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Dear Multi Theft Auto players and supporters! Today is the 20 Year Anniversary of Multi Theft Auto! On the February 9th 2003, a rudimentary GTA3 multiplayer prototype was released by our founder, IJsVogel. It did not take long for contributors to join the effort and turn it into a real multiplayer mod. The mod IJsVogel created was originally named “GTA3: Alternative Multiplayer”, but soon after it became “GTA3: Multi Theft Auto”. The Multi Theft Auto (MTA) name became the identity of all following projects. As new GTA games were released, new projects were created for GTA3, GTAVC, GTASA and GTAIV. Respectively, the main project names are: GTA3:MTA, MTA:VC, MTA:SA, MTA:IV. The development during GTA3 showed what the team was capable of with enough learning and reverse engineering. At this time, game modes were made for deathmatch and vehicle stunts. These game modes were hard-coded into the mod and could not be altered. It was not perfect, but it was an amazing accomplish for the time. Not only was it the first multiplayer for GTA, but it was an unprecedented undertaking. An early version of GTA3:MTA 0.2 (client and server). Some time in the first half of 2003. The working experience on GTA3 laid the framework for the second project, MTA:VC. It did not take long after GTA: Vice City for the 1st version of MTA:VC to release. The MTA Team succeeded in creating the basic multiplayer functionality much quicker through past-experience. At this point, MTA was well-known and there were mentions on gaming websites, magazines and even a TV interview on the gaming channel G4TV. Even Rockstar Games developers, the creators of GTA, contacted the MTA Team from time to time. The MTA:VC mod still offered a hard-coded deathmatch and vehicle stunting game mode that could not be altered. However, it had better synchronization and supported many new features. When GTA:SA came out, the contributors to the project were much more seasoned and mature. The 3rd project, MTA:SA, was much more ambitious. Although the first release was restricted to racing in vehicles, it was a proof of concept for a vastly superior framework that empowered users to make their own content. An editor was produced to allow in-game editing for the first time. When the full-featured product began development, a constantly evolving Lua-based scripting system accompanied it. This allowed the user to manipulate game code and modify various settings, elements and added features to create unique servers and game modes. Some added features include: voice chat, custom GUIs, web browser components. The MTA Team had the foresight to release this modification to the public as Open-Source code to attract future developers and embraced many new tools of game development that have become commonplace today such as installers, bug reporting, nightly builds, wiki documentation, anti-cheat, and Steam version support to name a few. MTA:SA 1.1 public tests. August, 2011. The release of GTA:IV did result in the beginning stages of MTA:IV, but once Rockstar released their official multiplayer, many of MTA’s most seasoned developers and contributors were ready to move on with their professional lives. Providing the same level of quality to GTA:IV would have been an extreme undertaking. It was decided that the best course of action would be to discontinue further projects and continue making MTA:SA better. The MTA:SA project still receives Open-Source contributions and still retains a consistent player base that is large enough to make developers of new games jealous! Thank You We would like to thank everyone who helped and participated over the years: developers, community/clan leaders, moderators, patch contributors, helpers, donators, testers, translators, scripters, mappers, server hosts/owners, streamers, players and fans. There were hundreds of thousands of such people over the years and they all had their place here. Many people have come and gone. Some are still very young and some are quite old now! Some of us have even developed life careers from our experiences working on this modification. We had the honor of befriending a lot of wonderful people in various stages of the project and many were just as enthusiastic about MTA as we were. Multi Theft Auto would not be here right now, had it not been for their hard work, interest and dedication. No seats? No problem. Screenshot from MTA:SA 1.0.5, taken by Zango. August, 2011. The social aspect has always been strong in MTA. No one knows what the future will bring, but there are things that will remain regardless of anything - and that is the time you all have spent here and your memories. Feel free to share your MTA stories in the comments! Feel free to say hi to us in Discord as well! Thank you all past and present MTA staff members, players and fans for sticking with us! Happy Birthday, Multi Theft Auto! Onwards to the next 20 years or more! -MTA Team

