"GTA III was a showcase for the powerhouse PS2. Earlier games in the series were fun, prankishly rude ditties; you played a criminal, and observed the gridlike world from an omniscient, top-down perspective. GTA III created an entire three-dimensional world, setting you at ground level in a city that could be freely explored. It wasn’t the first game to combine different genres into one, but the component parts of GTA III‘s gameplay were well integrated: it was a driving game, a third-person shooter, an RPG-inflected adventure, a crime thriller. The Casual Gamer — a primordial notion, five years pre-Wii — probably thought that GTA III was less a single videogame than an entire entertainment system unto itself. GTA III kickstarted whole host of changes in the videogame industry. Along with Halo: Combat Evolved, released in November 2001 as an Xbox launch title, it’s a central to the paradigm shift in the early ’00s that transformed videogames either into “a legitimately cool and important cultural force” or “that annoyingly fashionable Hot New Thing that meant Lindsay Lohan attended the launch party of Saints Row The Third” — depending on your perspective. (I’ll never forget watching The O.C. and noticing that Seth Cohen had a Rockstar Games poster up in his bedroom.)"