GTA III - Removed Content [Beta Analysis] [Part 1] - Feat. Badger Goodger

Hello there! My name is Badger, and today we’re going to discuss mostly unknown cut content in your beloved video game Grand Theft Auto 3. To start this video off, let’s take a look again at the first ever preview of the game, which we already covered in one of my older videos in the past. Why are we looking at this again? Turns out I missed one interesting detail in this sentence, where the author of this article teased us with a so-called “enemy-specific insult button”. Unfortunately, there’s

no such “button” in the final version of the game, but we can actually try and guess what it could be. The first clue lies in the previous game, where we have a similar button. Thanks to this button we can burp and fart... and yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, but here is how it works in GTA 2: The second clue lies within GTA 3 itself, and yes, we are going to talk about Claude’s bad habit of giving the middle finger to police officers… and to ordinary drivers who are honking at us. As you kno

w, we have absolutely no power over this hand gesture in the game and it’s up to Claude if he wants to raise his finger or not. But what if that “enemy-specific insult button” could actually provoke Claude to show this gesture when we wanted to? If yes then it could look something like this: I think we’ll agree that it does look funny, but at the same time, it would be as pointless as farting and burping in GTA 2. And speaking of those bodily functions, what if we’re wrong and Claude could actua

lly do those things instead? Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure. While we’re here, I want to thank FireHead for helping me to activate various cut content in this game and helping me to make this video. I also want to thank Nick007J and “app” for the help and support. You guys, rock! Did you know that this game has an unused opcode with the strange name of “DROP MINE”, which has something to do with a car mine? Yeah, that’s right! As soon as we activate this promising opcode, the game crea

tes a pickup of a yellow barrel, which internally is called a “car mine”. If you thought that you could pick it up, then you were wrong, because it doesn’t work in this way. If you thought that it would detonate from an impact with a car then you were wrong there, too… well, at least in this situation. So what kind of a car mine is that? Well, it turns out, if the game spawned this mine while the player was on foot, then it will remain inactive… but as soon as the player enters a car, it will be

come “armed”. Starting from this very moment, it will explode either from a direct impact with a car… or by itself after about10 seconds. Now, you might agree when I say it works rather strangely, but this is how the developers coded it to work. But the question remains, what could these mines be used for? Personally, I think that this opcode wasn’t meant for us. I mean, what would be the use of having an ability like this to leave deadly traps behind our car? Of course, it sounds super fun to d

o, but not in the vanilla game. If you would ask me, then I personally think that this opcode was probably made for a cut mission, where we would have to pursue a bad guy who was dropping barrels of explosives into the path of the player. Why do I think so? It's all about the next opcode in order with the name of “DROP NAUTICAL MINE”, which creates a pickup of a blue barrel, or should I say, a “nautical mine”? If you didn’t know, this opcode is used during the mission “Gone Fishing” where we had

to deal with Ray’s former partner, because he thought that he was a rat. While you are chasing this poor fellow on a boat, he is dropping these nautical mines on our path and we have to avoid them. This is why I thought that there was a similar mission, but involving car mines. Sadly, this mysterious mission didn’t survive to the final game and this is probably why the opcode remains unused. Speaking of a nautical mine, have you ever wondered why they don’t explode from the gunshots during the

chase? As a matter of fact they explode only after 10 seconds or from the impact with a boat. However, it wasn’t always like that in this game. According to this unused function, the player had an ability to detonate these barrels from a gunshot. It doesn’t work in the final version, because it is disabled, and I probably know the answer as to why. You see, if we reimplement this cut feature, then this mission becomes very simple and boring. There is absolutely no challenge in destroying these b

arrels as soon as they spawn, because we’re already shooting all the time from Predator, which has machine guns onboard. Sometimes, the barrel even explodes very close to his boat and it helps us fill the damage meter even faster than usual, making this mission much easier, which is likely why the developers got rid of this feature. Another interesting scrapped idea was teased in this massive IGN article, “How Smart is the AI?”, which to your consideration was posted almost half a year before th

