If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Quick quotes: Rockstar on why GTA III's lead was mute

"We were making up a lot of procedures as we went along, and we decided that the NPCs (Non Playable Characters) should talk and we would have to figure out how to make them talk (using motion captured cutscenes, something that had never really been done before, at least not on the scale we were doing it). So we decided that the game’s protagonist would not talk, partly to aid people identifying with him, but mostly because we had so many other problems to solve and this did not seem like a major issue. We started to discuss introducing a talking lead character when working on Vice City, but it was a lot of work. While the structure of GTA3 may seem obvious or natural now, and the use of cutscenes made in the game’s engine that look and feel like the game may seem simple and easy, it really was not the case back in 2001 when we had to figure out all of these things for the first time. Oh and in San Andreas, CJ calls Claude a mute because he does not talk and CJ finds this unnerving." - Rockstar on why it went with a mute protagonist in Claude for Grand Theft Auto III.

GTA III 10th Anniversary Edition is out now for iOS and Android.

Sign in and unlock a world of features

Get access to commenting, homepage personalisation, newsletters, and more!

In this article

Grand Theft Auto III

Video Game

Related topics
About the Author

Johnny Cullen

Contributor

Johnny has experience at a wide range of games media outlets, having written for Eurogamer, Play Magazine, PC Gamer, GameDaily, and more. He worked at VG247 pumping out news at an astonishing rate for several years. More recently, he founded the games website PlayDiaries.

Comments