Grand Theft Auto People: How GTA Grew Into a Cultural Giant
Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto VI is due this November, reportedly at a cost above $1bn. The series began in 1997 with a Scottish studio, a top-down view and stolen cars. Its rise has taken it from pinball-inspired fun to the centre of wider culture.
Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto VI is due for release this November, a game said to have cost more than $1bn to make. It follows Grand Theft Auto V, which launched in 2013 and has sold more than 230m copies. For Grand Theft Auto people, from longtime players to those who have never held a controller, the release is a major cultural moment.
The game is expected to be the biggest video game release of all time. It has already sent rival games hunting for other release dates and sent ripples through the rest of the media.
Rockstar also revealed GTA VI in unusual fashion. Its first in-depth showing came in a Netflix special, and the launch of that reveal made Netflix's own servers shudder a little.
The series began far more modestly. DMA Design, a Scottish developer, made the first Grand Theft Auto in 1997. Players raced around a set of fake US cities, stealing cars and colliding with pedestrians, viewed from above. The tone was high-spirited, in keeping with a design inspired by pinball.
Paul Farley, one of the original game's designers, described the studio's limits in a 2015 interview. There was no budget for a research trip to the US, and only one PC in the studio had internet access. Instead, staff swapped tips on pop culture.
"We'd come in on a Monday and say: 'What movies did you watch at the weekend? What music are you listening to?'" Farley said.
Even then, the shape of the GTA experience was forming: freedom, a heightened sense of place and sharp dark humour. The stealable cars carried names such as Impaler and Mundano, echoing the Culprits, Autocrats and Fiascos parked outside hotels in Martin Amis' novel Money.
Grand Theft Auto 2 expanded on those ideas. Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001, was the first in the series to give players a 3D world to explore.
Rockstar's own style of presentation has long drawn on film. In the 2000s, the company invited UK games writers to its London office and sometimes opened with clips from classic movies rather than footage of its new game. Its ambitions, though, were already straining against those influences.
One online commentator said Amis deals in "great ugliness described with surprising beauty". The same commentator added that this certainly sounds like GTA.
