Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (42 page)

Since the start of
Grand Theft Auto
’s development, David Jones had known that his game was a technological stopgap. ‘Everything was going 3D and we were
still last-generation in terms of technical ability,’ he says. ‘But we enjoyed playing it so much that the gameplay would make up for the 3D that some of the other games were
showing.’ There was an implication behind DMA’s trade-off. If the processing power had been fast enough, if the graphics had been advanced enough, then they
would have made
Grand Theft Auto
in immersive 3D. The player would have seen the streets as their character did, from the car seat or wandering the pavement. But that technology simply
wasn’t ready. On the PlayStation, most driving games reached the limit of the hardware by streaming a single racing track towards the player. Showing the matrix of roads and buildings needed
for a city seemed impossible for this generation of consoles.

Then, in 1999, a few months before
GTA 2
was released, Martin Edmondson’s company Reflections released a PlayStation game called
Driver
. It had been in the planning
stages for some time while his other franchise was in development. ‘I wanted to get started on
Driver
immediately after finishing
Destruction Derby
, but Psygnosis wanted a
sequel,’ says Edmondson. ‘We had to build that first.’ That delay might have given
Grand Theft Auto
’s top-down viewpoint a vital window of plausibility, because
when
Driver
finally arrived, it delivered a fully realised 3D playground that
GTA
players would have yearned for.

Driver
gave the player the free run of San Francisco. They were locked in their car, and the street map had shrunk, but the fully 3D city, and the freedom to throw a car over its hills
and around its corners, had arrived. And it had arrived in style; the game used seventies muscle cars with squashy, bouncy suspension. Fenders crumpled as collisions piled on, and when the player
violated traffic laws, which was often, the police pursued them with reckless abandon. The game even had a ‘Director’ mode, so that gamers could replay their finest stunts and
crashes.

Edmondson’s influences had been motor sport and car-chase movies. As a youth he hacked his video player into pausing
The French Connection
so that he could marvel at the cars as
they weaved through traffic and pulled off outrageous manoeuvres. He packed the same adrenaline and skill into his game: unlike
GTA
, at its heart
Driver
was about car chases
rather than crime. And it was bloodless,
too.
Driver
’s pedestrians always managed to jump out of the way of oncoming cars.

It was a prodigious achievement, and also an inspiration. Many gamers, especially those with PlayStations, had found their enjoyment of
Grand Theft Auto
frustrated by its primitive,
sometimes obscure, appearance. If
Grand Theft Auto
’s gameplay could take place in
Driver
’s city, it could unlock incredible experiences.

Driver
was the first free-roaming driving game of its kind, but Edmondson is realistic about the idea’s novelty. ‘Had we not released
Driver
ourselves, someone else
would have done something similar,’ he says.

And indeed DMA would. Twice.

Computer game development is volatile, and even in the glow of
Grand Theft Auto
’s sales, DMA, which had now opened an Edinburgh office too, found itself
overstretched and resorting to desperate measures. ‘DMA had other projects that were not successful and that were burning a lot of money,’ says Hamilton. ‘My understanding of the
situation was that Dave basically rescued the company by selling the rights to
GTA
to BMG, for enough money to keep the company going in its own right. It was a massive mistake when you
look back on it, one that would be worth billions eventually. But we didn’t know that at the time.’

Sam Houser rarely gives interviews, but every account of him suggests that when he is passionate about a subject, he is a juggernaut of a personality. In the midst of
GTA 2
’s
development, Houser managed to persuade Take Two to buy BMG Interactive, and they appointed him vice president in charge of both the UK and the US operations. Since the subsidiary could no longer
be called BMG Interactive, and Houser wanted to keep it distinct from Take Two, a new name was chosen, which would reflect the attitude of Houser’s new company: Rockstar Games.
Grand
Theft Auto
was Rockstar’s premier IP, and when Houser chose to live in New York, the centre of gravity for the franchise that BMG had acquired from DMA moved with him.

