20 Mind-Blowing Things You Didn't Know About Grand Theft Auto 3

2. The Lemming Pedestrians Of Liberty City

GTA 3 20 Years
DMA Design

Did you know that Rockstar North, developers of GTA 3, were originally called DMA Design?

Did you also know that DMA Design are the people responsible for smash-hit videogame, Lemmings?

It's never been 100% confirmed whether this is a reference or not, but there's a very popular urban myth in Grand Theft Auto 3 that there are certain pedestrians who love to tumble off cliffs to their deaths, just like Lemmings.

This will happen routinely at the Aspatria - Bedford Point Expressway and also in the Witchita Gardens area. In Aspatria, pedestrians will plunge from an overhang in the tunnel, while in Witchita, they'll throw themselves to their deaths in water.

The actual reason for this happening appears to lie in the spawning of pedestrians and their AI not being clever enough to actually determine they're about to fall to their deaths.

It's better to think that someone in Rockstar used to work at DMA though and purposefully programmed certain NPC behaviour in this way as a reference to the old game they worked on.

 
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Dan Curtis is approximately one-half videogame knowledge, and the other half inexplicable Geordie accent. He's also one quarter of the Factory Sealed Retro Gaming podcast.