Tune In, Steal a Car: How GTA III's Radio Set the Template

You get into a stolen car in Grand Theft Auto III, and before you can drive anywhere the world starts talking to you. A DJ announces a song. A jingle plays. A caller rants about something that has nothing to do with your mission. It seems obvious now that a sandbox game should have radio, but it was not obvious in 2001, and it is a good example of a design decision that looks inevitable only after someone has made it.

To be fair, the idea was not born in GTA III. According to fan-maintained wikis, the 1997 original already had seven in-car radio stations, made up of original music, and the top-down games used the same basic trick. What changed with the third game was the ambition and the writing. Liberty City had nine stations in all, and each one had its own identity: Head Radio for pop and rock, Double Clef FM for classical, K-Jah for dub and reggae, Rise FM for trance and house, Lips 106 for Top 40, Game Radio for hip-hop, MSX FM for drum and bass, Flashback 95.6 for 1980s pop and post-disco, and Chatterbox FM, which was talk radio and nothing else.

That last one is the key. Chatterbox FM was hosted by Lazlow Jones, with friends and neighbours, his own father among them, playing callers and guests. It was a satirical portrait of American life, played at the same volume as the music, and it turned the car radio from a soundtrack into a comedy show. The total amount of radio material in the game was in the region of three and a half hours, which is a lot of writing and recording for a game that could have gotten away with a few loops.

The template that emerged is easy to describe. Every station is a small character with a genre, a host, a sense of humour and its own commercials. The player does not select a playlist; the player turns a dial, samples what is on, and stays with whatever fits the mood. Driving becomes the act of listening. The game is also quietly making a claim about place: a city is not just what you see out of the windscreen, it is what it sounds like on a Tuesday night.

The next game pushed the idea further. Vice City leaned into licensed music from the 1980s, with well over a hundred songs and commercials and roughly nine hours of radio in total, and significantly more talk content than its predecessor. It also gave us the seven-album official soundtrack box set, which is the clearest evidence that the radio had stopped being background and started being a product. Later entries in the series kept expanding the model, and other developers borrowed it directly, adding radio dials to their vehicles as a way to give an open world texture.

There is a lesson for designers here that goes beyond crime games. The best radio in these games works because it is separate from the mission. Nothing on the dial is asking you to do anything. It just fills the space between objectives with personality, and that is exactly what an open world needs. Objectives are the reason to go somewhere; the radio is the reason you enjoy the trip.

My own view is that GTA III’s stations are the ones I would find hardest to give up if I could only save one part of the game. The city, the story and the mechanics have all been improved on since. But the feeling of climbing into a car, cycling past a classical piece, a reggae track and a caller shouting about politics, and landing on the exact thing that suits the moment, was a small invention that changed how games sound.