GTA 3 changed video games forever | Dan Houser and Lex Fridman

00:02- Yeah, I think GTA III is probably one of the most influential games of all time. It created a feeling of an open world. What do you think it takes to create that feeling? There were like these looming skyscrapers. There were the changing traffic lights. There's the feeling like, first of all, you had a feeling you could do anything, and then the world was reacting to it. - Yes - in a way that didn't feel scripted. - Yes, and it wasn't scripted. It was really, really, really low-rent AI. It was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened, and I think that was incredibly... It was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with and the simulation seemed to

00:48have a personality. So you could push and see... And the world would push you back in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this... I think one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio, I could... Look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians, and not in GTA III, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. And the world was there and existing, and so it was the idea of almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games, the idea of being a digital tourist. You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed

01:31almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn't feel like you'd started it. Of course, you had started it, but that feeling, I think, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating, was, "I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist." - So there are these two concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them: one is systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games. And the systemic is from the environment perspective, which means that there are these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world.

02:16And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything. And when those two things combine, the feeling like you can do anything, and the feeling like there's a world that's full, that is also doing anything it wants, that creates this incredible feeling of, like, "This world is alive. - And I'm in it." - And I'm in it. - And it's the combination of those two things, I think, that is very powerful. And I think with GTA III, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my life personally, and I was very able to engage in it, probably for the first time professionally, actually away to do something. And we were really sort

03:07of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content, and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven? So, as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting.