Crossing the Callahan Bridge
“While putting together GTA III, Rockstar knew we couldn’t handle Liberty City whole.”
GAME GTA III / RELEASED 2001 / FORMAT PS5, PS4, PS2
01 In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an inventor builds a machine capable of showing the entire scope of the universe, and the position of the user within it. Named the Total Perspective Vortex, it becomes a torture device, as it turns out in such a vast place, the one thing we can’t afford to have is a sense of perspective.
Rockstar must have realised something similar while putting together GTA III. It knew we couldn’t handle Liberty City whole. Exposing a 2001 gamer to a full-scale urban open world would probably have fried their frontal lobe, and so the game was divided into three islands, each linked to the next by a bridge. Then the first of those, the Callahan Bridge, was ripped apart by a bomb at the start of the game, leaving you stranded in Portland, a pastiche of New York’s industrial districts.
There you remained, for hours, learning the layout of the red light district, and the locations of police cars and health icons. The coastal drive up to Salvatore’s mansion started to feel like home. Then plot machinations took you away from the Italian mafia, and across the water to Staunton, first by boat, and then via the suspension bridge.
Staunton Island itself was overwhelming, a glamorous land of stretched limos and high-rise buildings. The roads were wider, the drives were longer, and the skyline was roughly recognisable as that of Manhattan. Navigating this multi-lane world was bewildering, and you could understand why Rockstar hadn’t simply let you loose there in the first place.
For years, impatient players shared methods of crossing the Callahan without completing missions, jumping between the bridge’s warped cables over water that, to a protagonist who couldn’t swim, was deadly. Some made it, and were treated to a forbidden realm.
Today 3D open worlds are standard fare. But in the years after crossing the Callahan Bridge, we called them ‘GTA clones’ – an acknowledgement that Rockstar had achieved something new.