Xbox 'Rejected' GTA 3 In 2001, Didn't Think It Would Be Successful

Daaaam. Imagine a parallel world where PlayStation made Halo and Xbox did GTA 3 lol. But really though how weird that gta 3 nearly came to xbox. I loved watching the documentary on youtube, that while pitch where Gates went mental then was all like "I love it".

Executives being clueless. As usual.

Also, I'm assuming this is for being a timed excluisive, and if so, this means nothing. Nothing would be different today.

Timed exclusives are the worst kind. They just temporaily deny access to the game, and not make the platform look anymore enticing. Look at Bioshock, Mass Effect, Resident Evil 4, or even Deathloop. Great games, but they end up on on every platform anyway, and they don't change the strength of that platform. Even a game like RE4 couldn't change the fate of the Gamecube.

Man, they're really being open about their past mistakes.

@Richnj I think back at the time it would not have been timed. Xbox were out for blood after Sony released the massively popular PS2, AND, Sony called out MS lol. On top of that Sony dominated so hard the Sega Dreamcast died. Xbox was fighting hard. They just made a bad choice. 2021 really seems like 2001 all over again. Sony has the throne, Xbox is looking to take it from them, which means we all, as gamers, are going to get better deals and better games. Just look at what Xbox has achieved this year, expanding on gamepass, delivering critical hits like Halo, Forza, Flight MS, Age of empires, Psychonaughts 2, and Deathloop. PlayStation has been lucky that contracts were predrawn but coming into 2022, everything Xbox owns is going to be exclusive.

But this point in particular is fascinating because had GTA been a Xbox exclusive I do have to wonder if they would have suffered during the Xbox one era, when Xbox exclusives clearly took a back seat, we might not have ever gotten GTA 4 or 5.

@Richnj Whether it would have been a timed exclusive or not is something we will probably never know, but regardless of whether it would have been or not, it still would have been a big deal to have the best selling game of 2001 as an exclusive. Obviously things would still be the same today where Xbox screwed everything up and almost left the gaming industry, causing them to have play catchup still to this day. Still, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if GTA3 was an exclusive back then.

@Ihavenomouthandimust There's still Ghostwire Tokyo in 2022 on PS5, but it's easy to forget it since it keeps disappearing after it gets brought up occasionally. Once that comes out at some point next year, I'm assuming it's the last Xbox Game Studios game to come out on PS5. There's nothing else I can think of.

@KilloWertz As @Ihavenomouthandimust points out, we don't know if it would have been a best seller on Xbox though. Again, take RE4, it sold quite poorly on Gamecube. Both the OG Xbox and Gamecube didn't have the install base to support these 3rd party exclusives. RE4 may have been a critical success, but it wasn't until it hit other platforms that let the game find wide spread success.

If GTA3 had been a full exclsuive, it could have killed off the franchise, or even the genre (we may be calling open world adventure games "Saints Row Clones"). A timed exclusive would have just seen that success delayed.

Aside from shutting down studios like Ensemble and Lionhead (and maybe letting Bungie go, instead of powering the studio to create Destiny), and not letting Rare be their Nintendo-esque sub-division, I like the position Xbox are in today. Not sure I'd like Xbox having the big "I am" attitude of the other two.

@KilloWertz lol oh yeah, ghost Tokyo looks amazing!

I'm sure they regretted that decision big time! At least they corrected that situation pretty quick. I remember I was pretty annoyed as a PS3 player when GTA4 had the dlc only on 360 for what felt like an eternity so it all evened out in the end!

I imagine original Xbox sales would have been much closer to PS2's if GTA 3 launched with the console, but we'll never know for sure. What if people didn't notice it because it was on a new console? It's entirely possible GTA 3 would've been Xbox's FF7, though.

I still will never know WHY GTA became such a popular franchise. I still have never thought of it as much more than an average game irrationally hyped.

@KilloWertz I assume Skyrim: Super Penultimate Mega-Ultimate 2D VR Edition will certainly come to PS.

@Richnj IDK what the magic sauce is. Timed exclusives can totally associate a brand with a game permanently. Or they can not. It's in the marketing, but even then it's not just budget. When people think FF or KH, they think Sony, full stop. And to a large degree when they think GTA, they think Sony. Thus why Jim opened the PS5 unveil by showcasing GTAV....again..... Those are absolutely associated as "PS games" by the masses. Even if FFXIV (SE said it's coming to Xb someday, eventually, but not a priority), and FF7R (and the upcoming FFXVI) all come to XB eventually, they will forever be thought of as PS games.

Then there's Mass Effect and ROTR that nobody thinks of as Xbox at all. And Deathloop that nobody will think of as PS, even though they did massive marking expense and time on it.

IDK what makes that difference between games benefiting from timed exclusivity and not.

Speaking of Bungie and Destiny, I love how many times Halo Infinite manages to sneak the word "destiny" into the dialogue. You know it's not a coincidence, every time.

@IronMan30 "GTA3 wouldn've been Xbox's FF7"
A massively overrated, disjointed, confusing mess of a story with a critical gameplay design failure about halfway through the story, representing one of the series worst entries in terms of story design despite inexplicable fan obsession?

Yeah, I could see that...

