Few missions in GTA’s history would make such a big and noticeable change to the geography of the host city as Bomb Da Base Act II, which goes some way to explaining why all 45 seconds of this short, sharp, Tin Can Alley sniper mission remains so memorable.

By today’s standards it’s extraordinarily simple: in a world where there are entire games built around the sophisticated premise of telescopic sharpshooting, GTA 3’s 45-second dalliance with the idea hardly seems like anything to write home about. But make no mistake: with GTA 3, Rockstar invented the modern video game, and with Bomb da Base Act II, GTA reinvented itself.

Bomb Da Base proved to be a tantalising early glimpse at the ever more complex, Bruckheimer-worthy setpieces that would come to define Rockstar’s later games, their narratives, and the subversive mission design that this most Triple-A of Triple-A studios is capable of.

Few games are as seminal as GTA 3 and even fewer of them are sequels: of the big franchise entries that successfully straddled the fault line between 2D and 3D at the turn of the century, only Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time remain as revered. Prestigious company that speaks to how industry-defining this humble little crime sim series came to be, originally hailing from the relative backwater of Dundee in Scotland, a place more readily associated with tracksuit gangs, Desperate Dan, and onion pies.

GTA 3 was not a sure thing.“

And sure enough, those of us old enough to have been fans of Grand Theft Auto before it even had sequels felt right at home in GTA 3. Despite the quantum leap in world simulation and graphical fidelity it heralded, the core gameplay loop and tonal flourishes that defined the MS-DOS original were all present and correct: the open world city, the job system, the in-game radio stations. More or less everything except the casual slaughter of Hare Krishnas survived intact. Though Liberty City now felt more tangible than ever in its polygonal reimagining, GTA 3 felt like it did little to advance the series in terms of its mission design.

Until Bomb da Base.

The Italian mob are losing the streets to the Colombian Cartel. Funded by their ruthless control of the drug SPANK, the Cartel have become the dominant faction in Liberty City’s criminal underbelly and Salvatore Leone is desperate to put them out of business. By chance, a Mafia snitch by the name of Curly Bob leads you right to their secret SPANK factory: the freight ship Les Cargo, a rusting hulk of maritime contraventions moored permanently in Portland Harbour. Despite being the lynchpin of the Cartel’s entire drug operation, it’s relatively lightly guarded and structurally vulnerable to a lunch-box sized bomb going off in its bowels.

But you’re not the bomber, you’re an accessory to the bomber. And it’s here that GTA 3 gets properly interesting. Not that it isn’t brilliant up until this point, it is, but Bombing Da Base is a watershed moment in GTA 3 that comes just at the point where you think you’ve got it down.

Firstly, you can’t even start the mission unless you can hand over $100,000. At this point in the game you likely do have at least this much, but it’s a high bar for entry that no previous missions have required. And if you’re the sort of player who spends most of their time playing death-by-cop in the open world instead of actually engaging with the missions and side-activities, it’s easy to keep blowing your cash on hospital fees.

So this first part of the mission filters out anyone playing like your wee brother.

Show up with the dosh, and 8-Ball introduces you to the scoped sniper rifle, along with an opportunity to practice your aim with it. Bear in mind, this is a PS2 title from before the twin-stick control paradigm and the aim-assistance that tends to come with it was fully established. The aiming is inverted as standard, which certainly didn’t help matters for the weak hearted, and the fire button is Circle, which you would naturally press with the same thumb you were aiming with. So, frankly, a lot of people needed the practice.

A short drive later, and you find yourself back in the hulking shadow of Les Cargo, the most important piece of real estate in the Cartel’s portfolio, their fortress of SPANKitude. But you’re not here to storm the gates: you’re here to run scoped hot-lead assistance from an adjacent rooftop.

There’s a beauty to the way Bomb Da Base’s action is laid out in this L-shaped curve. From your elevated vantage point, it presents as a sophisticated twist on the classic fairground shooting gallery, sans the smell of candy floss and roll-ups, where the targets don’t pop-out at you, the shooter, because they’re too busy popping out at your accomplice.