It has been a long and winding road to get to this point. Here is a condensed personal story from me for those who find it here. After so many years and so many people and memories, its so hard to remember everything. I started with GTA2 on Dreamcast and I loved it. I was fanatical about the upcoming GTA3 release. I even bought gaming magazines just to read pieces about it in school. I never did that for any other game. Eventually, I got my copy of the game on the PS2. The game met all my expectations. For it's time, the open world 3D city was something revolutionary and very exciting. I dwelled on the GameFAQ boards for GTA games during school after it released. Back then, that was one of the gaming centers of the universe. I'm pretty sure that is where I first heard about GTA Multiplayer being created for the PC version of the game. In the earliest days I had 56K Internet (gigabit fiber now!) and a mediocre computer with no GFX card, so I missed the earliest days of MTA. It was painful for me knowing that it was out there and I couldn't play it. By the time Vice City came out I had the means to play and really became part of the community since the first Vice City release. Vice City was actually a pretty fun deathmatch game. It worked well by abusing animation glitches to create good movement. The community grew into clans and I found one of the first users, Iggy248 and asked to join his new clan Vice City Police (VCP). We recruited a lot of talent. In the earliest days, we absolutely ruled the scene and it was a great time. Over time, a handful of our clan remained heavily active in the community and became closer to the development team. We would eventually be invited to beta test. Throughout time our roles and contributions increased. A handful of our crew moved on to be key contributors and one even became an MTA code developer. When GTA:SA released, development exploded and so did the need for contributors. As heads of the QA Testing Team (Rebel, JHXP, myself), our new "clan" consisted of finding the right people to test and contribute. I think we did a pretty good job at finding a lot of talented people. You could say this was a lot of luck. Personally, now at this point in my life after having similar experience elsewhere, I feel like I have had some skill and some part in bringing the right people together and keeping them together. However, I recognize that I am also stubborn and bull-headed, so I had failures and fallouts with people as well. I don't think you can lead without losing some friends. When disagreements happened, they were heartfelt and horrible, but I laugh thinking about most of them now. Some of them I deeply regret when I remember them. If any of those people are reading, I apologize to you if there are still any ill feelings. As mentioned in the OP, there were a lot of systems and I contributed significantly to most of them as staff and as a tester on behalf of the developers. I would say I am most proud of the original MTA:SA race editor. It was extremely popular and nothing let you edit & test directly inside a GTA game before this moment. At heart, I've always liked creating custom content, so this was of immense interest to me. I did the lion's share of bug reports/testing/features for this thru something we had called Mantis Bug Tracker. Thank you eAi and ChrML specifically for letting me drive you insane haha. I made a lot of races with that editor, but the best thing I made wasn't a race at all. I bastardized the race mode into a birth of the Destruction Derby game mode, with a map of the same name. It worked, because the race would end if only one car was left. I see the destruction derby game mode in GTA5 MP with pickups and it is very much the same way they were on that first map I made. I have no doubt that Rockstar Games took ideas from MTA for their online prototyping. You can look for "gta destruction derby" on YouTube and see now how big that game mode is alone. The GTA community is massive! Contributing to this community ultimately changed the course of my life. I learned a lot of various skills in the Computer Science field and it really propelled me towards being the IT worker I am today. From building my first computer to coding my first piece of code, the guys were there to help me along. It enabled me to pickup a lot of concepts of IT quickly and also to be efficient at what I do. Even though I got a business degree, I couldn't escape my fate haha. I still catchup with some of the people I worked with thru the years on our Discord. Every once in a blue moon, some long distant name will come out of the woodwork and namedrop me. It's overwhelming how many people you can meet over many years!

I remember my own first encounter with the mod. It was also back in 2003, although few months later in the summer. MTA:VC 0.2 was a hot thing back then and I had just learned about it from a gaming magazine. Sure enough, it picked up my interest, but I was only able to play it myself later, at an internet café. While being limited, it was also impressive - I have found the freedom of the gameplay fascinating. You could do whatever you wanted ingame, and so could other players. You could play along with others, or try mowing them all down with your guns. You could get in a car, drive around and watch the mayhem from afar, or challenge other players to see, who is the best driver. Got ran over by another player? Just respawn and hunt them down, or ask your friends to get ingame and get your revenge together. And it all had that cool GTA wackiness and style that I loved. My VCP recruitment fight with Ransom! January, 2004. I sticked around and kept playing. Few months later, I was spotted by Ransom, who recruited me to my first MTA clan - VCP (Vice City Police). It did not end there - I have had a chance to participate in the MTA 0.5 beta tests, then got invited to the newly-formed dedicated QA Team for MTA:SA, led by l2ebel. From there, I worked my way and got to co-lead the QA Team. I also became the MTA Moderator later on and held various roles in the project over the years. This experience has actually landed me a career in Software Testing, which is still my occupation. Yet, nearly 20 years later from back when I started, I am still here, preparing this article for you. I could go on and on, but this was just my story - each of you have an MTA story of your own. Multi Theft Auto is made of such stories, and of course made by the people who starred in them.

