Grand Theft Auto is one of, if not, the biggest video game titles in the industry, making billions of dollars since it was released 25 years ago. However, when the first game was being made, its creators at the time, DMA Design weren’t sure what the final game was going to be. In fact, the early concept of Grand Theft Auto involved the player as a dinosaur roaming around and destroying buildings. In an interview with BBC, Colin Macdonald, who joined DMA Design a few months before the game’s launch in 1997, talked about the early days of the franchise and how it evolved into the series it is today.
The developers at DMA Design weren’t sure GTA would be successful when it was being made. “In mid-development, there was an informal staff survey on which of the seven titles they were working on would be the most successful and least successful,” Macdonald explains. “The one voted most likely not to succeed was Grand Theft Auto.”
Macdonald says “that’s because, mid-development, the direction of the game wasn’t clear. It was also quite buggy – you couldn’t play it for more than a couple of minutes without it crashing, so certainly at grassroots level there wasn’t a lot of confidence in it.”
During development, Grand Theft Auto went through many changes due to a troubled development. Macdonald talked about the early version of the game which stemmed from a technology experiment with a dinosaur as the main character. “One of the original founding programmers at DMA, Mike Dailly, was basically doing a tech experiment as a way of showing how buildings could look in 3D from top down with a little bit of perspective. So he basically came up with a dinosaur game. You had this city that moved around in some form of 3D, but you were a dinosaur roaming around and destroying the buildings. That was what Grand Theft Auto started as.”
Dailly added cars driving around to bring the city to life. This brought on the idea of having someone driving a car instead of controlling the dinosaur. “It was called Race ‘n’ Chase for a good while. And then someone realised, ‘oh, actually we’ll try letting the player get out of the car and run around and jump in and out of other cars’. It was really only at that point it morphed into Grand Theft Auto.”
Overhauling the game from the original idea led to new issues. “You have developed code that is no longer doing what it was originally intended to do,” MacDonald says. “So there’s all sorts of problems – the game gets very buggy and crashes a lot, and the team are feeling like the whole process is completely changing and they are not doing what they originally set out to do. But actually, this process of evolving and iterating is what made it feel so dynamic.
MacDonald continues “So although it was a very frustrating process for the team, it meant they could see what really worked, iterate on it and give the game a new direction. They also had time to polish it, so they started doing things like adding skid marks and shadows and nice sound effects and the radio stations – all of those things that really brought the world to life.”
Talking about the sequel, MacDonald wanted to move the game from being set in the contemporary world. They wanted to make it a bit more futuristic which would’ve given the team more creative license with vehicles, guns, and the environments.
“In hindsight, that probably hasn’t resonated with audiences as well as the contemporary vehicles and cities,” MacDonald says. “Most of the Grand Theft Auto games have gone back to being set more or less in the present day.”
While there were issues during development, MacDonald says there was a sense within the original team that they were on to something. “We knew we had something special – the fact that the team were playing it in their own time is a really strong indicator of that – but there are countless games that come out every year that are creatively and technically brilliant but just don’t sell particularly well, for whatever reason.”
“Most people don’t hear about them – they are not quite capturing the zeitgeist of the moment – and Grand Theft Auto could easily have been another one of those,” MacDonald says.
“It’s been quite a surprise to see it still do so well a quarter of a century later.”