e game even went out. Once again the detail is hidden in this one tiny sentence, which claims that “If you get rid of a person in this game, and a ped sees you, he or she will run to the nearest phone, and call the police.” Sounds intriguing right? Sadly, this idea of peds calling police is absent in the final game, however the code from this feature is still presented within the game, but sadly in a broken state. Thanks to “Erorcun”, who managed to trace this feature down and fix it, we can act

ually take a look at it right now: As “Erocun” had told me, the developers had fully coded the first part of this feature, that if the pedestrians saw a crime, they would flee to the nearest phone booth to inform the police about the crime they saw, and it worked like this. Be advised that the animation of peds picking up the phone was added by the author of this find, and later I will explain to you why. If the player didn’t want to attract unwanted police attention, then he could simply get ri

d of the witness and break the sequence of receiving a wanted level. As you can see, it was an interesting idea in the GTA universe, and the developers were very proud to tease it in that article. However, in its current state it looks more like a prototype rather than a fully working feature, and here’s why: The most obvious flaw of this feature is that after the witness makes a call, you don’t get a wanted level, because this part is missing in the code. Moreover, sometimes it works and someti

mes it doesn't, and you will see that a witness will run in circles around the phone booth before making a call. Of course, you can wait till they finally stop and make the call, but well, what would you expect from an unfinished cut feature? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and you will see that a witness will run in circles around the phone booth before making a call. Of course, you can wait till they finally stop and make the call, but I mean, come on, why would you wait for them

to do that? And hey, don’t even try to commit a crime in front of a crowd. If you did, then be prepared for everyone to flee to the nearest phone and bum rush it. Instead of earning your truly deserved wanted level, you’ll instead be watching crowd fighting for a phone and trust me, you will see these round dances quite often. Now if you wanted to get rid of a witness or scare them away, then you are free to do it, but be prepared to deal with another witness in this case. Trust me, they won’t s

top, and you will have to repeat your actions again and again. And the worst thing about this feature is that as soon as a ped reaches the phone, the sequence ends. This is why the author of this find added that animation, because without it, it’s hard to know what’s going on. To be honest, this idea wasn’t that bad, but clearly it was very unfinished, and I wonder why they even teased it in that article when they had nothing more than just a prototype of this idea. What would you say if I told

you that there is yet another unused opcode, which Rockstar Games called “SET COMEDY CONTROLS”? The interesting thing is, the comedy controls are actually special car controls which we will enable in a second... and voila, we are now driving a comedy-controlled car. I guess the term “comedy” in this context means a problem with a steering wheel, because right now I am pushing only the acceleration button, but the car seems to automatically steer from one side to another without me doing anything

. But the question remains, is it hard to drive a comedy-controlled car in traffic? The answer is no. All you have to do is to constantly adjust the direction of your car by steering it in the right direction, it isn’t hard at all. On the other hand, I can’t say the same about the Playstation 2 version. As you know, GTA 3 was initially developed for PS2 platform and for some reason in this version this opcode is coded a little bit differently. First of all, the wobble effect on PS2 is much stron

ger than on PC meaning the car in this version automatically steers more aggressively and you can easily crash into a wall or something else. Secondly, in this version, the car sometimes drives forward without you pressing the accelerator button. Thanks to that, most of the time you can’t properly stop the car or even drive in reverse. It seems that this opcode was either unfinished in the PS2 version, or perhaps the developers changed it for the PC version. And yes, this opcode was 100% intende

d for the player, because if we activate it on a pedestrian’s car, nothing will happen. Either way you look at it, let’s face it, these comedy controls were probably intended to simulate a broken car behaviour in some way. What if they planned a special mission where we had to drive a broken car for whatever reason? But the question remains, why did they call these controls “comedy”? What was so funny about it? Your guess is as good as mine. If you played GTA III, then I think you would have hea

rd various police codes after committing various crimes in the game: There you just heard code 65, which means “auto theft” in this game, but how do I know this? Well I just opened the leaked list, which was used by Rockstar Games to master the main sound bank in this game. According to this leaked file, and of course the game code, the developers also had an idea to punish people for running a red light. What’s more interesting is that this crime is coded to have code “9” on the police dispatch

