Members of the original DMA Design team in Dundee, 2011. From left: Lord Provost John Letford, Russell Kay, Mike Dailly, Steve Hammond, Gary Timmons, Dave Jones. Photo Steve Hammond, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Grand Theft Auto
What it took directly
- documentedGrand Theft Auto (1997) took from Race'n'Chase, a design document K. R. Hamilton wrote at DMA Design in January 1995"Race’n'Chase, as it was originally intended to be called, began life on the 25th January 1995 in a design doc authored by K. R. Hamilton." John Walker, Rock, Paper, Shotgun (March 2011), on the documents Mike Dailly posted
- documentedGrand Theft Auto (1997) took from a DMA engine that scrolled a top-down city around a moving car, which David Jones built a cops-and-robbers chase on"Programming had an engine that simulated a top-down cityscape, and centering the camera on a moving object gave it a incredible sense of speed. Jones quickly dreamed up a cops-and-robbers chase game around that dynamic" Rus McLaughlin and Lucas M. Thomas, IGN (2013)
- documentedGrand Theft Auto (the name) took from Sam and Dan Houser at BMG Interactive, who signed Race-n-Chase and renamed it"They instantly signed Race-n-Chase, and immediately changed its name." IGN (2013)
- statedGrand Theft Auto's 1997 launch publicity took from Max Clifford, the publicist BMG Interactive hired"He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved... He'd do anything to keep the profile high." Mike Dailly, to The Sunday Times (quoted by Rachel Weber, GamesIndustry.biz, October 2012)
- documentedGrand Theft Auto III's Flashback 95.6 radio station took from the Scarface soundtrack"radio station Flashback 95.6's entire GTA III playlist came straight off the Scarface soundtrack." IGN (2013)
- documentedLos Santos (Grand Theft Auto V) took from more than a hundred days of photographs and video shot in Los Angeles"the G.T.A. V team conducted more than a hundred days of research in Los Angeles, taking thousands of photographs and hours of digital video" Sam Sweet, The New Yorker (September 2013)
What it learned to do
- statedGrand Theft Auto learned from Elite, Syndicate and Mercenary, which members of the DMA team had in mind"there were definitely other people on the team who had things like Syndicate, Mercenary and Elite very much in their minds as well. That combination definitely led to the more open plan structure there is now." Gary Penn, DMA Design, to Tristan Donovan for Replay (published by Gamasutra, 2011)
- statedGrand Theft Auto (playing the criminal) learned from cops and robbers, turned around because nobody wanted to be the cop"The game was cops and robbers and then that evolved fairly quickly -- nobody wants to be the cop, it's more fun to be bad." Gary Penn, to Tristan Donovan (Gamasutra, 2011)
- documentedGrand Theft Auto learned from Body Harvest, DMA's free-roaming Nintendo 64 game where you could jump into any vehicle"You played an armed and armored soldier in a free-roaming mission to save humanity from hungry alien carnivores, able to jump into any vehicle you found." IGN (2013)
- statedLos Santos's look (Grand Theft Auto V) learned from the Los Angeles sunlight, as art director Aaron Garbut saw it"The buildings, the people, the cars, the architecture, even the smog, it all centers around the sunshine" Aaron Garbut, Rockstar art director, in an interview quoted by Sam Sweet, The New Yorker (2013)
- statedGrand Theft Auto's darker direction comes from chasing what was most fun, not controversy"We always did everything from the perspective of what's going to be the most fun. It just naturally kept pushing us down the darker direction." David Jones, to The Sunday Times (quoted by GamesIndustry.biz, 2012)
The tradition it sits in
- documentedVice City (following Grand Theft Auto III) comes from the crime films of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma and Michael Mann"They'd already pulled influences from Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Now it was Brian De Palma and Michael Mann's turn." IGN (2013)
- documentedLos Santos (Grand Theft Auto V) comes from the Los Angeles of cop dramas, heist films and music videos"Los Santos is not a real city; it is the Los Angeles of cop dramas and heist flicks and music videos, a love letter to the synthetic Los Angeles of the imagination." Sam Sweet, The New Yorker (2013) — a critic's reading of the game, not the developers' account
- inferredThe police chase in Grand Theft Auto comes from Pac-Man's ghosts"People said to me that GTA was just like Pac-Man — he eats the dots, while you drive over the dots in GTA. The police chase you like the ghosts in Pac-Man." inferred — David Jones repeated this comparison at the Develop conference in 2009, but as something people said to him, not as a design source he names
Where the whole form comes from
- documentedSam and Dan Houser learned from East Coast rap and America's growing hip-hop movement"Sam and Dan Houser were the prep school sons of a London jazz club owner, but their addiction was East Coast rap and America's growing hip-hop movement." IGN (2013)
- documentedDMA Design comes from Menace, a shooter David Jones wrote on his Commodore Amiga as a student in Scotland in the mid-1980s"that didn't stop full-time student David Jones from taking a half-done, spare time project – side-scrolling shooter Menace, written on his Commodore Amiga" IGN (2013)
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