Wow, 20 years, unbelievable. I remember coming across GTA3AM while lurking on a Dutch forum and having quite the challenge in getting it to work in the first place. Tried it a few times, both GTA3AM and GTA3:MTA 0.2, with a friend even though there wasn't much to it. When I found out about the MTA forum, I decided to join it and whine for the next release as the impatient 12 year old I was. Slowly but surely I started spending more and more time here om the forums and especially on IRC. To my surprise I got invited to the then called 'beta team' for MTA:VC. I enjoyed my time and tried my best to hunt down and report bugs all the way up to the MTA:SA Deathmatch beta's. However, as much as I enjoyed MTA itself, the most important part for me was the community. I got lots of support that helped me through severe mental health issues. Even though I decided to step back from MTA when I was at my worst, I've always kept popping back in to IRC and later Discord. In no particular order, I'd like to thank IJs, Blokker, h0z, Rebel, Talidan, Ransom, JHXP, MrBump, MrBill, Black_Dragon, Wartech, Xerox, Robpol, Iggy, x86, Aeron, HAZJ, Boss, BB101, Johnline, eAi, AJH, Oli, Solide, Gamefreek and whomever I forgot to mention for helping me make great memories I'll never forget. PS: VCP is still the only clan to win an official tournament, undefeated.

Happy birthday! ? Those good old memories. Look at the names on the screenshots (I have a lot of old videos)! I'll be 50 years old this year, but since GTA came out, I've still been playing. FMJ, UVA, Vces clan, etc. (on/with MTA of course) We also play here in Hungary. Check out my YouTube channel, where I record, edit, and cut all the videos. Let's celebrate! image_01 image_02 GTA Jano channel. Alias [FMJ]Jano, Dopey, Sz@nci

Congratulations! MTA was a big part of my childhood (was active from 14-19 years old) and one of the main reasons I'm a software developer now. You guys have made programming so interesting and so much fun for me and many others around the globe. Thank you, and I am curious what the future will bring.

My story with MTA:SA started back in 2012 i think. My PC was weak so i did not have much of fun - but i've seen a future in this project. I've started as just a player, then i've wrote my first scripts - this led to me learning how to use Photoshop to make GUI, then i've learned how to make 3D Models in 3DS Max and Blender. Met a lot of awesome people here and want to thank them all - just for being here and keeping all of this alive.

"We know this sucks. But hey, it's not fun to play alone."

Please make the game easier to work with like Roblox Studio for example, Map editor is not enough for everything and it's also good for us to find 3D objects made by the community or scripts ready to use or modifying game gravity and all of those things in one program making MTA have different fun servers (Football games, Hide and Seek and even fall guys for example) without using an additional program. As creative as you can get you'll still won't be able to make a good server in mta if you don't know how to script. And because of this we're not seeing any type of creativity like in other sandbox games. I Really love mta but we're not seeing anything new neither from the community or the staff.

