"I think some of the team were a little shocked by the tabloid response," says original GTA dev: "We'd made a game that gamers, critics, and the people actually playing all thought was pretty bloody good"
Copy link Facebook X Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter It was 1997. The UK was on a high. The general election that year had brought about the end of a Conservative government and the beginning of what was said to be a new era. British music was thriving to the point that a fresh movement Britpop had been created, with the UK even winning the Eurovision Song Contest. JK Rowling released the first of her Harry Potter novels, The Philosopher's Stone. The phrase 'Cool Britannia' may have become rather tiresome, with The Economist saying the following year that the public had grown sick of it, but it sure encapsulated the mood of the time.
Gaming formed part of this British creative wave. WipEout was enthralling clubgoers, boys were lusting after Lara and, fresh from releasing the classic Lemmings, DMA Design was sensing a change in the way games were being perceived. Dave Jones, DMA's co-founder, felt gaming should tap into the wider world of entertainment. He wanted people with an interest in film, music, books and a broader sense of popular culture to play. More than that, DMA wanted people to forget that they were playing a game and immerse themselves into an environment instead.
This feature originally appeared in Retro Gamer magazine #100, in the run-up to GTA4's release. For more in-depth features and interviews on classic games delivered to your door or digital device, subscribe to Retro Gamer or buy an issue !
The DMA team cracked on with a city simulator. Programmer Mike Dailly produced a prototype on his 486 PC, working with an isometric viewpoint and all of the action on foot due to issues getting vehicles around the city. But when it came to actually playing this early prototype, it was deemed too slow. It didn't help that Syndicate Wars looked similar, so Dailly went back to the drawing board and created a second prototype, this time from a side-on perspective.
A short while later, Dailly spoke to John Whyte, the lead programmer of Body Harvest for the N64. Whyte had wanted to create a top-down racer but Jones wasn't interested, yet it got Dailly thinking. Adding a floor to his side-on demo, he turned his second prototype from a side-on view to a top-down perspective. Then, using the first prototype as a base, he built perspective points using cubes to produce a pseudo-3D effect. DMA's management team loved it, and the new game, entitled Race'N'Chase, was given the go-ahead.
In 1995, DMA drew up design documents for the title. Aiming "to produce a fun, addictive and fast multiplayer car racing and crashing game which uses a novel graphics method" and set in the present day, the developers had an idea for three cities, each with their own graphical style. The game was to be packed with missions. There were, the document detailed, to be pedestrians. Such bystanders could be run over by cars. Players could also get out of cars and steal others. And this would attract the attention of the police.
The initial meetings about the direction of the game were somewhat chaotic. "The only agreed direction was that we were basically writing a game that we would want to play ourselves," says lead programmer Keith Hamilton. "Everything had to be interactive. The player had to be able to drive any vehicle he could find. Nothing was to be off-limits. We wanted fun situations to present themselves just by all the elements coming together, not necessarily in ways that were specially designed."
About the only thing they could decide upon at this stage was that the top-down view was the best way forward, nixing suggestions of using full 3D from a very early stage. DMA wanted whatever game was made to be delivered over multiple platforms the PlayStation, PC and, originally, the Saturn and while it was theoretically possible to do 3D on the PC, the console versions simply wouldn't support it. "The choices were to more or less develop two different game engines, or focus on making the game as rich and deep and fun as we could on an engine that would run across all of the platforms," recalls writer Brian Baglow. "So we did that. I think it was the right decision."
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Although design documents existed, much of the game was made up on the spur of the moment. "The game evolved," explains Dailly. "It was a true 'team-designed' game." Each design decision therefore became an experiment. The 'eureka' moment came when the team thought about the player leaving their own car and getting into a different one. They realised that, because the other car wasn't really the player's, they must be a criminal, and so the infamous GTA theme was born.
"We envisaged a straight cops-and-robbers driving game," recalls Baglow. "But it went from that to a car-based crime sim and wild sandbox adventure. We initially had the player as a good guy, and it was a long way down the line before the decision to try playing as the criminal was made. And at that point, we could see that there was something in there. Something fun and unique."
As the months went by, DMA's new game, which changed its name to Grand Theft Auto mid-project, started to grow. A lot of fresh talent was hired to work on the game, resulting in a very young team.
Despite the inexperience, the ambition remained. The simulation aspects of the game continued to be important, especially for Hamilton, who felt it was crucial to create a city that the player could see in action and then enjoy interfering with. For this reason, police cars drove all the way from the police station to a crime, while ambulances motored from the hospital and contained little characters with stretchers to pick up bodies. "If you followed them, you could see that they actually went back to the hospital," says Hamilton. The team also planned to have teams of traffic light repairmen who would drive out and fix any traffic lights if you broke them. "We dropped that because it was getting a bit too anal and because players just ignored the traffic lights anyway."
The levels were designed by just three people: Stephen Banks took on San Andreas, Billy Thomson looked after Vice City, and Paul Farley was responsible for Liberty City. Farley had quit a degree in architecture and only envisaged being with DMA Design for six months while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life, and when he started on GTA it was little more than an ugly-looking and rather rough demo. Yet while it wasn't the game everyone on the team wanted to produce "I think most of us would rather have been working on one of the sexier Nintendo first-party games," says Farley those working on it soon recognised the game's potential.