, but you don’t ever hear it, nor do you receive a punishment for running a red light. Do you know why? The truth is, the game doesn’t have a clue when the player is breaking this rule, meaning you can ignore all traffic lights in the city and get no punishment at all, but it seems that it wasn’t always like that in this game. In addition to this, the developers also wanted to punish people for speeding, which isn’t a crime in the final version of the game, either....or is it? Turns out, the gam

e does register this violation and you will occasionally hear the corresponding police code over the police radio under this circumstance: If the player makes the cop jump away while being in pursuit, then there is a high chance that you’ll hear the dispatcher announce a 10-48. Yes, that’s right, the crime code you heard is actually assigned to the “SPEEDING” crime in the game, and it has nothing to do with the “speeding” term, but do you know what’s more strange? If you repeat that action again

, then sometimes you will hear a different code, which would be “RECKLESS DRIVING” under code 29. To sum things up, there was once an idea to punish players for running red lights and speeding, but sadly or fortunately depending on how you look at it, both of these traffic violations weren’t implemented in the final version of this game. Let’s face it, the loadscreens in this game are boring, and to avoid being blamed for making such a strong statement, I will just say that they weren’t always m

eant to be so boring, and here is why. According to “Play TM” magazine issue #82, when we loaded the game we were treated to a series of interesting adverts for products that range from dog food to Ammu-Nation, and it was going to be a really cool way to promote these fictional companies and goofy services in the GTA universe. Luckily for us, they even showed us one of these load screens in this article, and it features this famous dog food company in GTA 3. And you know what? Apparently, these

adverts were maintained by Love Media, which is owned by Donald Love, making this feature a cool reference to a game’s lore. On the other hand, I haven’t found any other loadscreens in any material I had apart from finding the same dog food loadscreen in the official BradyGames PC guide, so I started to wonder... What if an ad with Ammu-nation on a load screen looked like this? The store that helped beat communism... If yes, then this can be found in the official GTA 3 flash animation, which has

more of these possible loadscreen ads. Perhaps we could also be greeted with “1 555 I Sue You” advertisement, which according to the lore, helped you to sue anyone for anything, and maybe you will win. It’s also possible that you would be greeted with an advertisement for the restaurant belonging to Toni Ciprani’s mother, which features glittering reviews of the establishment. Or maybe you’d be treated to a huge hint about their future game in Francis International Airport load screen. But that

's not all. You can find more possible ads for loadscreens in the official manual of the game. Starting from a revolutionary way of saving a marriage from Fernando Martinez to buying pets from pets overnight dot com with a delivery in a box directly to your door. Not to mention that some of the older adverts look quite different here. As you can see, we can endlessly speculate about this topic, we don’t know for sure what ads it would have featured, but it would have been really cool to see! By

the way, don’t forget that the Playstation 2 version has, in total, 24 different load screens, and most of them don’t even have a background image. What if these replaced 24 goofy in-game ads? What could possibly be a reason for getting rid of them? I would surely like to know the answer. And while we’re here, I want to present to an extra tidbit. This is how the loading screen looked during E3 2001. Kinda strange, especially seeing that old GTA 3 logo, right? If you didn't know, this logo, for

some reason, was left in the files of the PC version of Vice City. I think we all remember the well known “Taxi Driver” odd job mission, where we have to take clients from point A to point B, while earning some extra cash by doing so. In other words, it’s a simple and relaxing activity, but according to the leaked mission sources, this side job wasn’t always so relaxing. And first let’s look at the old text strings left in the sources, which indicate that this mission was quite toxic towards the

player. In the final version,take a client to their destination in time, the game tells you that “you are out of time!” and the mission fails. But in an earlier version, instead of telling you something in a neutral form, the game would flat out tell you that you suck... and suck was written with capital letters. Not a nice thing to hear about the job you’re doing. And here is another one. If you try to pick up a client in a badly damaged car, the game tells you that it is trashed and prompts y

