Ask a dozen average punters what the best mission in GTA 5 is, and you’ll get several dozen answers. Ask the same box of eggs about Grand Theft Auto 4 and a consensus will emerge: it’s Three Leaf Clover. A bickering bank-heist that starts on the border of outright slapstick but quickly turns into a masterclass of escalating tension, where the streets of Liberty City become a Pac-Man maze of hot flying lead in yet another glorious Grand Theft Homage to the works of filmmaker Michael Mann. It’s the crowning achievement of an otherwise very divisive game.
GTA 4 remains the most curious beast in Rockstar’s blockbuster menagerie: a brand new start in an era of unprecedented sophistication and visual fidelity, with the ever-capable hardware of the time leveraged into depicting the cold forever-autumn of Liberty City: a suitable backdrop for the grubby, boldly bleak tale of a man on the run from his past, a story chiefly about disillusionment, of treacheries within and without. A far cry from the endless summers of Vice City and San Andreas. If California knows how to party, New York City knows how to freeze your bollocks off on a park bench.
GTA 4 was in the same breath a huge step forward for Rockstar’s world-building and storytelling chops, while also being a deliberate back-to-basics reset for their flagship series. Structurally, it’s a lot closer to the original GTA and GTA 3 than its immediate predecessor, San Andreas, and it’s even less sophisticated than Vice City in key areas. GTA 4 has no real estate sub-game. Niko cannot gain weight by stuffing his face, or get jacked by lifting stuff. GTA 4’s missions tend to be short, sharp, shooty-bang vignettes where the player only has to work against the game’s chief objects of friction: angry NPCs with guns, and the unforgiving driving model that makes your average canalboat-sized American sedan handle like a bouncy castle on swampland.
In short, it’s brilliant. But it does leave us with only one real answer when it comes to its best or most iconic mission, and that’s when you tag along with the Irish mob for a hastily undertaken bank heist in Chinatown.
Though Three Leaf Clover is credited by Rockstar itself for inspiring the intricately designed heists of GTA 5 and GTA Online — as well as the lauded three-protagonist mechanic allowing players to switch between Michael, Franklin, and Trevor at key moments — Three Leaf Clover itself barely hints at such complexities. If anything, it’s the complete antithesis of a GTA 5 heist: there’s no planning involved, save for the almost arbitrary requirement to go buy a suit and tie and a hasty en-route briefing from Patrick McCreary.
Unsurprisingly given the lack of prep, things go wrong from the off. While Patrick and Derrick are arguing about how to treat the hostages, one of them, an idiotic NRA member, decides to be today’s “good guy with a gun”. Michael Keane, not Batman’s butler, cops it when Eugene Reaper unconceals his carry. For the final time, as it turns out, when Patrick and Derrick shoot him to death in revenge. Luis Lopez, the tertiary protagonist of the GTA 4 saga and star of the Ballad of Gay Tony DLC, keeps his head down sensibly, although the player can choose to kill him if they enjoy messing with the space-time continuum.
The vault is blown with probably too much C4, a cool million dollars gets shoved into duffel bags, and all hell breaks loose on the streets: the bank is descended upon by scores of LCPD. Hundreds of cops and dozens of patrol cars block every escape route, turning the streets into killing corridors. Cover is scarce and flimsy: Niko can peek around corners, duck behind bins, or use parked cars as makeshift shield walls. Unfortunately, in hails of gunfire, cars are liable to explode, due to this being an era when people could afford to put gas in them.
The cavernous tenements and skyscrapers echo with barrages of bullets. Footsteps bounce around the walls as the crew dives into a subway station in a desperate attempt to get out of the open. The player somehow hears all this over the thumping of their own heart. If Niko dies, it’s back to Patrick’s mum’s house for a restart. If either of your companions die, it’s over. Kill too many civilians? Also a fail state. Lose the money? Fail. Car blows up? Fail. Abandon your crew? Fail. There are no mid-mission checkpoints: Three Leaf Clover is a mission that requires as much luck as skill to clear. It’s not an especially hard mission, but it’s easy to have a bad time with it through no fault of your own. Conversely, it’s perfectly possible to stumble through it with dumb luck. You need good fortune to make a fortune. As with all GTA missions, the game’s open world systems can work with or against you.
And this is a huge part of why it’s so tense. If you’ve been unlucky in your first attempt, the stakes get higher with every subsequent run: this is a crucial story mission that unlocks the last third of the entire map. But aside from the consequences of failure, Three Leaf Clover’s sheer lack of bells and whistles gives the whole experience an air of deadly realism that cuts through GTA’s baseline silliness by stripping it back to its most basic elements. Shooting. Running. Driving. Cops and robbers. Borrowing heavily once again from the works of filmmaker Michael Mann, most obviously 1995’s Heat, Three Leaf Clover refuses the temptation to underscore its action with the appropriate musical accompaniment, instead painting a symphony of death with strictly diegetic audio. No needle drops. No radios to bark crisply with the dialogue of your colleagues, no matter how far away they are. The sound is raw, real, unsweetened. Or, at least, it’s painstakingly designed to seem that way, and so successfully that you’re liable to forget that these are all sounds being triggered by clever scripting and a sophisticated real-time engine.