"The actual level design was fairly straightforward in the most part," says Farley. "At the time I came on board there were some rough guidelines to the possibilities and limitations of the game engine. The head of art had already written down some core design considerations regarding the flow of space within the game. This helped communicate to the team some of the fundamental aims of the driving part of the game."
The team were big fans of topdown racers like Super Sprint and Micro Machines, and these games informed some of the vehicle-handling objectives. "Even from an early stage, we were looking at how to make the driving flow well and be as forgiving as possible the geometry of the levels plays a huge part in enabling this," continues Farley. "I think we did a good job of both allowing the player space to express themselves and their driving skills, while providing contrasting spaces to support gameplay focused on pedestrian play. A real difficulty was the lack of diagonal road or sidewalk tiles. I know I struggled with some aspects of Liberty City because of that limitation."
The team was given a lot of freedom on the game's direction. Remarkably, only one person on the team had ever shipped a game before, but despite that, they were handed a huge amount of responsibility and ownership over the title and, says Farley, it helped them make clear and quick decisions. Each of the three level designers took one of the city maps each.
"You can clearly see the different approaches coming through both the level design and missions across the three maps," explains Farley. And they had a laugh doing it. "Quite early on, the sense of humour in the team was becoming evident in the game. In keeping with this cheeky nature, it seemed natural to take real-life American cities as our inspiration and send them up a little. I'm sure there are kids that fly into New York for the first time and are more familiar with it as Liberty City. I hope they aren't disappointed; it's an amazing city but not quite like it's portrayed in-game."
The criminal aspects let the imagination of the team run riot. It was possible to mow down a line of Hare Krishnas to earn a 'Gouranga' bonus, for instance. "We could also use the pager and text to tell the players about things that didn't really happen, like with bomb shops and respray shops," adds Baglow. "Some cars wouldn't remap, so the idea was going to be dropped. It was suggested giving the player a message saying the plates had been changed instead. Simple, fast and it worked."
Some ideas didn't make it, however. Vehicles, characters, missions and city locations all got cut along the way. "We wanted combine harvesters to mow down pedestrians. We never quite had time for it, so never had to consider the issue of whether that might have been taking things too far," says Hamilton. Cutscenes, voiceovers and cinematic sequences were also axed, with the game having just one cut-scene per city for the main bad guys.
"We also ended up losing the original maps, which is a tragedy," continues Baglow. "We had created full maps for each town and around the border of each were adverts for local businesses, vouchers and tourist destinations, all made up and in keeping with the style and feel of each city. It's one of the few things I never managed to get a copy of or find when the company became Rockstar North. In my imagination, they were awesome. In real-life well, we may never know."
Other ideas were in the PC version but dropped for consoles due to hardware limitations. "Speaking for the PlayStation version, we had big problems with the trains mainly due to the way they were implemented on the PC. They used a lot of memory and were only used properly in a few missions, so we had to drop them. It was unfortunate, but we had to live with the realities of the situation," explains PS1 programmer Russell Kay.
According to Farley, however, the team was fearless. It wasn't scared of failure and it was open to new ideas. Some of the team even wanted missions involving burning churches but, above all, they wanted to give the player a sense of right and wrong. "The player could choose not to act in a certain way if they didn't want to. If we had included missions where you were forced to single out certain groups of people to kill or abuse based on race or religion, that would have been a step too far, and it would have devalued the player's sense of choice to the detriment of the game and its subsequent success."
One of the problems that faced the team was how best to integrate the missions. The level designers were using fairly complex tools to create fun, challenging and exciting activities for the player, but it ran as a series of challenges that were fundamentally unconnected. The game essentially ran along the lines of 'go here, steal this car, drive to this point, leave it, get on a bike, take it to this point' and so on. So once the missions were in place, it was up to Baglow to come up with the specifics of what exactly the player was doing and why.
"This 'plot' or narrative had to be delivered," he explains. "There were no voiceovers, animation or cut-scenes featuring a rich variety of protagonists. Instead we had around 120 characters on a 'pager' at the top of the screen. This was years before Twitter too! Everything had to be scaled back and written for the maximum amount of information in the smallest amount of space."
But that wasn't the only problem he faced. "The missions could be played in pretty much any order within each city, so there was no real way of doing any sort of linear plot within a single city. Putting together little self-contained missions was a definite challenge. There was a lot of allusion and implied action taking place elsewhere, just to make the writing reflect the 'living, breathing city' thing that the whole game embodied."
The non-linear mission system came later in the game's development. At first, the game had players returning to a sub-menu to select their next mission, but the level designers felt this broke the immersive nature of the game and that the front end was too boring. Coming up with the idea of spawning missions from payphones, characters, vehicles and other in-game elements was groundbreaking at the time, effectively building the level selection into the game itself, and it made a huge difference to the player's suspension of disbelief.
"I don't think the code team were initially very pleased at this because they had never designed the engine to run indefinitely," says Farley. "The new mission structure certainly created a number of new issues for them to solve, but I'm glad they did."