Back in Dundee, Jones was struggling with another setback. Gremlin Graphics had sold itself to Infogrames, a rather conservative French publisher. Infogrames was
unhappy about owning
Grand Theft Auto
in any form, not wishing to hold onto DMA Design for long, and in Rockstar they found a willing buyer. Keen to ensure that there were no loose ends to
its ownership of
Grand Theft Auto
, Rockstar made Infogrames an offer. By late 2000, the IP and its developers had been reunited, and Jones found his former company and his biggest title
owned and controlled overseas by an outfit he didn’t want to work with.

‘I never really saw eye to eye with Take Two, to be honest,’ says Jones, ‘so I had to make a decision at that point. Did I then want to become part of Take Two and stay with
GTA
? Or was it time to go and do something else?’ He decided to try something new.

Jones’s decision may have been affected by another wrinkle in DMA’s fortunes. The whole company agreed that a
Driver-
style
Grand Theft Auto
game was the next stage
for the franchise, yet even within DMA there was a split. ‘There were two projects going on after
GTA 2
,’ says Hamilton. ‘There was “
GTA 2 and a
half
”, where we were taking the
GTA 2
engine, making it in 3D, and setting the game in 1980s Miami. At the same time
GTA III
was underway, but being developed in the
Edinburgh office, mostly by the team who had previously worked on
Body Harvest
.’

The new technology, and DMA’s geographical split, had resurrected the inter-team rivalry from the era of of
Race ’n’ Chase
’s inception. And Take Two’s
buyout only seemed to heighten the division. ‘We thought this was Sam rescuing us,’ says Hamilton, but it quickly became apparent the
Body Harvest
team in the Edinburgh office
were being favoured with the ‘real’
Grand Theft Auto
sequel.

Dailly, Hamilton and their colleagues were considering breaking away to form their own development company, when Jones approached them with an offer. He had secured funding for a new company in
Dundee, would they like to join? ‘It was a case of choosing between Dave and Take Two,’ says Hamilton. ‘And our loyalty
was much more with Dave. The day
after we left, they shut down the Dundee office and laid everybody else off, or moved them to Edinburgh.’

Even though their departure was their choice, it had felt like a necessary, rather than joyful, end to their careers at DMA. ‘It was a slightly acrimonious split,’ says Hamilton.
‘We were annoyed that the game had been given to this other team, most of whom had had nothing to do with the first two versions of it.’ Within a couple of years, DMA’s Edinburgh
office, by then one of the most respected developers in the world, had been renamed Rockstar North. And the original DMA, the have-a-go Dundee start-up that had created
Lemmings
and
Grand Theft Auto
, had entirely dissolved away.

Grand Theft Auto III,
published by Rockstar Games in New York and developed by DMA Design in Edinburgh, became the defining title of the PlayStation 2. It had a quiet
launch. As big a PR splash as the first
Grand Theft Auto
games had made, their sales had been respectable rather than phenomenal, and modest things were expected from the latest
sequel.

But once in the hands of critics,
GTA III
ascended to greatness. By the end of the PlayStation 2’s life, it had secured the highest aggregate review score of any of the
platform’s titles. Despite only going on sale in the last two months of 2001, it became the bestselling game of the year in the US, and the following year its sales were beaten only by its
sequel. It almost certainly helped console sales and it may even have reinforced the PlayStation’s victory over the rival Xbox, despite the game eventually being released for both. Around the
world,
GTA III
has sold at least fifteen million copies. It was a breakout, suddenly mainstream game, but it had still been produced by a core team of no more than thirty, split between
Edinburgh and New York. In the decade since its release, it has been repeatedly cited by the gaming press as one of the most influential games of all time.

From Edinburgh, the promise of
Grand Theft Auto
relocated to a 3D world had been delivered. The extra dimension added a new level
of intensity to the feeling
of immersion. A sandbox, free-roaming game viewed from a third-person perspective, it shone with golden gameplay moments, great and small. A building seen on a distant horizon, which in any other
game might have been no more than scenery, was a real, explorable part of
GTA III
’s world. There was the simple pleasure of stealing a car and smashing it around until it caught
fire, then bailing out seconds before it blew up, knowing that if it exploded near other cars, they would catch fire too, starting a chain reaction down the street. Police chases were thrilling and
quite unpredictable – as they fled, players might discover hidden alleyways, or even boost their car onto the elevated railway while their pursuers floundered beneath them.

