Everyone was ‘pulling in a different direction’, recounts producer Gary Penn. It ”made no sense, and it kept breaking,” with the US trying to kill the project every week.
The original Grand Theft Auto, in all its top-down loveliness, released for PC and PSOne in 1997. It almost didn’t make it through production from an inexperienced dev team.
”The writers were driving at one way. The level designers were driving at another way. They weren’t meeting in the middle,” producer and creative director Gary Penn told The Guardian. ”So you ended up with something that read badly, that made no sense, and it kept breaking.”
”The milestones they were meant to uphold didn’t really materialise,” he said. ”We’d have conference calls at least once a week with the US. They wanted to kill it every week. Every week they wanted to kill this game, and we’d have to argue to try and keep it going, because we had some faith.”
”Anarchic almost makes it sound sexier than it really ought to be. It was just messy.”
Penn’s arrival at the Scottish studio meant that the project could finally start taking a coherent shape. Only one developer at the then DMA Design actually had experience in getting a game completed.
”It was like trying to nail jelly to kittens. Eventually there were enough hands to hold this thing together, but please nobody move, because this thing is going to fall apart. That’s what it felt like right at the end. It was like, we’d just got to put this out now because if we don’t it’s just going to break again and we’ve lost it forever.”
Today the Grand Theft Auto franchise is worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, with Grand Theft Auto V reportedly costing around £170 million to make and market. Analysts believe it will clear over 25 million copies within 12 months, bringing over £1 billion in revenue. Not bad for an ‘anarchic mess’ from a bunch of amateurs.
Our review of Grand Theft Auto V will be available soon; stay tuned. Times sure have changed…
