There's something oddly magic about seeing the innards of a game laid bare in the out-of-bounds. I have vivid memories of toggling noclip at the train station in Half-Life 2 to find a legless Wallace Breen performing his speeches in the void, with a legless Isaac Kleiner not too far off. Grand Theft Auto is prized for its attention to detail, but hiding these oddities just out of reach is typical of any developer, and Rockstar is no exception.
Just recently, Uncharted fans found a never-before-seen 2D image of 16 mugshots in the first game.
The opening cutscene of GTA 3 takes place in a 'ghost town' that is otherwise inaccessible to the player. It's a small cluster of buildings with no collisions that was built specifically to be separate from the rest of Liberty City, and so Rockstar hid it in space, assuming nobody would ever find it. But players discovered that you could fly a Dodo at a specific angle to break through the map and reach the area, submerging into 'blue hell' as you clipped through the city block.
With this discovery, modder Eilano86 got to work adding a road that allowed players to easily reach the area without needing to fly a Dodo or use the antigravity cheat to awkwardly maneuver a tank. In fact, the mod was so famous that it caught the eye of Rockstar, who noted in a 2012 newswire that "someone built a bridge mod so you can actually drive there now - amazing..."
Unfortunately, when gta-downloads.com went offline, the mod became lost media, and players once again had to resort to exploits to reach the out-of-bounds city. Thankfully, as reported by PC Gamer, someone has finally restored the mod all these years later.
Ghost City Is Back, And Now You Can Explore It
"For over a decade, this specific alternative bridge mod was considered 'Lost Media,'" wrote Mod_Saver. "The original hosting platform went completely offline, and the original link was dead forever. Even the Wayback Machine couldn't recover the downloadable files. The mod was gone. Instead of letting it fade into history, I decided to fully recreate and resurrect it from scratch based on an old 2012 video."
Mod_Saver didn't stop there. Not only have they recreated the 2004 mod, allowing for easy access to Ghost City after 22 years, but they also "built the missing collision files to make the entire island solid and fully playable for the very first time." Now, when you cross the bridge, you won't fall through the map into the infamous blue hell, you'll instead be able to continue driving around the out-of-bounds streets.
Grand Theft Auto 3 Like Action Adventure Systems OpenCritic Reviews Released October 23, 2001 ESRB M for Mature: Blood, Strong Language, Violence Developer(s) Rockstar Games Publisher(s) Rockstar Games Engine RenderWare Franchise Grand Theft AutoWHERE TO PLAY
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