The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Grand Theft Auto at 25 – hard drive to success
Drinking pints in Dundee’s Ascot Bar after a Chinese meal at the nearby Mandarin Garden, the DMA Design team felt a sense of relief rather than celebration at the Grand Theft Auto wrap party.
They did not have high hopes for the global sensation before its release 25 years ago on November 28 1997, with GTA voted the least likely of DMA games in development to be a hit.
Producer Colin Macdonald, 48, said: “There was little indication GTA would be successful.”
DMA Design had been established a decade before by David Jones, who hired former classmates Mike Dailly, Steve Hammond and Russell Kay.
The firm started with shoot ’em ups before creating Lemmings, one of the biggest games of the 90s and a bona fide classic.
It allowed the young Dundonians to invest time and money – and roll out Grand Theft Auto.
Macdonald, who came on board shortly before GTA1’S release, said the gun-slinging game that whipped up moral panic in the House of Lords was originally about a dinosaur on the rampage.
He told The Courier: “We knew it was a really fun game – normally by the time you finish working on a game you never want to play it again.
“But a lot of the team were still choosing to play it multi-player in their own time at lunch, which is always a good sign.
“Many games though were moving to 3D and we were worried that just being fun wasn’t enough to overcome the inevitable negativity that came with still being 2D.
“Earlier in 1997 there had been an informal vote of which of DMA’S games currently in development was most likely to be a hit and which was most likely to fail.
“GTA had a difficult development, and even three years into its three and a half-year development it was still unfocused, unpolished, and so buggy it was borderline unplayable.
“So very few people thought much of it – and it was voted least likely to succeed of the seven games.”
He added: “The original GTA started out as a dinosaur game, with the player controlling a dinosaur that rampaged through a top-down city.
“Cars were added to bring the city to life, and when someone decided to try making the cars driveable, they found that to be more fun than being the dinosaur.
“Initially the game was focused more on the driving, with a working title of Race’n’chase, before evolving again with the ability to get in and out of cars, and turning into Grand Theft Auto.”
Macdonald said: “GTA was unique in being not only an open-world game, where players didn’t have to follow a linear path to progress but also in that the ‘distractions’ were often more fun because they took the form of whatever people wanted them to be.
“But it wasn’t an immediate hit – it was a slow burn, as word of it spread.”
GTA courted controversy before it was even on the shelves thanks to a PR frenzy orchestrated by disgraced publicist Max Clifford, hired by DMA’S publisher BMG Interactive.
Lord Campbell of Croy expressed outrage in the House of Lords over the game’s “thefts of cars, joyriding, hit-and-run accidents and police chases”.
GTA was then banned in Brazil in 1998 but the controversy and heated protest simply made the game nearly irresistible.
Former Monifieth High School pupil Macdonald, who now works works with several Scottish games and tech firms, said: “Although we weren’t involved in the marketing, we were aware that the controversy was actively courted.
“Now-disgraced publicist Max Clifford was involved, and when there were stories about a ram-raid on a warehouse leading to the theft of thousands of copies of the game, we all just assumed he was behind it in order to generate another headline.”