There, you meet his cousin Roman Bellic, who accompanies you throughout the game. You play as Niko Bellic, a criminal of European descent, who escapes his home country to set foot in Liberty City. We never thought it would end up being the number-one entertainment franchise in the world.Make your own story This opportunity to shape the outcome of your storyline gives you a sense of responsibility and satisfaction. But its longevity has been the big surprise. We just felt, well, this is what DMA does. Walking into HMV and seeing it at No 1 didn’t surprise me. But from the very start, we thought we were making a great game. The visuals weren’t great: it felt like something left over from the Commodore Amiga era. Strangely, GTA was the runt of the litter. Most of the team didn’t care about the moral issues though Keith Hamilton, the project leader, always stopped at the traffic lights, much to everyone’s amusement. I think that came from a bug: groups of pedestrians would start following one person around and we thought: “Can we use this? What sort of people walk around in a long line like that?” And we thought of Hare Krishnas. You’d probably be arrested for putting that in a game now, even though it was all very tongue in cheek.Įveryone remembers the Hare Krishnas, who’d dance along the pavement. In one mission idea, which was later cut, you had to go around burning churches. We wanted to poke fun at US culture and could do pretty much whatever we wanted, since from day one the plan was for it to be 18-rated. We’d bring in our favourite childhood shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team, and take inspiration from movies like Speed, which we referenced a lot. We had guys who were really into cars, others into heavy weaponry. We’d come in on a Monday and say: “What movies did you watch at the weekend? What music are you listening to?” That really informed the game.
Game gta 1 Pc#
We had one PC with internet access for research. It was before the days of big budgets, though, so there were no fact-finding trips to the US. These became Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City. Me and the other designers were each given a massive sheet of graph paper and told: “OK, start designing a city.” We just sat and said: “Where is this set?” We thought America, obviously, and decided we’d take the essence of Manhattan, San Francisco and Miami. They were thinking: “OK, we just need to make sure we can prevent the game from crashing for about five minutes at a time.” There was resistance from the coding team, though: they’d never envisaged a player exploring a game for two or three hours.
Game gta 1 free#
Then we had the idea of allowing the player to pick up missions by visiting phoneboxes, and it became much more free and open. And it wasn’t even a game at that point, just a prototype. I was one of three designers who got put on GTA. You should always set out to make a game you enjoy playing. When we did Lemmings, we all thought it was great – but we weren’t sure anyone else would. It needed a huge amount of memory and the console just didn’t have it.
But I think the guys who did the PlayStation version had a bigger challenge when we handed the game to them. I ranted at the team for letting it get in such a mess. We had a major fallout over car collisions, too. The buildings weren’t right, though it did have a nice feel. It was brilliant, just bombing around the city, but it was still bug-ridden and the demo was always crashing.
All the little effects, like being able to run pedestrians over, came from someone saying: “Hey, it would be cool if you could do this.” When we first got the driving part done, everyone huddled around to see it working. There were maybe seven programmers working on it. You could play as the cops or you could play as the criminals.ĭave was fascinated by the idea of just giving players the tools and letting them do what they wanted. By 1994, I was working on a game engine that evolved into something called Race and Chase. Dave Jones, its founder, took me on in 1989 and we started bringing all these young people into our Dundee HQ.