GTA nearly got cancelled, and a police bug saved it
It started in 1995 as a game called Race'n'Chase. It crashed constantly, the driving was bad, the publisher wanted out. Then the cops started ramming people.
By Wes Calloway
The biggest series in games almost didn't happen. The first Grand Theft Auto started at DMA Design in Dundee in April 1995 as a top-down driving game called Race'n'Chase, and for a long stretch it was a mess.
A game that didn't work
Gary Penn, who worked on it, told the author Tristan Donovan about it years later for his book Replay. The game crashed so often the team couldn't properly test anything, and the car handling was bad, which is a problem when your game's mostly driving. The people overseeing it at the publisher, BMG Interactive, wanted to cancel it because it didn't look like it was going anywhere.
Then the cops broke
What turned it round was a bug. According to Penn, "the police suddenly became mental and aggressive", basically trying to drive straight through you instead of politely chasing. On paper that's broken AI. In practice it was the most fun anybody'd had playing the thing.
So they kept it. Instead of a racing game where police show up, it became a game about causing chaos and getting chased for it. Penn's been careful to say he thinks it was a bug, so take the exact cause with a little salt, but everyone involved agrees the aggressive cops are what made it click.
From there to here
Grand Theft Auto came out in Europe on 28 November 1997 and caused a huge fuss, which only helped it sell. DMA Design later became Rockstar North, the studio making GTA 6 today, and it's still in Scotland.
There's a nice line from that bug to the new game, too. GTA 6's whole pitch on the police side is that they're smarter now: they build a case against you from your face, your car and your clothes instead of just counting stars. The series started because the cops were dumb and furious. Thirty years on, Rockstar's spent eight of them making the cops clever.
It's one of those stories that sounds made up and isn't. If you've got a few minutes, our full story of how GTA 6 got made picks up where this one leaves off.
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