Replay: The History of Video Games (59 page)

Back to the ’80s:
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
resurrects the glam of
Miami Vice
. Rockstar Games

27. The Grooviest Era Of Crime

Grand Theft Auto III
opened with a bang. The player’s nameless character is being transported to prison with two other convicts when the police convoy is attacked while crossing a bridge.
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The attackers free one prisoner before fleeing, blowing up the bridge behind them in a bright flash of white. Seconds later the player is hand
ed control. The bridge is broken in half and the burning wreckage of prisoner escort vehicles lay scattered. Only the player and the other prisoner have survived. One empty and undamaged car offers a chance to escape to freedom.

Directed by the other criminal, the player heads to a safe house in the city. The player drives past people milling around and passing traffic; up hills, under railway bridges and along darkened streets lit by the orange glow of streetlights. As Chinatown whizzes past, a squeeze of a button switches the car radio from Debbie Harry’s
Rush Rush
to Double Clef FM, which is playing
La donna è mobile
from Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera
Rigoletto
. The escape car screeches around corners, leaving behind dark tyre tracks and startled pedestrians. Soon the run-down looking red light district comes into view and then the barely noticeable back alley leading to the safe house.

Dawn breaks, bleaching the sky pink and purple. Dirty clouds hover, threatening rain. A taxi hoots its horn, piercing the snatched chatter of passing pedestrians. A train rattles along the elevated tracks with a thundering noise. A passing van runs down a man in a Hawaiian shirt and knee-length shorts before speeding off in panic. Seconds later an ambulance races into view emergency lights flashing to treat the injured man whose prone body has attracted a crowd of shocked on-lookers. Just past the dual carriageway where the hit and run took place is a large river across which lies another part of the city with a Manhattan-esque sline of skyscrapers pointing to the heavens. In the far distance a plane is descending down towards an airport that must lie beyond the skyscrapers leaving a vapour trial that cuts through the dawn sky in its wake.

This is Liberty City, the world of
Grand Theft Auto III
and what happens next is anyone’s guess. There’s a story to follow where you could seek work as a thug-for-hire but it’s not compulsory. You could steal a car and tour the city, see the sights and become a virtual tourist. Or you could grab that discarded baseball bat and prowl the streets beating passers-by to see how long it will be before the cops show up. Or drive off ramps to perform stunts with your car. Or take a ride on the train to get a better view of the city, visit a prostitute, or become a cab driver. Or maybe you will do all of this and more.

Released in October 2001 with little pre-release hype,
Grand Theft Auto III
’s three-dimensional city teemed with life and offered a sense of freedom, openness and possibility that no other game had achieved before. Many had, of course, tried before. Not least the first two
Grand Theft Auto
games.

The origins of the series date back to 1994 when Mike Dailly, a software engineer working for the research and development team at Scottish game studio DMA Design, developed a new graphics demo. The demo,
Rotator,
showed an isometric view city that could be rotated at will. “This was very fast and worked well, so the idea was to make a strategy game that could use it,” said Dailly. “
Grand Theft Auto
actually started out as a gang versus gang game. However there were problems when the team tried to implement the rendering and Bullfrog’s
Syndicate Wars
had just come out and done something very similar, so the idea was dropped.”

Dailly, however, had an alternative to hand: “I had been working on a second engine called
Dino
. This one was based on an idea I got when watching a Sega Saturn game called
Clockwork Knight
being played.”
Clockwork Knight
was a fairly unremarkable side-view platform game in the
Super Mario Bros
mould. Its visuals, however, were reminiscent of a fish-eye lens. Only the objects in the centre of the screen were seen as flat; those to the left and right of the screen’s centre appeared to curve off to the sides.

“It occurred to me that although I had a side-on engine, all I needed was to add a floor and it could be an above engine,” said Dailly. “So with sad programmer graphics I set about using the previous prototype engine as a base.”

It didn’t take long for the DMA Design team working on the prototype
Grand Theft Auto
, then known as
Race and Chase
, to embrace Dailly’s new engine. “I showed Keith Hamilton, Did ‘Oz’ Ozbourn and Dave Jones,” said Dailly.
[2]
“They decided to restart
Race and Chase
using the new engine since it allowed far more freedom. It was simply a case of me showing Dave, Oz and Keith the new demo and 30 minutes later everyone agreed to start again. It was a good meeting.”

Race and Chase
was envisaged as a cops and robbers game. Players could be the police chasing the robbers or adopt the role of the fleeing criminal hoping to lose the pursuing squad cars. It didn’t take long before the option to be the police was dropped. “Nobody wants to be the cop, they want to be bad and that evolved into
Grand Theft Auto
,” said Gary Penn, who joined the Dundee-based studio as the game’s producer halfway through its development.

