Multi Theft Auto - Background

Background

The release of Grand Theft Auto III, a critically acclaimed sandbox-style action-adventure computer and video game developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) represented the first 3D title in the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series. Despite its success, it was the first Grand Theft Auto game to ship without the network gameplay features that were present in earlier titles, which allowed players to connect through a computer network and play the game with others.

The first version of Multi Theft Auto, dubbed Grand Theft Auto III: Alternative Multiplayer, attempted to fill in this gap by extending an already existing cheating tool with functionality that allowed the game to be played with a very crude form of two-player racing over a computer network purely as a proof of concept, similar to how the now-defunct XBAND service worked by manipulating game memory in order to add online multiplayer functionality. Newer versions of Multi Theft Auto with increasingly better gameplay and other improvements were released based on the same concept of game manipulation, by a small team of developers.

With the introduction of successor Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, it became clear that this computer game title also lacked any form of network gameplay. The Multi Theft Auto software was subsequently extended to include support for this title, and eventually shifted its entire focus towards this title and the concept of a new software framework dubbed Blue. As the original concept (of game manipulation by memory) was prone to various problems with performance and stability that often resulted in application crashes, this new framework was created as a successor and laid the foundation of all future Multi Theft Auto software.