Vehicle License Plates

Licence plates are introduced in Grand Theft Auto III with the player's ability to explore in a three-dimensional environment. Licence plates in GTA III and GTA Vice City are static textures, with plates in GTA III reading LC R29 and in GTA Vice City illegible but have a Florida state plate. Licence plates are dynamic in GTA San Andreas. Each of the three major cities in San Andreas have their own plates and the plates have randomly generated numbers and letters. Some vehicles have their own custom licence plate letterings.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, licence plates differ from those in the GTA III Era. They do not have an actual letter-number combination. Every vehicle that has a licence plate has "LIBERTY CITY" in large blue capital letters. If a player zooms in with the analog sticks, or with a sniper rifle, they can see that it says "Liberty City State". These license plates are almost an exact clone of the current New York license plates, as seen here. It is possible that the plates were intended to have a letter-number combination, much like the vehicles in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but it may have been forgotten during the game's development.