Hey, folks. My name is SWEGTA and today I'll be serving for the voice of this channel as we dive head-first into the mystery that is Darkel from GTA III. Let's roll! According to various sources, Darkel was a "dark, brooding old man who hides, or sort of dwells, in the shadows of the game" "He says weird things, and asks you to do weird things, too." Sadly, this character was completely removed from the story, which surely was upsetting to a lot of hardcore GTA III fans across the globe. I don't really think you'd be surprised if I were to tell you that there is actually a lot of interesting leftovers of him still intact in the game files. In fact, this is his old creepy model, still in the game files. By the way, his model also has "LOD", meaning that he was both used in-game and in cutscenes. Now if you don't know, the game loads LOD when the player stands way too far from the actual model. Lots of games do this to prevent framerates from dropping and to keep performance smooth. I think it's worth noting that we should consider ourselves VERY lucky that Darkel's model is still present in the game files. Also, if you were to complete the game, then you could spot his name in the end credits, where it is stated that Bill Fiore was going to voice him. Or possibly that he did voice him. The same information can be found in the game manuals. Moreover, by clicking on "Harbour tunnel" in the official GTA 3 web flash, in Portland, you will see a render of Darkel as well as a strange group of Tramps, which is still presented in the final version of the game. Was this group of tramps Darkel's gang? Why were these Tramps are armed with molotov cocktails? Did he use this tunnel as a hideout? Who knows. Now you're probably asking yourselves, "What missions was Darkel involved in?" Thankfully, there is one interview where developers acually brought up one of his missions. According to this IGN intervew, "Darkel sets you out to steal an ice cream truck" "and to acquire some dynamite" "Your job is to attract as many people to the truck as possible and to set off the bomb to kill as many of them as you can!" According to the PSE2 magazine, it seems this whole event took place in the middle of the park, on a hot summer's day. So yeah, it is safe to say that Darkel was kind of a douchebag. Anyways, by looking at this pre-release screenshot we see an Ice Cream van in the "Little China Park". Unfortunately, I can't say for sure if this is where the mission actually took place, or if it's just a cool unrelated screenshot that the developers took. Despite being cut, this mission actually reappeared in the final game. Perhaps, you already know that this mission has a lot in common with El Burro's mission "I Scream, You Scream". To give you a quick recap, in this particular mission you had to find a briefcase filled with dynamite... Steal an Ice Cream Van.. Park the van here and turn the jingle ON... And as soon as Forellis got close to your van, you blew it up. Now without a doubt, this feels very... very similar to that of Darkel's mission. Now you might be wondering, "Why was this character cut from the game in the first place?" Well, thanks to the anniversary answers, we have this: "Darkel was just a crazy bum who gave you some crazy missions. They were removed a few months before the game was done and long before 9/11, because they just weren’t as good as the rest of the game, and tonally they were a little odd. He started with 5 missions and they were slowly all cut. When only one or 2 were left, they were all removed as the character just didn’t work alongside the other characters." And that's how he was slowly but surely cut from the game. As we established before, The El Burro mission "I Scream, You Scream" was the spiritual successor of Darkel's chaos. And unfortunately, this is the mission which was actually proven to be one of his cut missions. Originally, in the IGN interview I mentioned, developers described this "Ice Cream mission" as "Dark!" "Evil!" and "Gruesome!" Posing a question "When was the last time you did that in a video game?!" Which begs the question, what did the rest of the missions look like? Were they more "dark".. or more "evil".. or even more "gruesome"? Sadly, we won't ever know for sure what the developers came up with and why they decided to change their minds. If you've ever tried to Google the rest of Darkel's missions, then you've probably come across this list of his "removed" missions". Sadly, it's pretty obvious that this list is FAKE. A lot of gamers trully believe that there existed mission by the name of "Love Hurts". They all say, that the main goal of this mission was to kill Donald Love. Which could be achieved by crashing a Dodo into Love Media building. I shouldn't really be doing this, but whatever. Developers said. "The Dodo was never meant to be flown very much at all. It was just a fun thing that people then went crazy with when they figured out various bugs that let them fly it!" So... poof... busted. Yet another popular mission was considered to involve blowing up school buses full of children. So the developers commented on this by saying: "None of these missions involved blowing up buses of school children" Although admitted