Updated links and info January 2019

Open-world classic that inspired dozens of clones and made Rockstar one of the most successful developers of all time.

However, the PC port of this game was poor on release and it's aged like milk. I've made a list of problems and solutions I had while getting it running:

I had a lot of trouble getting this game to launch in Win10. I had to use both SilentPatch and the DDraw patch found here[gtaforums.com] to get past the Unhandled Exception c0000005 error and crash after the intro movie. These patches also fix a bug where menu text is either invisible or very faded.

This is one of those old games where physics are tied to framerate. If you turn off the 30FPS limiter, car friction, jumping and running up stairs are totally broken. This is one of those things where someone at Rockstar could fix it in an afternoon but it's still broken after all these years.

As far as I know, there's no mod or patch to fix this. You can limit the game to 60 with a graphics driver tool but the physics problems are still there.

The HUD doesn't scale well for widescreen. There's a "widescreen" option in the graphics menu but it doesn't work. You need to use a community fix found here[thirteenag.github.io] to get the game to look as expected at resolutions like 1080p (or anything bigger than 1024x768).

The Steam version of the game has a bug where lighting doesn't affect cars if you're running it on a modern version of Windows. The SilentPatch I linked earlier fixes this bug, but the widescreen patch I linked breaks it again. The best way to fix this bug is adding this mod[gtaforums.com].

GTA3 has decent support for DirectInput controls and that's good enough for me. There's plenty of people with Xinput controllers though.

San Andreas recently got a patch to support them but GTA3 hasn't had that patch yet despite using the same engine. Here[gtaforums.com] is a mod that adds support along with the correct HUD buttons.

GTA3 was created in a time where the maximum DPI of a mouse was 600. Originally, both X and Y axis had customisable sensitivity but this was removed in the final release.

If you change mouse sensitivity in game (which everyone would, since it's designed for monitors with like 8 DPI), it only changes the X sensitivity while leaving the Y axis to go wild. There used to be a fix for this by ThirteenAG here[github.com] but it's no longer available.

This one isn't a big issue (I don't use it) but this game was designed to take advantage of the PS2's hardware with stuff like real-time car reflections. They couldn't be bothered to port any of these enhancements to the PC version but there is a mod that restores PS2-like graphics to the game here.[gtaforums.com] (Read the instructions though!)

If you're a completionist, the in-game stats aren't useful at all. A member of the community made a 100% checklist that hooks the game (download here[github.com]) and tells you what you still need to do if you're trying to complete the game 100%.

Another not-huge issue but something to keep in mind before playing. As Rockstar support[support.rockstargames.com] points out, their huge game with 3 different islands has no in-game map, so you either have to memorise where everything is or follow their suggestion and print out a map like it's 1999.

Just a final tip to top everything off, once you've got the game running you can delete the "movies" directory from the install folder and it'll no longer play the intro movies. A little nugget that will save you a few seconds after spending 20 minutes or more getting the game running.

I do love this game but I can't honestly recommend GTA3 to anyone until they fix some of these issues.