A former producer at British games studio DMA Design, now known as Rockstar North, recalls a period during the originalGrand Theft Auto’s development in which internal confidence in the title was low. Due to varying developmental issues, studio staff did not see much potential in the title and could not have predicted thatGrand Theft Autowould become one of the most successful gaming franchises of all time.
Colin MacDonald is a game industry veteran who joined the team at DMA Design in 1997 during the months leading up to the release ofGrand Theft Auto, though it was not yet known by that name. The earliest mainline entries in theGrand Theft Autoseries were top-down experiences that had prototypical versions of the series' trademark open-world framing. This was years before the franchise would reach high levels of acclaim in the early 2000s withgenre-defining titles likeGrand Theft Auto: Vice City,Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, andGrand Theft Auto 3.
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MacDonald would become a producer onGrand Theft Auto 2and was able to witness the development of the series' earliest iterations. In a recent interview with BBC, MacDonald remarked that around halfway through development of the first game, an informal staff survey was conducted where members were asked which of the games in development at the time they thought would be most and least successful. Of the seven games in development,Grand Theft Autowas voted least likely to succeed, an ironic statement given that in the 25 years since the game’s release,Grand Theft Auto’s massive successhas made it universally recognizable.
Colin MacDonald clarified that during development, the idea of whatGrand Theft Autowas supposed to be was not yet 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," the developer said during the interview. The game would receive a number of design overhauls during development with the introduction of series staples like police encounters, vehicle gameplay, and the first in the line oficonicGrand Theft Autocriminal characters. When the game launched in 1997, it would become the blueprint for the open-world sandboxGrand Theft Autogames that are still played and celebrated today.
Grand Theft Autohas earned the reputation of being the gold standard of the sandbox genre, but the earliest years of the series are notably humbler than the blockbuster productions of later titles. The amount of success that would spawn from the developers trying different ideas led to them striking gold. Had they given up on the project halfway, the landscape of modern gaming would have been a different story entirely.Grand Theft Autois now a household name that has stood the test of time in gaming culture, and withGrand Theft Auto 6confirmed to be in the works, it is a reputation that is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