The team envisaged the game’s three cities as a playground where players could go wherever they liked.
[3]
It was an idea heavily influenced by
Elite
, the open-ended 1984 space sim created by Ian Bell and David Braben. “I had worked on
Frontier: Elite II
and there were other people on the team who had
Syndicate
,
Mercenary
and
Elite
very much in their minds as well,” said Penn. “That combination definitely led to the more open structure that we condensed into, basically,
Elite
in a city. You take on jobs in a slightly different way but it’s incredibly similar structurally, it’s just a more acceptable real-world setting.”

For months, however, the
Grand Theft Auto
project teetered on the edge of abandonment hampered by unstable code, boring action and overly complex controls. “When I joined DMA it was a mess,” said Penn. “It was a mess for years, it never moved on, it never went anywhere. It was almost canned. The publisher, BMG Interactive, wanted to can it as it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was no fun at all. The core of the play was fundamentally broke and it had a broken structure as well.”

But the compelling idea of an open city to drive around was enough to keep the project alive. A renewed push to fix the game’s rickety code proved to be the turning point, allowing the team to concentrate on improving the game experience itself. Piece by piece the game came together – sometimes more by accident, than design. The way the police originally worked was just rubbish and then one day – I think it was a bug – the police suddenly became mental and aggressive because they were trying to drive through you,” said Penn. “That was an awesome moment because you got real drama where you went ‘oh my god, the police are real psycho, they are trying to ram me off the road’.”

But on its release in October 1997,
Grand Theft Auto
’s key feature - thfer of a city to roam in – went largely ignored. Instead people talked about the game’s overhead viewpoint, which was seen as a 2D relic in an era when 3D was fast becoming the norm, and the subject matter.
[4]
Egged on by the ga
me’s publicist Max Clifford,
Grand Theft Auto
was greeted with howls of outrage thanks to its embrace of criminality. Most games portrayed players as heroes regardless of their in-game actions, or at the very least victims who have been forced into carrying out criminal acts.
Grand Theft Auto
offered no such veneer of respectability. The player was an amoral crook out to rob, kill and maim for personal gain and nothing more. Politicians and players alike were shocked by DMA Design’s refusal to apply any morality to the player’s actions. One reviewer called it the “most violent piece of gaming on the PlayStation” thanks to features such as the ability to mow down whole processions of Hare Krishna for extra money. In the UK Parliament, Conservative peer Lord Campbell of Croy accused the game of setting an “alarming precedent” and of glamourising crime.

But beyond the notoriety,
Grand Theft Auto
was a rare example of an action game taking up the challenge presented by
Elite
and Will Wright’s
Sim City
: to create games that give players virtual ‘sandboxes’ to play in, where they created the narrative through their own actions and choices.

Prior to
Grand Theft Auto
, only a handful of games had managed to come anywhere close to offering players this level of freedom. Foremost among was Bethesda Softworks’ fantasy role-playing game series
The Elder Scrolls
.
The Elder Scrolls
games handed players a vast open-ended fantasy world where the main adventure was optional and covered just a fraction of what the game could offer. In effect Bethesda offered two narratives – the one created by the developers and the one defined by players within the game’s world. “Giving players’ freedom of choice was our main goal,” said Todd Howard, the executive producer of the series. “To have the game react to you and remove as many boundaries as possible to what you can do. I think players often start a new game by trying things, asking the game ‘can I do this?’ and the more the game says ‘yes’ the better.”

But by the start of the 2000s
Grand Theft Auto
was already looking outdated thanks to
Driver
, a 1999 driving game inspired by 1970s movies and TV shows such as
The Driver
and
Starsky and Hutch
.
Driver
hinged on its over-the-top car chases, but also gave players the freedom to drive around its cities as they pleased.
[5]
By comparison the same year’s the devfont color="rgb(0, 0, 0)">Grand Theft Auto II
offered little beyond that contained the first game in the series and, thanks to the lack of sales-boosting public condemnation, it sold below expectations.

For its third attempt at
Grand Theft Auto
, DMA Design tried once again to deliver on its dream of a 3D city to walk, drive and fly around. “We had tried to do a 3D city with the first one but it was definitely beyond the team’s capability at the time,” said Penn. “With
Grand Theft Auto II
we tried other 3D elements, but the risk was too high. It made more sense to build on what we’d established with the first one. In all there were three or four attempts to do a 3D one before
Grand Theft Auto III
.”

The breakthrough came from another group of DMA Design employees who had just completed work on
Space Station Silicon Valley
, a 3D platform game for the Nintendo 64.
[6]
“They were an incredibly capable team. They had just done
Space Station Silicon Valley
in 3D so they had the attitude and the ability to take the 2D game and put that in 3D,” said Penn, who worked on
Grand Theft Auto III
for its first six months of development before leaving DMA Design. “The core team were so capable I didn’t have a doubt that it would come out – it was really a case of how long it would take because it’s such an involved thing. It’s a really fucking hard game to make. It’s a really hard game to make in 2D and really, really hard to make in 3D. So that the third one ever came out really impressed me.”