There's something strangely magical about seeing the inside of a game laid bare in out-of-bounds. I have vivid memories of switching noclip at the train station in Half-Life 2 to find a legless Wallace Breen giving his speeches in the void, with a legless Isaac Kleiner not too far away. Grand Theft Auto is appreciated for its attention to detail, but hiding these oddities just out of reach is typical of any developer, and Rockstar is no exception.
The opening sequence of GTA 3 takes place in a “ghost town” that is otherwise inaccessible to the player. It's a small cluster of non-collision buildings that were built specifically to be separate from the rest of Liberty City, so Rockstar hid it in space, assuming no one would ever find it. However, players discovered that you could fly a Dodo at a specific angle to break through the map and reach the area, immersed in “blue hell” as you cut through the city block.
With this discovery, modder Eilano86 began adding a path that allowed players to easily reach the area without having to fly a Dodo or use the anti-gravity 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 newscast that “someone built a bridge mod so you can actually drive there now – awesome…”
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.
The ghost town is back and now you can explore it
“For over a decade, this specific alternative brew 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 completely recreate and revive it from scratch based on an old video from 2012.”
Mod_Saver didn't stop there. Not only have they recreated the 2004 mod, allowing 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, instead you'll be able to continue driving around the out-of-bounds streets.
- Released
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October 23, 2001
- ESRB
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M for mature: blood, strong language, violence
- Engine
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RenderWare
