It’s hard to imagine, but in Rockstar’s first 3D Grand Theft Auto game, we were supposed to obey the rules of the road, but we didn’t have to!

Obbe Vermeij, a former developer at Rockstar, revealed on Twitter that Grand Theft Auto III has three states of traffic lights: north/south, east/west, and pedestrian. The orientation of the traffic light model determines the cycle, and Vermeij’s code had the necessary information when the game launched. As a result, if the traffic lights were destroyed in an accident, the traffic would still obey them.

The artists installed the lights, started the game, and everything worked without any extra work. The same was true for Grand Theft Auto IV, released in 2008. During the development of Grand Theft Auto III, Vermeij says the original plan was that anyone who ran a red light would get a one-star wanted level. That wasn’t a popular concept within Rockstar, so Vermeij quickly removed the feature, making it possible to break the rules.

Running red lights sped up the game (who knows how many times you would have had to stop in traffic…and would our pursuers have obeyed the traffic laws?), which was appropriate since there was still open world crime in the story. Vermeij had previously tried to fine-tune the system so that we would only get a star if there was a police car nearby, but it was still annoying because even at this level of pursuit the police were very aggressive. The pace was slower despite the change because we had to check the traffic to see if there were any cops…

Although Vermeij has nothing to do with the development of Grand Theft Auto VI (coming this fall for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, and Corsair says a PC port could be in early 2026…), he thought they wouldn’t make it a punishable offense to run a red light in this game either.

Source: PCGamer