ou to repair it, which sounds fine, right? Earlier, this text string actually belonged to a client, who was not being very nice about the condition of your car! And to understand the seriousness of this situation, the game ended this sentence with two exclamation marks!! Instead of enjoying this mission, the game kept verbally abusing you, but to be honest, it wasn’t so bad in comparison with the fact that this mission was also going to be more dangerous. In the final version if you damage your

cab badly enough, your passenger immediately bails out, leaving you with the text that your passenger fled in terror. In an earlier version, the game told you that the taxi was trashed, and according to this unused code, your passenger would have been very eager to beat the crap out of you for trying to kill them in a car accident. And if he or she manages to throw you out from the car, then the mission fails. This whole sequence can easily be reenabled in the final game. Funny thing is, the gam

e didn’t even care who your passenger was. Even if you picked up an old granny and trashed your car during the ride, she won’t just flee in terror, she will try to kill Claude with her grocery bags. I don’t know about you, but it does look quite crazy, and I wonder why this behaviour was cut from this mission. But then not all removed or changed things in this mission were insane. For instance, there was this special “SWITCH TAXI TIMER” opcode planned for this side mission. Thanks to these leake

d mission sources, we can easily bring it back, and this is how it worked. As soon as you pick up a passenger, while they’re sitting in your car, each and every single in-game minute the game will pay you one dollar. It will end as soon as they exit your car, and it obviously works like a fare meter. Maybe the developers decide to get rid of this in favor of fixed prices for taking people to the right place. It would be a logical answer, unless we didn’t know about GTA 2. As some of you may alre

ady know, GTA 2 has no official taxi driver mission. BUT, if you drive a Taxi, then sometimes pedestrians will enter your car and you’ll be paid for it, just like with the unused opcode in GTA 3. Since there’s no destination point, you can drive where you want and eventually the passenger will bail out. After that the payment will end. Who knows, maybe GTA 3 in the early days had a similar system, or maybe it was indeed another way of earning cash in this mission. But do you know what bothers me

more? According to the leaked mission sources, the Taxi driver mission had also some special sub-missions within it, and at least one of them could be activated if you were seeking fares in the Red Light District. Sadly, not much is known about it, but apparently, our goal was to give a ride to a special pedestrian. What was so special about this ped or these missions is unfortunately a mystery. And now let’s talk about a cut Easter egg, which you can only find in the first rare European versio

n of GTA 3 on Playstation 2, which to remind you was rushed and shipped to the mastering factories by mistake having more pre-cut features than any other version we have. If you didn't know about it, then I would highly recommend watching this video that you see on your screens right now. Anyway, this cut Easter egg I was talking about involves this “male01” ped, who in this particular version sometimes says this specific quote: Yes, you heard that right, he said “I designed Playstation 2” and i

f you’re still sceptical about it, then here’s a sound file with this quote extracted from this version: If you were wondering, in any other version, the developers replaced this cool quote with an already existing sound file of him saying “Stripe summer”. Either way, for some reason, this quote was cut in the final days of development, and to prove this, take a look at the file dates of this first European release. What if Sony didn’t like this reference after reviewing the game? Or what if Son

y and Rockstar couldn’t agree on a price for putting native advertising of the PS2 straight into the game? Sadly, we will never know the truth. But this wasn’t the only Easter egg cut from the game. Alan Campbell, who was one of the GTA 3 developers, revealed this when he gave a huge interview in 2011 to “Retro Gamer” magazine. According to Campbell, “One of the artists who was constructing buildings positioned several towers to spell out a certain – extremely rude – word which could only be see

n from above.” And he added that he doesn't remember if it stayed in the finished game or not. The truth is, it didn’t make it, and it was probably removed for a good reason. You see, in the early days, the PR team at Rockstar loved to share early map renders of their upcoming game to the public. Can you guess what it would be like if people saw an extremely rude word spelled out on these renders? It would definitely cause them some problems. And that is probably why this Easter egg was cut. By