This is an amazing milestone. I've not been involved really now since around 2007-8, but for some years Multi Theft Auto was (almost) my life. I spent most of my nights and spare time as a teenager and while at University focused on developing MTA. I started playing almost back at the start - probably a month or so after the initial MTA for GTA 3 was released. I remember trying to play - and finding the experience really quite bad - endless crashes and loads of limitations, but I loved MTA from the start: the way it opened my eyes to a technical way of achieving was initially seemed impossible, the ambition of the project and the enthusiastic community around the project. Everyone could see what MTA should be - the product vision was obvious - it was just a massive challenge to get it there. As I was a fairly competent Visual Basic programmer (the first version of MTA was built by modifying an existing trainer for GTA3) I was able to get involved and help out fairly quickly. IJs let me join around the time that MTA:Blue was just starting development. This was a big rewrite of MTA and the foundations of what MTA is today. I cut my teeth as a C++ programmer with this project which was really ambitious - we were almost writing a parallel game engine alongside the GTA engine that had to map almost 1-2-1 to it. This involved learning a lot of techniques for reverse engineering, C++ and assembly language. At this time, there was probably a core of 2-3 people working actively on the project in their spare time as developers and there was a lot of pressure to deliver something. We deliberately picked an easier goal - adding a racing mode, so that we didn't need to achieve some challenging features such as shooting synchronization. MTA Race was a big success and it was around this time that we had the rise of other copycat mods which really heaped on the pressure. At times the community seemed to turn into a battlefield between the different mods with cheaters thrown in the mix. We also had to handle various people from the cheating community making cheats as performing DDOS attacks against our infrastructure. Now days these things are easier to mitigate against, but as a small volunteer run project, these caused us a lot of hassle. After MTA Race, we were really ambitious with what we wanted to achieve - we wanted to add scripting to the game, and we wanted to build a modding infrastructure that was really flexible. I remember being proud of designing the resource system that MTA is still using today (though I'd definitely do some things differently now!) The version we released was really powerful - with a pretty good, extensible editor, downloadable resources, a web admin interface and pretty good synchronisation of gameplay. At times during the development I was the only developer for a while, so I like to think that MTA wouldn't have survived if I hadn't carried on fighting to make progress. I remember spending a whole summer trying to get shooting to work! But I think MTA was such a strong idea and had such a fan base that I'm sure someone would have picked up the torch. Now days I run a small games development company (www.fireboltgames.com) and I've worked professionally in the games industry for the last 15 years, and I'm certain I wouldn't have got where I am or have the skills I do without MTA, and for that I'm really glad. It's still one of the most successful things I've worked on and one I'm really proud of. It's certainly the longest-lived! We actually created a Roblox game recently inspired by the Hay mode made by Aaron for MTA - check it out here: https://www.roblox.com/games/6645345380/Climb-King The community around MTA was what made it all worth it - it was hard work, but there were so many good, enthusiastic people, all working together towards a common goal. We never met - we never even talked (this was before voice-chat was so widely available!) - but we were good friends and had a lot of respect for each other. All in all, this is a really well deserved milestone and I'm so glad I had a chance to be part of the history of this great project. Here's to another 20 years! PS: I designed the front page about 16 years ago - it is probably time to update it! Here's a few random screenshots from my archive: MTA:Green (MTA:Blue for GTA3, never released): http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/green_progress_6.JPG Old website design: http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/mta_site_design_2.jpg http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/mta_hud_9d.JPG

I was playing MTA back in 2010-2011. I wasn't even in middle school yet. I remember uploading some videos on my YouTube channel while playing DKR, good times. Sadly I can't log into that account to retrieve the videos anymore. Now more than a decade later, I might not play as I did, but MTA introduced me to scripting, which basically defined the path I would take in life. Regarding MTA, I'm still coding and giving my input, and I feel it's appreciated. Happy birthday MTA and now let's aim to get to 2033 together.

Hello dear MTA Team! First. Congrats for 20 years! Thank you for your job! Second. Special news about it from EFO (since 25.01.2004): https://efo-team.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=view&news_id=1619 . Third. Original arhive yours GTA3:AM 0.1a, GTA3:AM 0.2a and GTA3:MTA 0.3b: https://efo-team.ru/modules.php?name=Files&d_op=get_file_details&files_id=176 . And last. On second link you can find current interface in maximum quality. Respect for all, guys! Cheers.

Congrats on 20 years MTA! I'm proud to have been part of this community for at least 13 of those years even if it was on a laptop that was only able to run the game at a whopping 7 fps. Multi Theft Auto has been quite an important part of my life, in part due to the fact that I started playing when I was around 14 years old while I'm now 27 which means that it was there through some of the most defining years of my life. When I grew from being a kid to the adult that I am now. Being a part of this community helped me improve my English (it used to be absolutely horrendous as some who have known me since the UAG days may remember), form tons of amazing friendships and significantly improved my coding skills. While Lua itself isn't necessarily useful in my current job building projects and communities in MTA has taught me plenty of useful coding practices, helped me improved my web development skills due to the need for websites for my communities and forced me to learn how to properly build a server infrastructure. It also helped me become more mature, learning from any mistakes I have made in the past. A little known fact as well is that MTA has in part helped me go through a severe depression I went through around the age of 16-17. Thank you for helping me grow both as a person and as a coder. I appreciate everyone who contributes positively to this project and look forward to the many years yet to come. You bet I'll be around for all of it.

Just came here to say - thank you!!! I'm missing shotgun fights at Yakuzas territory on GTA3:MTA at Shore Side Vale with VCK, KFC and LCG clans. Wharfshrimp, Inuyasha, Philip, Kanada, Slothman, Chris, Zentrix, Snoob, Lancelot and every other guys. Cheers! [LCK] 4 ever?

Check your PMs.

As code editor you can now use Visual Studio Code with my extension over 6000 people have downloaded it already! https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=subtixx.mtasa-lua