that it is a funny rumor! And because all of these facts we're left with just one scrapped ice cream mission, while the rest remain a mystery that only Rockstar truly knows about. And here is somemething really interesting regarding his missions. According to this intervew with Dan Houser, we have a statement that these missions were never even completed. But hold on. We are not done with this character just yet. When this game was still in early development stages, Darkel was actually somehow connected to the Rampage missions. And according to the "GameInformer" magazine, it's stated that: "The popular "Kill Frenzy" mission from the first two iteraions of GTA are missing from the part three... Kill Frenzies have been replaced with a "stinky old tramp" by the name of "Darkel". Darkel lurks in the dangerous reaches of Liberty City, and will give you missions along the lines of "kill twenty pedestrians in five minutes." For your dirty deeds Darkel will reward you with a variety of special items that only he posesses." Before we will move on, I just want to give our beloved SpooferJahk a shoutout for providing these lovely scans! Speaking of "Kill Frenzies", they're basically the same thing as rampages, with only one real difference of significance. GTA 2 and this magazine article say that your enemies on these missions are normal pedestrians. As we know, when you engage in a rampage in the final version of the game, your targets are various gang members instead. So unlike pedestrians who just run away yelling, gang members can actually take you down with the speed of bullets, what makes these rampages way more fast pace and intense. I decided to see what would happen if your enemies were pedestrians, and this was the result. In all honesty, playing the rampage minigame with just innocent pedestrians fleeing just came off as boring and unsatisfactory. Was this the main reason for why these peds were later swapped to mobsters with guns? And why did we only have five minutes if you literally could finish the mission in just a few seconds? I guess it all played out very differently than what I tried to show you. And lastly but not least, it is mentioned that for killing those innocent peds, he rewarded you with a variety of special items that only he posessed. And as you might guessed, these items all remain unknown. Moreover, as those articles suggested, these new "kill frenzies" were to be found in the dangerous reaches of the city, suggesting that Darkel was found in multiple locations around the city, just like the skull pickups that I previously mentioned. I'm very curious to figure out how this system would work. See, according to the mission sources, the skull pickup is actually refered to as "Kill Frenzy" in the native language. And thanks to some people who managed to reverse the game's code, it is now clear that the class responsible for these rampages still uses the name "Darkel" with some funcions and variables having "frenzy" in their names. If you don't know, the native language is the original GTA scripting language, which looks something like this before it gets compiled. Anyway, let's get back to his character model. If we were to compare his flash render with this model, we can easily spot some distinct differences. For one, his boots were different. And his coat seems to be a little bit different as well. You might think for yourself, well, "You know, the render looks better, SWEG'!" Well, you would be surprised, because this actually used to be his way older model. And the reason for why I belive this is the case is because it has the exact same structure as these other alpha models of some other characters. What makes his model so unique is the fact that it uses a different texturing scheme. For instance, he has 3 separate textures; one for his face, one for his bandage and one for his coat. Which is kind of odd considering that each character just has one big texture instead. Actually, there is one more character model with uses such texturing scheme. It's the alpha model of Eightball left unused in the PS2 game files. And since Eightball looks identical to his appearance in the alpha version of the game, let's say it is an alpha texturing scheme, which proofs that Darkel was scrapped a few months before the game release. By the way, in GTA III there is this fictinal Liberty City news paper by the name of "Liberty Tree". This is an issue from August, where it's said that Liberty City has been flooded with problematic Tramps. They terrorize the local citizens and after drinking the booze by the name of 'Boomshine', they go berserk, which leads to terrifying results. And as you might've gussed, this article as well as the IGN interview prepared gamers for the future game events with Darkel, however after he was cut, these articles pretty much just became obsolete. Thank you for watching this Vadim M video on "Darkel from GTA III"! My name is SWEGTA, and I hope you guy enjoyed! If you're a fan of the game "Bully", then make sure to check out my channel as I cover almost everything related to it. From beta content to commentary "Bully 2: News" and much, much more! You can find links in the video's description below! Have a good day, folks.