@NEStalgia I think FF and KH are bad examples here since the PS1 and PS2 had releases that were full exclusive. I had to check but KH 1 and 2 were PS exclusive, and the series didn't come to another home console for 11 years. FF had around 4 releases and nearly 10 years worth of exclusives between FF starting to skip Nintendo and landing on xbox.

I think it takes multiple releases over a long period of time to get that association.

@NEStalgia it was very overrated, but there's no denying that a game in an established franchise propelled the PS (an unestablished console) to sell much better than if it didn't have the game. GTA 3 could have been that for Xbox, but we'll never know.

If GTA and Halo were the most influential games of that generation. Imagine both on Xbox at launch, could easily have pushed xbox above 25 million systems.

@Richnj Good point of FF and KH. That really was a much more unique situation. Though GTA does seem to have a strong association with PS and that was a brief exclusivity.

@IronMan30 IDK how established FF was at the time really. The SNES games were super niche, the NES games never left Japan (and weren't close to DQ popularity there), and everybody just ignored VI. 7's what really established FF as mattering that much, and I think it sold primarily on flashy visuals and style more than anybody having a glue what they were actually buying

Then 8 happened...

@NEStalgia that applies to my argument even better. GTA only had 3 entries before then and FF had 6 (3 in the states), so GTA could have done wonders for the og Xbox.

"Hmm, this doesn't look exactly like other things that people already have. No one will buy it."
-genius executives, then and now

@IronMan30 Then Xbox would be the home of endless open world over the shoulder action adventures trying to capitalize on the GTA market, and Sony would have all the WPRGS?

@NEStalgia yes, that's exactly what would've happened. Not that Xbox would have been a top selling console. Then again, they may not have gotten 360 right if they had that level of success from out of the gate.

Well that was a bad decision.

Everything has cascading effects. This game was so big I feel it would had made the original Xbox a lot more competitive against the PS2. That in turn might had not made Xbox feel they had to launch the 360 so early, never getting their year head start, but also possibly never suffering RROD. Unless Xbox right out acquired rockstar at that time, I don’t think the long term repercussions would had been all that positive.

Without the original xbox lagging behind PS2 we would had never received the 360 aggressive push.

Without the 360 dominance of the market, MS would had never been arrogant enough to mess up the xbox one.

Without the xbox one disaster launch, we would not have the amazing studio explosion and game pass services we are seeing right now.

@IronMan30 TBH it's a miracle 360 went so right. It was an underdog at the start, it had a catastrophic design flaw that guaranteed self-destruction, and launched without HDMI and had to do a "do over" re-release of the hardware (which was then also guaranteed to fail.) Realistically, if PS3 hadn't been a total dog, and Nintendo hadn't gone chasing the blue ocean, things would have probably been very bad for the green team much earlier than Matrick. They got a head start and got early blunders excused that today would never be excused simply because Sony shot themselves in the foot and also priced themselves out of the market, and Nintendo was too busy bird watching to notice any of this was happening at all.

It's funny how the 7th and 8th generations were pretty much repeats of each other with the opposite company arrogantly removing themselves from the market before the launch even happened. And Nintendo was busy humming in the corner with earplugs in.

As bad and weird as the 9th gen launch is among shortages, it feels like the first time since the 6th generation there's actually a competition between vendors. PS2/DC/GCN/XB was the last time nobody derped at the start line and took themselves out of the race before street date.

Actually that's an unusual occurrence in the console war.
2nd gen, Atari shot themselves in the foot half-way through and took the entire games industry down with them in the US.

3rd Gen was a monopoly by Nintendo in the US.

4th was a real 2-way competition with some less significant additional viable competitors

5th Sega derped at the start and took themselves out of the race.

6th Was real competition between vendors, Sega went down after the start, XB rose up.

7th Sony derped before the start and took themselves largely out of the race, allowing XB to survive multiple huge problems that otherwise would have killed them.

8th MS derped before the start and took themselves largely out of the race, allowing PS to achieve "greatness" with an otherwise decidedly average console.

9th gen finally a real 3-way competition for the first time since the end of the 20th century.... lol

I would have bought an Xbox just for GTA3. Instead bought it for Fable and Jade Empire.

Two years later Xbox got State of Emergency, which was essentially a tech demo of GTA3.

@Richnj You are right that we don't know how things would have went even if GTA3 was an Xbox exclusive. It still would have been interesting to find out though.

Yeah, it seems like Xbox knows how to manage things a lot better than they did before. They could have had the greatest developers in the world and they would have found some way to screw them up eventually back then, evident by the already mentioned Rare who should have been a slam dunk fantastic acquisition if anybody else was managing them but Microsoft at the time.

It'll be interesting to see how things go over the next few years. Obviously Ninja Theory looks to be in pretty good shape with Hellblade 2's great trailer last week. Obsidian seems to be working on several games, so obviously that's a good sign as well. The Initiative is the really wild card, as it's a bunch of really good talent put together by Microsoft. If Microsoft can keep them on track and Perfect Dark turns out to be really good, then nobody should be able to doubt that Microsoft finally knows how to manage their first party studios for the first time in well over a decade.

It’s great they’re honest about these things but I really feel it was better off for that game to be on multiple platforms. It changed gaming in a big way. And we wouldn’t have had the awesome PSP titles.

That team hit a lot of homeruns - can't get them all.