The first grunt you pop is 8 Ball’s cue to make a mad dash for the cargo hold. Desperate, yes, but not suicidal: his NPC AI is rudimentary but blessed with a faintly human sense of self-preservation. He will take cover. He will give you a chance to ice every goon before they ice him, but with an ever fleeting window of opportunity to take your shot as the mission progresses, there is a high chance of failure.

The simplicity of the mission brief was, for those of us playing the original GTA 3 in 2001, given ballast by the game’s obtuse control scheme. And arguably, this is by design: it is realistic, after all, for a high-powered sniper rifle to be unwieldy in untrained hands. Or, maybe it isn’t. Maybe the controls are just crap. Whatever the reason, this particular mission was a major choke point. Many players would never even see the next island. A lot of them were casuals, satisfied to simply wage an endless, unwinnable war against the LCPD on the island of Portland. Fine.

For the determined, it was a test of skill, perseverance, and possibly lateral thinking. It was possible to block or slow 8 Ball’s path with some strategic parking before starting his run, giving yourself ample time to take out the guards before letting him loose on the top deck. This method was fiddly and unpredictable but it did demonstrate GTA 3’s flexibility in how the player could use the open world simulation to change the odds in otherwise scripted encounters, something that would become a key part of the fun in later GTA games.

More than that, Bomb Da Base was a bold, early statement about how the player’s actions could, albeit in a contained, stage-managed way, have a permanent effect on the city itself. Most of your actions didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, almost everything you interact with in the open world is a temporary construct that spawns and then gets flushed out of memory as the game sees fit. But in these setpiece moments, your mark would be felt on the narrative, the factional politics, and the very landscape itself.

Inflicting permanent scars on the landscape is a trick that Rockstar uses with uncharacteristic restraint until GTA 5, which is chock full of subtle and unsubtle map changes, permanent and semi-permanent, as the player progresses through the single-player story. It works sensationally there, because it just makes enormous thematic sense in a game set in and around GTA’s equivalent of Hollywood to have a high instance of destructive, high-stakes, action-movie setpieces.

But in the grimy, 2 real 4 U hard-knock life of Liberty City, a rearrangement of geometry on this kind of scale was shocking and hugely impressive. It was a moment in time where the future was being invented, and showcases like this were enormously difficult to engineer on a technical level. But it impresses in a conceptual sense too: casting the protagonist in a support role while an NPC character does the actual mission is a wonderful subversion of a medium where almost nothing happens if not directly instigated by the player themselves.

Bomb Da Base would echo throughout the series as it became ever more bold and expensive. Playing an entire mission from a secondary perspective naturally gives way to the idea of playing through the same events from multiple perspectives, as happens so memorably in GTA 4 and its DLC stories, where the lives of three largely separate player characters become entangled around the nexus of a certain ill-fated diamond deal, which goes on to inform the basic idea of GTA 5’s hugely sophisticated triple-protagonist mechanic.

Like all the best things in life, as in game design, the central idea of Bomb Da Base is extraordinarily simple. But its implications were massive: it taught us that anything can happen in a Rockstar game, and sometimes it even leaves a scar.

Though its impact has been diminished by the ever ballooning spectacle of its successors and decades of quality of life improvements that have flattened out its steep difficulty, it remains one of the most important and iconic missions in what is arguably the 21st century’s most era-defining game.

GTA 3 was not a sure thing. It’s difficult to imagine now, at a time when it seems inconceivable that the next GTA won’t make a billion dollars in its opening week, but back then it was a gamble. There was no guarantee that the simplistic, top-down antics of Grand Theft Auto could be successfully reimagined as a full-blown 3D action game and Rockstar, formerly DMA Design, had seen its fair share of flops in the intervening years. But the quality of the experience, exemplified by the unassailable shock and awe of missions like Bomb Da Base, would ensure its status as a modern classic and the blueprint, the bible, the foundational work that informed everything after it.

For more deep-dives on the greatest stages, locations, and bosses in gaming history check out our previous Art of the Levels, and stay tuned for more GTA themed editions coming soon. Next month we take a deep dive into the hot Caribbean waters of Vice City’s Cop Land, so stick around!