James Delahunty
7 Feb 2011 3:44
Grand Theft Auto developer Gary Penn told Gamasutra about how the original Grand Theft Auto video game title was almost canned during development.
The GTA series has been one of the biggest stories of the video games industry so far, with the Grand Theft Auto IV title selling a huge 17 million copies within two years of its commercial release. Earlier versions of the title also had strong sales across gaming platforms over the past decade.
All of that came very close to never happening. In fact, it was something that was then considered a kind of "bug" in the game that convinced the developers to continue with it and set its tone.
"It never really felt like it was going anywhere. It was almost canned. The publisher, BMG Interactive, wanted to can it," Penn said. "There are probably two key things it fell down on; two critical things. One of them is stability, which is a really boring one, but it crashed all the f---ing time. So even if you did get something in the game, you couldn't really test it."
Penn explained that the other key problem with the original Grand Theft Auto was the vehicle component of the game. "There was a point in it where you used to have a button for opening the doors, and it was just rubbish," he said. "I can't remember if this is true because we used to joke that you even had to start the engine. It was awful; it was too sim-y."
One day while testing the project, the police characters in the game began to behave erratically, and this amused and inspired the developers to keep going with it.
"Then one day, I think it was a bug, the police suddenly became mental and aggressive, and that was an awesome moment because suddenly the real drama where, "Oh my God, the police are psycho...they're trying to ram me off the road."
The original Grand Theft Auto title is available for free.