looking through the official BradyGames PS2 strategy guide, you can find this interesting pre-release screenshot featuring a cut, mysterious object which looks like a giant human face on a stand. This object was also omitted from the files of the game, but thanks to PowerStation issue #69, we can clearly see that it was definitely a statue of face on a stand… and, quite frankly, it’s very creepy Despite the fact that we have absolutely no leftovers from this thing in the game files, some experie

nced GTA fans and travelers noticed that it might be a cut reference to a real life full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty’s face, which the developers might have seen during a scouting session around New York. But the question remains, why would make it look so creepy? Maybe they thought that it looked that way up close, or maybe it was just their special type of humour, but besides it being scary, what would be a possible reason to get rid of it? As we know, the September 11th attacks occ

urred shortly before the game was going to be released. Due to these events, the game was delayed and received some minor changes and cuts, which we already discussed in a past video. What if this statue was one of those minor things that got cut, too? Of course, this is pure speculation, but it can’t be just a coincidence that it was cut right before the game went out. Alright, enough of the speculation for now. Let’s take a look at the famous “cinematic” camera, which you can activate while dr

iving. Did you know that its internal name in the code is “Obbe Cinema Camera Car”? Does this name ring a bell to you? Well, if you are a true GTA 3 fan, then you probably noticed that this cinematic camera was likely created by Obbe Vermeij, who was a talented programmer technical director of GTA 3. It turns out that Obbe was also experimenting with a cinematic camera on foot, which he internally named “Obbe Cinema Camera Ped”. Despite the fact that this camera mode was cut, it wasn’t so hard t

o bring this mode back into the game, and this is how it was going to look. You might say that it looks quite decent, but in reality it feels very unfinished. As soon as the camera changes its position, Claude will suddenly go in a direction you didn’t want him to. In other words, every single time the camera angle changes, you will have to adjust the direction of where you’re going, and it isn’t convenient to play with at all. And if you’re shooting while doing this, then be prepared to suffer

from total disorientation. The camera flies from one corner to another like crazy. So yeah, basically the biggest problem with this camera mode is its inconvenience… and the bugs, of course. What you saw to this very moment was a slightly fixed version of this mode. In reality, one of these cameras for some reason uses its “car” camera counterpart, and thanks to this flaw it doesn’t follow Claude when it should. But overall, there is nothing to be surprised at. Looks like Obbe eventually realize

d that this cinematic camera on foot was a failure, and dropped this idea very early on. I think that you already know that there are lots of places with parked cars around the city. Internally these places are called car generators and according to the leaked sources, there were going to be several more car generators around Portland. Let’s have a look at them. For instance, there was going to be a parked Idaho in Saint Mark’s near the Mafia Sentinel behind Toni’s restaurant. I wonder who would

take an Idaho if a Mafia Sentinel is sitting right next to it? It would be clearly a better car to use. In Trenton, right next to the Perennial, there was going to be a parked Manana. Fun fact. Both of these cars could be seen parked in this spot in the video preview from Playzone magazine meaning that Manana was cut very close to the game’s release. In Trenton, near the sawmill and next to Rumpo, there was going to be Mule appearing here, too. Interestingly enough, you couldn't spot both of th

ese vehicles at the same time like in this footage. You could either spot the Mule here… or the Rumpo with an alarm. It has something to do with the spawn point collision. A little bit further away, at the taxi depot near the Cabby there was going to be a spawn point for an ordinary taxi. Due to the previously mentioned spawn point collision, you could spot either the taxi or cabby, but not both of them at the same time. And lastly, at the bus depot there was going to be a third Coach that would

appear. Funny thing is, it also had an alarm on board, and to be honest, three buses in was place is probably more than enough. As you can see, the developers, for some reason, had to remove 5 different car generators in Portland. And that kind of sucks, because even small details like this added more life in this dark and cruel city. For more videos on GTA beta content, recent news, and other stuff, be sure to check out my channel here on YouTube, BadgerGoodger. And don’t forget to follow Vadi

m and I on Twitter. This has been Badger, and I hope you have a wonderful day out there. Peace.