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Hello everyone! We have prepared a special gift for you to celebrate Multi Theft Auto's 20th Anniversary! Here is an exclusive interview with IJs (also known as IJsVogel), the founder and first developer of the Multi Theft Auto project. Read on to see his thoughts on the project in retrospective. Note: more details about Multi Theft Auto's history and timeline can be found on our Wiki article. What had prompted you to create the very first multiplayer mod for GTA3 - a game that did not offer such a feature out of the box? Wow, it has already been 20 years.. I remember the reasoning behind it very vividly! As I grew up in the 90s I was lucky enough to be surrounded by PCs, early internet and PC games from the very beginning (of myself). I was a very fanatical player of Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2, especially so because these games had a multiplayer mode that I could play at home with my brothers. Then, finally in 2002 when GTA3 came out for PC, I was 13 at the time and completely astounded at the possibilities of this 3D open world version of my favourite game for the first couple of months. After a while, it sinked in that this game was missing any ability at all to play with others, which put a huge dent into my appreciation for the game... At the time, I never really played the storylines of games because it didn't quite fit my youthly attention span (my older brother always left the savegames for me to play) and was usually more into the multiplayer and modding aspects anyway. Two completely coincidental things then sparked the start of an attempt at multiplayer. First, a fake French screenshot was being sent around forums, showing a multiplayer mod for GTA3. This raised my hopes tremendously and I was looking forward to testing this so much. When it turned out to be another hoax, my hopes were in shambles and I began thinking about hacking something together to do it anyway. A screenshot of a fake multiplayer mod in GTA3. Surfaced in July, 2002. Secondly, some coders had just released a trainer/cheat tool for GTA3 including its source code in Visual Basic 5 or 6, which was the only language I knew at that time as I was only 14 by then. I started hacking around with the tool to make a synchronized trainer tool, and figured I might as well synchronize car positions, and a very crude attempt at multiplayer was born and it was dubbed GTA3: Alternative Multiplayer (GTA3AM). It was amazing to see it work, it seemed such a stupidly simple hack! This was the first effective prototype of Multi Theft Auto. A not-so-fake GTA3AM 0.1 Client window, win9x style! February, 2003. Were there other people who shared your idea and wanted to contribute? Was it easy to find them? The initial GTA3AM was posted on a well-known Dutch tech forum, and this raised some attention from people over there. It wasn't so much a conscious decision to find people, people really wanted to contribute and we gathered on IRC, with some people helping out with the website, server donations and coding. This grew organically as the users grew. The first months or so was mostly Dutch techies helping out, including a well-known provider sponsoring our hosting, and after the first year or so the team became very diverse, international and well skilled. I am still very grateful for each and every contributor to this project from the very start and later, also because I was still very young at the time, and the project would not have been able to thrive on my contributions alone. I have had the fortune to meet and work together with some of the most skilled people I've met in my entire life, as well as people who simply loved playing around with our creations. Work on ambitious projects like this typically involves solving tough and unusual problems. What was the most significant one that you and the team had to deal with during your time in MTA? And perhaps, maybe there was a really peculiar problem that you also would like to share? MTA has been an amazing learning curve for me, and I believe many other contributors in its 20 year lifetime, to acquire a very special mix of skills. We have had tremendous fun and also frustration engineering the hell out of all sorts of things, and trying to tie worlds together over a network. There are countless things that were tackled and pioneered (even if only personally) in this project, so it is hard to pinpoint out a single thing. I think one of the most groundbreaking efforts of this project however was to restructure the entire project and release it as open-source to the world. As part of that we spent much effort to restructure everything using git (this upset quite a few developers at the time) and published it in 2009 or so on GitHub when it was still in its infant stage (GitHub even mentioned us on their blog at the time). A bit messy in MTA:SA Racemod internal tests. Some time in the second half of 2005. If you had a chance to start this project again, would it be closed-source as it initially was, or would you prefer it to be open-source like it is now? It would certainly be open-sourced again, probably as early as possible. The facilities for open source projects are much, much better now than 20 years ago as well. The move to GTA:SA kind of left the multiplayer mods for GTA3 and GTA:VC in the dark. While there were some alternative mods developed for these games, they did not really leave a lasting impact in the long run. Have you or the rest of the team ever considered bringing back the support for GTA3 or VC after MTA:SA DM 1.0 was released? I do not think there was ever a strong will to revive the GTA3 or GTA:VC versions, because GTA:SA by all means had a better and more capable engine. Perhaps in today's open source world, where contributors are easy to find, it could have had a better chance. My personal opinion (or fantasy) at the time was to "just" build our own game behind it instead, but that obviously never took off. Development build of MTA:VC Blue. Some time in the second half of 2004. What in your opinion are the strongest points of Multi Theft Auto (be it the original 0.x series or MTA:SA)? What do you think the project especially succeeded in? The critical mass of players and contributors, that never seems to die out, and it keeps surprising me. The incredibly challenging technical issues we have had to solve (and still do), sometimes from the ground up. This makes for a very exciting sandbox to work in as a developer or hacker. And in contrast, do you feel there are any shortcomings in MTA? I think one of the missed opportunities in MTA is that we could have developed a bigger framework or other products on top of all the codebase we had written. A bit messy again, this time during MTA:SA DM internal tests. December, 2007. Thinking back, are there any things in the project that you think you would have done differently nowadays? I would have loved to have set up a much more professional collaboration with the entire team that were around at the time the project was open sourced around 2010, using all the knowledge we had all acquired in the process of making MTA:SA 1.0 when it was still very hot. With the knowledge on startups that I have now, I realize that had I been 5 or 10 years older, I might have had some better idea on how to take it to a level to possibly develop our own game(s) or framework on top of it. But alas, for MTA's sake it turned out good either way! The MTA Community is very large these days and scattered across all continents, but that was not always the case. What was the community like back in your time? As with most (modding) projects you usually start out with a very niche audience. For MTA, this was a direct result of me posting on a Dutch tech forum and as a result, the initial contributors in the first months were mostly (if not all) Dutch and Belgian. With the GTA series obviously being a hit in the Western world, more people wanted to contribute (and play). Nearly all of them came from the US, UK, Central and West Europe and the Nordic countries, with a few notable exceptions. I think this pretty much mirrored the demographics of the GTA series themselves. Let's race! Beta tests of MTA:SA DM. December, 2007. I have noticed that you have been involved with various tech projects after retiring from MTA. What are you up to currently? Was your experience from working on MTA useful in these projects? Among some other startup adventures in the past years, I currently lead an audio software company called KoalaDSP that develops virtual audio plugins, instruments, effects and algorithms for a bunch of very big companies out there. We started this company around two years ago in Amsterdam after some previous endeavours, and with around 10+ people working on some crazy software being used in music and home studios around the world. But Multi Theft Auto has given me a lifetime passion for video game development, and after many years or scribbles and notes, I have finally found the time and people around me to developing my second (..after MTA) game idea using 90s retro graphics and voxels. I feel quite strongly that my experience with Multi Theft Auto has been a unique and once-in-a-lifetime gift of skill, much adventure and lasting connections with others. I can't quite pinpoint it, but it feels special. I hope that also still holds to this day for any contributors out there. A long-running project like MTA also means a lot of memories. Do you have any fond or interesting memories from your time working on the project that you would wish to share? I have so many memories of my time during MTA, it is hard to pick out something! Apart from the early memories of all the excitement, healthy stress and testing with all these people during the very, very early days, there is something I remember from a bit later: There was a pretty far-fetched and secret clandestine plan from some of our developers to put a live editor into one of the first MTA:SA releases. Like often with our features, it was really a coding challenge, a show of skill. Are you skilled enough to build this crazy thing? They figured that, in order for the community to enjoy using our mod, they needed an engaging way to create content. So they started building a complete editor inside the game. It required a tremendous amount of work, but they kept to it, others started contributing, and it ended up as one of the key features of the entire release! Some say that editor served as an inspiration to other mods, possibly other games afterwards. Internal tests of the cancelled MTA: Orange. April, 2010. To wrap things up, is there anything that you would like to say to current MTA Team members and/or to MTA fans? Thanks for putting your enthusiasm (and many wasted hours of gaming!!) into this amazing project. Props to all the contributors, past, present and future. MTA, the way it's meant to be played! Interviewed by jhxp.

