Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive
After a 13-year wait, two delays, and several high-profile leaks, the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 is fast approaching.
The next chapter in the nearly 30-year-old series, where players explore open worlds and break the law, has created an extraordinary level of anticipation.
And with developer Rockstar Games keeping their biggest release yet, tightly under wraps, even the people who helped bring the original to life aren’t getting special treatment.
“We’re all waiting to see what they’ve done,” Dave Jones, GTA’s co-creator, tells me, sitting alongside the original game’s writer and publicist, Brian Baglow.
Have either of them been able to play the new game ahead of launch?
Baglow shakes his head. He’s not complaining, though. “I’ve got the pre-order,” he says.
The original Grand Theft Auto was released in 1997 in Dundee, Scotland by DMA Design, a relatively small team, at least judging by later games’ standards.
Following its success with puzzle game Lemmings, the studio was toying around with the idea of making a racing game, initially called Race’n’Chase.
Sitting in the state-of-the-art computer lab at Dundee’s Abertay University decades on, Jones tells me the developers still felt they had to bring something new to the table.
“At DMA, we always wanted to do something different,” he says. “What was the unique spin we could put on it?”
Part of the answer, he said, came in what feels like a premise gamers take for granted now – “just getting out of the car”.
He says the idea of being able to not only drive but switch and steal cars, running about on foot as you did so, meant “all of a sudden you had this interesting mix of gaming coming together”.
DMA Design / Rockstar Games
‘More fun’ playing the bad guy
The team envisioned a game, Jones says, where you could play as both a criminal and a police officer.
But he quickly reconsidered the second option, as it would require players to behave “by the book”.
“At some point we just said, you know what, it’s way more fun playing the bad guy, so that’s what the game was about,” he adds.
Despite some of these novel approaches to the game’s design, Jones says it was a “slow burn” in sales compared with Lemmings – partly because you had to “play it to get it”.
“For the whole of the year that GTA came out, it just kept going and selling and selling,” says Baglow.
“And we reckoned it was the word of mouth. The people who had played it going, oh my God, have you played this game?”
Its themes of criminality and violence sparked controversy – leading to debates in the UK Parliament and calls to ban the game. Yet it later transpired much of that was generated by the game’s own publisher, BMG Interactive, as a viral marketing stunt.
“We just did things that we felt were fun,” says Jones. “We never at any point kind of thought, should we do that? Is it controversial? We never thought that way.”
Although relatively basic in appearance, with its top-down 2D view and more arcade-like graphics, the original game forged the blueprint for the series’ signature satire still seen in much later, more advanced GTAs today.
Despite being set in an exaggerated version of American cities, its Scottishness could still be found in its humour and its outsider perspective, says Guardian video games editor Keza MacDonald.
“It’s a deeply satirical game,” she says. “It really takes aim at the hyper-individualist, hyper-capitalist nature of the US.”
Partly out of necessity due to their comparatively low budget and the cost of real-world licenses, the team came up with cheeky brand names and fake radio stations players could listen to while driving around and causing mayhem.
Though some of these choices were made out of limitations, Baglow says the world-building is the element he’s most proud of from the original, which is still a big part of what makes a title feel like GTA.
“It’s the business names, it’s the radio stations, it’s the lyrics, it’s the DJs,” he says.
“Every part of that is making you believe that this environment you’re in is a big cohesive whole.”
Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive
When GTA V launched in 2013, it made $1bn (£760m) in just three days – faster than any entertainment product had achieved at the time.
The series evolved into a cultural reference point itself – something people recognised, understood and even referenced outside gaming.
“I’ve seen movies where someone says ‘don’t go all GTA on me’… it was just surreal,” says Jones.
MacDonald, joining me in Glasgow’s gaming cafe, RCade, tells me there’s an argument now that while earlier GTAs “took a lot” from the big screen, films are now “probably more influenced by GTA” than the other way round.
She says later titles in the series have a cinematic feel, but also reflect the distinct identity it has forged for itself.
As for why Jones believes the game has become such a cultural phenomenon, he says it’s the simple fact that it’s “based on real life”.
“It’s not like a lot of games like sci-fi or adventure or fantasy,” he says. “There’s nothing you have to learn about it, as long as you know a city and driving.”
GTA 6 is expected to surpass its predecessor on every level, not only in scale and scope, but also in revenue.
Already, both PlayStation and Xbox, the two platforms the game is initially releasing on, have said the game has become the most pre-ordered title in their digital stores’ history.
This may be partly down to its huge size (212GB), meaning many are pre-ordering to “pre-load” the game, ready to play it immediately at launch rather than waiting to download it.
“Everyone is extremely excited for this,” says MacDonald.
“It’s hoping to be a shot in the arm for the general games industry, but also every player is looking to see what Rockstar’s been doing for all this time.
“It’s very rare that we have this one massive game that everybody’s going to be, if not playing, then certainly interested in.”
Do Jones and Baglow ever wish they were still working on the game now, given the huge amount of global attention focused on it?
“I think everybody loves having their time on it, for one, two, three versions,” Jones says.
“But eventually you want to go off and do other things as well.”
Baglow adds that watching “the rest of the world fall in love with the game over the last 29 years has just been joyful”.
“It means so much to so many people – it’s been fantastic.”
