7小时（终于！）畅玩《侠盗猎车手III》

A month ahead of the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI, I decided to play the breakthrough Grand Theft Auto III.

As of Thursday, it was a quarter century old.

As of this week, it is no longer the one big GTA that I’ve never played.

III was the first GTA in three dimensions. Like many, I hadn’t seen its impact coming. At the first E3 trade show I attended, in mid-2001, I mistakenly paid more attention to a different Rockstar-published game, the riot simulator State of Emergency.

By the time III launched that October, I knew it mattered. I just I couldn’t play it. I wasn’t covering games full-time yet, and I didn’t have a lot of spending cash. I’d saved money to buy a Nintendo GameCube launch. Game Cubes played Luigi’s Mansion and Pikmin, not GTA.

I wouldn’t own a PS2 until 2003 or so, when Vice City was the GTA to play.

Over the past 20+ years, I’ve enjoyed the GTA games I’ve played, but I always worried that I’d missed out. GTA III, people writing about games online would say, just had more freedom than those later GTAs.

I think they were right.

Freedom’s a great word for why GTA III is still interesting to play today. It’s crude in ways both good and bad, quite rough in spots that benefited from sequelized improvement.

But there’s a magic to this game, one that becomes clear not just by playing it by discovering the community around it and their wild tips about the best way to solve its challenges.

More on that in a bit, but first a note about the actual process of even going back to play older GTAs these days, in case you want to do so as well. It’s complicated.

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