And those were merely the idle pastimes between missions. Improvisation was encouraged throughout, even in the more structured parts of the game. A target’s getaway could be hindered by
stealing a truck and parking it across their exit. A thug in a pursuing vehicle could be outmanoeuvred at a dockside so that they crashed into the sea. Enemies could be taken out by planting car
bombs, sitting in wait with a sniper rifle, or simply ramming them off the road. The 3D graphics were decent, only a step below the best on the console and far more ambitious, but the execution of
the gameplay was outstanding. When the game’s defenders argued that
GTA III
’s violence was part of its art, it’s this gameplay that they meant: recreational anarchy and
inventive destruction were deeply embedded in its genes.

The New York office added a fundamental character to the game. Sam Houser had brought over his brother Dan and some London colleagues to form his Rockstar team. They were gamers but not coders,
and their task was to enrich the world of
Grand Theft Auto
with generous helpings of cultural kleptomania. Sam and Dan Houser had an obsessive regard for Americana, but an outsider’s
freshness – and detached cynicism followed close behind.

GTA III
was delivered on DVD, and with it came the capacity to store a city’s worth of personality. The setting was Liberty City, the
first location from
the original game, and now a parody of New York. Rockstar filled this metropolis with all the noises, sights and characters of the team’s adopted home, but filtered through a sceptic’s
lens. They licensed music for eight radio stations that gamers could hear when they entered a car, enough that flicking through channels would come naturally. And with the radio stations came added
personality. The Housers and the team wrote hours of dialogue for adverts and talk radio, all sharply satirical of the culture they inhabited. ‘The great thing about America is that you can
sue anybody for just about anything, and probably win! Or at least get a settlement,’ ran one radio advert for a Liberty City law firm. Characters, or rather broad caricatures, were invented
as mission givers, and actors had their movements recorded to bring them to life.

Despite a middling budget, the Housers and their colleagues found ways to make Liberty City appear slickly professional. Actors and audio producers were hired and a ‘motion capture’
studio found to transfer the actors’ movements to their virtual counterparts. These were jobs that felt like movie production: securing song licences, booking talent. And the dialogue
writing, very much Dan Houser’s area, cemented the city’s character.

The two teams were thousands of miles apart, but their contributions formed a consistent, seamless whole – the licentious city and its scabrous media veneer meshed together with one
personality. But with it came the first sense of dilution: there was plenty of British talent behind the game, but it wasn’t a Scottish project any more. The publishing and production side
had wilfully, determinedly emigrated. And that was the half that gave the game its voice.

‘When
GTA III
came out, it was galling,’ says Keith Hamilton. ‘Lots of people became millionaires out of it. And I didn’t, and neither did
quite a few of the other guys on the original team.’ The former employees of DMA Dundee watched from a distance as the game became an unrivalled phenomenon. And it didn’t escape their
notice that the setting of the abandoned ‘
GTA 2 and a half
’, 1980s Miami, shared very
similar themes to that of
GTA III
’s follow-up,
GTA: Vice City
. For the young team who had started their games careers on
Grand Theft Auto
, such alienation from their creation was a trial, but older hands found comfort in a
longer perspective. ‘
GTA
1 and 2 were big to be sure,’ says Mike Dailly, ‘but at the time they weren’t as big as
Lemmings
had been.’ Hamilton is
sanguine about it now. ‘So be it, that’s what happens. You take your decisions at the time – there’s no point in regretting it.’

David Jones’ new company, grown from the ashes of DMA Dundee, was called Realtime Worlds. It produced what Hamilton calls the ‘real sequel’ to
GTA 2
: an urban
superhero game called
Crackdown
. It was a long time coming, eventually arriving for the Xbox 360 in 2007, a generation later even than the PlayStation 2. But when at last it did, it won
them a BAFTA. The team wore their kilts to collect it.