The thing was, some play testers didn’t want to do the missions at all. Given the bad-boy nature of the game—cars to steal, pedestrians to crush—they had more fun recklessly joyriding around. Baglow, who oversaw the play testers, would politely tell them it was time to stop driving and go answer a phone for a mission, but he could sense their disappointment over being restricted from simply joyriding around.
Penn, the producer at BMG, thought the game should let players do what they wanted. “It’s a virtual space,” he fumed, “you’re allowed to do what the fuck you like!”
THE AMAZING THING about creating a video game was that you could code your own solutions out of thin air. You didn’t need to reshoot a massive scene of a movie with thousands of extras, you could just think and type. Gary Foreman, the thoughtful young programmer in charge of the technical production for BMG, came up with a solution for the mission structures on his own. There was no technical reason why the missions had to progress in a linear fashion. “Can’t we just make it so you can answer any phone?” he asked.
Why not, in other words, just let the players proceed along their own paths, at their own pace—answering a phone whenever they wanted to or simply speeding off and having fun? This wouldn’t be the first time that a game would let players freely roam in an open world or a sandbox. Games such as The Legend of Zelda offered degrees of undirected exploration. The Race ’n’ Chase team also reminisced about an old Spectrum game called Little Computer People, which let players roam a two-story house doing random chores. Yet bringing that kind of freedom to a criminal world would break down the fourth wall as nothing ever had before.
Sam knew this sort of DIY freedom was revolutionary for the medium. “The problem with other games is that when you hit a point that’s frustrating, you can’t get past it,” he once said, but in Race ’n’ Chase, “when you hit a point that’s tough, just go do something else. That’s fucking great!” Even the audio became freer. If players could drive anywhere in the cities, why not have different radio stations in their cars, too? Such as country music when you steal a truck. Late into the night, the musicians stayed up recording the different radio tracks.
Jones had his worries about creating such an open-ended game world. Games were all about having an object, a purpose, a goal—shoot the aliens, get the high score. How would gamers respond to something as unrestricted as this? He hatched an idea of how to give them some focus: setting a goal of accumulating one million points. When he looked at Race ’n’ Chase, the cars zipping around from here to there, he thought of a different model for the game: pinball. “Pinball, for me, is the ultimate,” he said. “You have two buttons, and that’s it. It’s just superb for teaching players about getting feedback and hooking players for hours.”
Race ’n’ Chase could be similar, encouraging players to rack up as many points as possible—even by running people over. Not everyone dug the increasingly untamed direction of the game, though. One programmer stubbornly insisted on continuing to play the game as a simulation—and others walked by to find him dutifully stopping at the traffic lights in the game. Yet they realized that was the beauty of what they had created. You had the freedom to do anything, good or bad.
The only limitation was your “wanted” level. If you caused enough mayhem, a cop’s face would appear on a meter at the top of the screen. Police cars would give chase if they spotted you. Commit more egregious crimes, and your wanted level increased. Now an in-game APB was put out on you. At wanted level three, police would begin to set up roadblocks. If you got busted, you got carted off to jail, and your weapons were confiscated. Yet to keep all of this from happening too frequently and ruining the game, Baglow suggested that there be Respray Shops, where you could pull in the car and get a new coat of paint.
Their living, breathing world teemed with life. DMA programmers would sit at their PCs and pull back the camera on the game, just watching cars drive on and off the screen. “The good thing about [the game],” said one coder at DMA, “is that you don’t have to go down a predetermined path. And there’s nothing as much fun as spinning a car over your friend’s head six times.”
They weren’t only running over one another, however. Baglow, DMA’s writer and PR guy, had an idea of other people they could mow down in the game. The inspiration came from his own real-life travels. Whenever he passed through London airport, he always got hassled by Hare Krishnas, urging him to be happy. “Gouranga!” they’d say, a Sanskrit expression of good fortune. Baglow hated it. Then a lightbulb went off over his head.
Back at BMG, a new build of the game arrived. King slipped it into his PC and began to play. As he tore down the road, he could see a line of small orange-robed figures moving down the street. The closer he came, the louder he could hear them chanting and drumming. Holding down his forward arrow, he careened toward them, plowing down each one as a point score floated up above them. As he smashed the last one, a bonus word flashed onscreen: “gouranga!”
“Dude!” King exclaimed, “I’m running over Hare Krishnas!” The BMG crew marveled at this wicked weird world the gang in Scotland had created. Race ’n’ Chase had come a long way from the geeky simulation that DMA had submitted a year before. It was time to give it a new name, something that captured its outlaw spirit: Grand Theft Auto.
Grim city. Aerial view. A blaring police car tore through narrow streets in pursuit of two cars. Inside the vehicles, the gangsters seemed young, dressed in black suits, white shirts, black ties, and shades. They leaned out their windows, waving guns in the air. The cars passed phone booths and restaurants, buses and pedestrians.
It looked like something out of a video game, but this was real life. Down by the docks along the river in Dundee, the cop pulled the car over. When he approached, he saw one of the blokes holding a video camera. “We’re making a promotional video for a computer game called Grand Theft Auto,” said Baglow, the diminutive DMAer with short blond hair and glasses. The get-ups and the toy guns had been inspired by Reservoir Dogs, and, as Brian Baglow and the other geeks from DMA in the cars explained, they were just making the video for fun. The cop arched his brow. Grand Theft Auto? What kind of crazy game was that?
Though the cop let the guys off, he had reason to be dubious. As Grand Theft Auto—or GTA, as the crew had begun to call it—developed, the darkly comic urban action game couldn’t be more different from the biggest title around: Tomb Raider. Released in the fall of 1996, this action adventure of swashbuckling Indiana Jane, Lara Croft, had become gaming’s greatest phenomenon in years. It milked the muscle power of the PlayStation like nothing else, with players jumping and swimming and shooting from mountains to crypts. Lara, with her big breasts and almond eyes, was eye candy personified.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time for GTA. Games were often judged by appearance alone, and compared to glitzy Tomb Raider, the top-down, 2-D racing scenes couldn’t look more outdated. The brass at BMG wanted to cut the game. Or, as Penn put it more bluntly, “they were trying to kill it every fucking month.” Jones remained defiant. “Gameplay! Gameplay! Gameplay!” he said. “Graphically, it may not be at the cutting edge, but I believe this is going to change the world.”
Luckily for Jones, he had BMG’s crew of Nerf gun–wielding players on his side—along with a new member of the BMG team, Sam’s younger brother, Dan. Fresh from studying literature at Oxford, he’d begun to compose questions for what would be a hit trivia video game, You Don’t Know Jack. Dan shared Sam’s passion for GTA and