Rockstar has decided to celebrate Grand Theft Auto 3's 10-year anniversary by releasing iOS and Android ports of it and by answering fans questions.
Perhaps the most repeated question about GTA 3 is about the reason why its protagonist was silent unlike his counterparts in the rest of the series.
"It may now seem obvious that people should all talk in games, but this was not necessarily the case in 2001, certainly not in an open world game," Rockstar explained. "We were making up a lot of procedures as we went along, and we decided that the NPCs (Non Playable Characters) should talk and we would have to figure out how to make them talk (using motion captured cutscenes, something that had never really been done before, at least not on the scale we were doing it)."
"So we decided that the game's protagonist would not talk, partly to aid people identifying with him, but mostly because we had so many other problems to solve and this did not seem like a major issue. We started to discuss introducing a talking lead character when working on Vice City, but it was a lot of work. While the structure of GTA3 may seem obvious or natural now, and the use of cutscenes made in the game's engine that look and feel like the game may seem simple and easy, it really was not the case back in 2001 when we had to figure out all of these things for the first time. Oh and in San Andreas, CJ calls Claude a mute because he does not talk and CJ finds this unnerving."
Rockstar also shared some of the original concept art used to design GTA 3's protagonist, Claude. You can check out those in the screens tap.
The rest of the questions and answers are available on Rockstar's website.