It’s this approach to sound design that really hammers home how much the people behind GTA are in love with Mann’s filmography, to the point where Grand Theft Auto is probably the most significant cultural force keeping the relevance of Miami Vice alive. Vice City and the upcoming GTA 6 are obviously massively indebted to what was one of the greatest TV shows of the 1980s, a rare example of one that still absolutely holds up today. The juxtaposition of pina coladas, speedboats, and sharp suits against a seedy criminal drug trade fuelling gang violence and urban decline certainly must have appealed to the Houser brothers and many of their collaborators, given how much of their stock in trade is based on those exact vibes. And it’s not hard to imagine why even the tainted glamour of a crime-ridden Miami would seem like paradise to kids growing up in 1980s Britain, purely by virtue of the fact that everything didn’t look like it was covered in a thin film of shit.
Miami Vice is just one side of the coin when it comes to Michael Mann’s influence on GTA: much is made of how Three Leaf Clover is directly inspired by the brilliant bank heist in Heat, right down to the outfits, which explains why Patrick McCreary is so insistent on Niko looking the part before the mission can even start. Three Leaf Clover plays out markedly differently to the Heat heist, with the inherent claustrophobia of Liberty City’s labyrinthine streets and alleys feeling a lot less exposed than the wide thoroughfares of downtown LA. But anyone who watches Heat for the first time will be struck by how minimalist the score is for such a high-stakes action thriller.
Where there is non-diegetic music, it’s often as simple and bare as a single note or drone denoting the mood: this maximises the impact of any gunshot that crackles over the mix, cutting the music entirely like a drum solo. And it’s highly important that this impact is not artificial: the gunshot must be heard and felt by those on screen, rather than dubbed over in post. To that end, Michael Mann uses on-location audio wherever possible, infamously using weapons loaded with full-charge blanks in his action scenes in order to get that real, terrifying sound without relying on post-production editing. As I’m writing this, the news has just broken that he recently shot himself in the foot at a shooting range, quite possibly having now invented Method Directing.
But even outside of action scenes, quiet conversations are given visceral impact by this minimalist technique: the iconic face-to-face meeting between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is soundtracked not by trebly strings or terse pizzicato, but by the ambient din of a busy diner dialled up to oppressive levels. Again, this audio is captured on set, as the actors say it, with all that racket going on around them. Most other filmmakers, or cowards, would have a quiet set or ADR this in post. But that’s why most films sound…otherworldly. Not quite a product of the real world. Because they’re built out of duct tape and bullshit. Michael Mann’s films are no different, but I would argue that the techniques we’ve been talking about perhaps remove one layer of artifice between the viewer and the world they’re glimpsing on screen. You feel like you’re in that Collateral cab. You’re drilling that safe alongside James Caan in Thief. You can practically smell the perversion wafting from Manhunter’s Dollarhyde. All that fun stuff.
Grand Theft Auto’s designers are devotees of this naturalistic approach, of working with the fundamental elements of the audiovisual toolkit in order to achieve impact. Most of GTA’s audio is diegetic by design, even its scant few needledrops are usually at least conceptually delivered via the in-game radio. But Rockstar has to work backwards to achieve this kind of environmental naturalism: while filmmakers like Michael Mann, David Fincher, and David Lean could work magic out of the basic building blocks of light and sound to achieve gloriously dramatic results, cinematic minimalism or realism takes a whole lot of fakery to achieve in a real-time game engine.
The heat-haze of San Andreas, the soft, filmic quality of Red Dead 2 that evokes classic westerns, the smartphone shot Snapmatic reels of GTA 6: none of these styles are a happy consequences of pointing and shooting, but the planned and hard-won result of artisan engineers with extraordinary talent and a functionally infinite budget to work with.
In the end, Three Leaf Clover is a simple mission with simple objectives that is elevated by style, and the uncompromising boldness of its designers. You can make the argument that it is functionally little more than a high-fidelity rendition of Space Invaders if you want to, but that would be missing the point. It is, like the rest of GTA, all about making you give a shit. The humour, the frustration, the tension, the payoff: you are invested in Niko’s story because it feels real. And nothing exemplifies the wizardry and parlour tricks it takes to achieve that more than Three Leaf Clover, an ode to the detached, hyper-real style of Michael Mann at his best. It’s style and substance colliding to create a masterpiece.
In order to build Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption into the ambitious, intricately designed, systems-driven worlds of intrigue that they would eventually become in the HD era, Rockstar had to dial back to the bare essentials. And in order to get back to basics, GTA 4 had to be a powerhouse of audiovisual engineering. With its pioneering work on getting the Euphoria physics engine to play ball in a vast real-time simulated environment, its rich and detailed simulation of cinematic fundamentals that is so pristine that it looks easy, and excellent character work and writing that gave rise to the video game as HBO box set paradigm that we now take for granted as what video games are just like now.
Tl;dr: yeah it’s really good, it’s like that bit in Heat.
Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn’t fawning over Assassin’s Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and playing manservant to a horrid little cat. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN’s YouTube channel!