By Ray Ampoloquio · Oct 14, 2026 GTA III's iconic grid box art exists because 9/11 forced Rockstar to scrap the original cover, says co founder Dan Houser.

Zoom image: The original cover was scrapped after 9/11 and the grid of character tiles replaced it. The Grand Theft Auto franchise almost did not become what it is today and the look that came to define happened accidentally. In a career-spanning interview with IGN, Rockstar Games co-founder and co-creator, respectively, Dan Houser revisited the strange birth of Grand Theft Auto III , the game that invented the modern series and pretty much defined the entire open-world genre.

The story runs through a near-bankrupt studio, a flop at E3 and the aftermath of 9/11, an event that reshaped the world and gave GTA III its now-iconic box art.

" The team was still struggling to finish the game. They believed in it anyway and took it to E3, where it died on the show floor. "Nobody cared about it," Houser recalled.

We have written before about how GTA III pulled Take-Two and Rockstar back from the brink , but in that moment the game looked like a gamble that might sink the company, something former Rockstar North lead developer Obbe Vermeij also confirmed in the past .

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