When GTA VI hits stores worldwide on May 26 next year, no one will talk about anything else for weeks. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good or bad, or if it deserves the price it will cost: it’s one of those events that marks a before and after in the history of video games, like GTA V in 2013. However, it almost never existed. Not because its development was excessively complex, but because, originally, the first Grand Theft Auto was made purely by chance.
Police, thieves, and bugs
Initially, not even Rockstar was part of the GTA story: the ones responsible for making the first game were DMA Design (which now, indeed, is Rockstar North, but that’s another story), a studio that had been making video games since 1989 and had their first major success with Lemmings, which they ported to as many consoles and computers as possible. From then on, they focused on making versions and sequels of their flagship game until the title had run its course. It was then, in the mid-90s, that they decided it was time to do something different.
Why not try a game where you could choose to be a police officer chasing a criminal or a criminal being chased by police, through races in three more or less open cities? It didn’t sound bad, did it? DMA set out to create Race’n’chase, where you could participate in illegal races in the style of Fast & Furious. However, they had a problem: it wasn’t just that you couldn’t do all kinds of missions (they were all the same), but also that the chases were… boring. Imagine the idea of creating a racing video game and having testers tell you it’s not fun. At least, until they found a bug that changed everything.
Suddenly, one day, the testers found that the cops and robbers game they had to endure every day had become… Fun! Of course, not on purpose: suddenly, the cops were no longer chasing you to make you stop, but were hitting you on the sides, speeding towards you, and causing chaos in the city just to stop you. Somehow, the algorithm got it wrong, believing that its true target was not a few centimeters from the rival car, but inside the rival car. As a result, they were constantly attacking, making it so that no one was friendly in the game anymore, and also changing its entire reason for being.
Dan and Sam Houser, from BMG Interactive, ended up buying the rights to Race’n’chase as distributors and turned it into Grand Theft Auto. The rest, as they say, is history, more or less: the game grew in every way, they set aside the option of being the police (“it’s more fun to be bad,” they commented) and, when it was released in 1997, it had to face a wave of negative comments that wanted to ban it. It didn’t matter: the seed was planted and by 2001 they had sold 6 million units worldwide. A huge success for the time, indeed. It even managed to get a version for Game Boy Advance!
Obviously, a sequel was immediately approved: in 1999 DMA continued the saga, but this time they were published not by BMG, but by a new distributor founded by the Housers, who, after selling their company to Take Two, founded their own, Rockstar Games (maybe that sounds familiar). Back then, their business was basically based on GTA and other minor games like Earthworm Jim 3D and Monster Truck Madness 64. Fortunately, as we know, their future looked very, very bright, and with no other Race’n’chase in sight.