Takes me back! Good times!

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

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!

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

Crazy to see things still going after all these years. I remember fondly the days I was involved in development working alongside IJs amongst others. I enjoyed coding before MTA but this project really turned it into a passion and I can only thank IJs and the others for inviting me in to participate before it went open source.

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.

Thanks bro, i try it later! Have a great day! @Kidzonio

Heyo Bro, you will need to do calcs. I think the functions are these getGroundPosition and getElementPosition now, the functions i think are now, the functions i think ar

Stop playing with yourself! ?

Happy Birthday MTA! I started playing and scripting at around 2011, had a small deathmatch server running for a while with a great community. I can say that the experience I got hosting my own server and creating my own mods really helped me start my professional career in tech. Thanks for the memories MTA!

Happy anniversary

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

As i told many things wrong try this one GUIEditor = { checkbox = {}, staticimage = {}, label = {}, button = {}, window = {} } addEventHandler("onClientResourceStart", resourceRoot, function() GUIEditor.window[1] = guiCreateWindow(542, 254, 348, 92, "No Deathmatch Mode", false) guiWindowSetSizable(GUIEditor.window[1], false) GUIEditor.label[1] = guiCreateLabel(10, 25, 283, 15, "You can enable or disable 'No Deathmatch' mode.", false, GUIEditor.window[1]) GUIEditor.staticimage[1] = guiCreateStaticImage(10, 50, 34, 26, "icon.png", false, GUIEditor.window[1]) GUIEditor.checkbox[1] = guiCreateCheckBox(49, 52, 234, 24, "Enable / Disable No Deathmatch Mode", false, false, GUIEditor.window[1]) guiSetFont(GUIEditor.checkbox[1], "default-bold-small") GUIEditor.button[1] = guiCreateButton(303, 52, 31, 25, "X", false, GUIEditor.window[1]) guiSetVisible(GUIEditor.window[1], false) addEventHandler("onClientGUIClick", GUIEditor.button[1], onGuiClick,false) addEventHandler("onClientGUIClick",GUIEditor.checkbox[1], checkBox, false) end ) addCommandHandler("nodm", function() guiSetVisible(GUIEditor.window[1], true) showCursor(true) end ) function onGuiClick() guiSetVisible(GUIEditor.window[1], false) showCursor(false) end function checkBox() if ( guiCheckBoxGetSelected(GUIEditor.checkbox[1])) then setElementData(localPlayer, "invincible", true) else setElementData(localPlayer, "invincible", false) end end addEventHandler ( "onClientPlayerDamage",localPlayer, function () if getElementData(source,"invincible") then cancelEvent() end end)