Before Liberty City Had Skyscrapers: The Original Grand Theft Auto

It is easy to forget how strange Grand Theft Auto looked when it arrived in late 1997. Long before the franchise became shorthand for blockbuster budgets and cultural argument, it was a top-down, sprite-and-polygon oddity from DMA Design, a studio in Dundee, Scotland, that had made its name with Lemmings in 1991. A game about cute suicidal rodents was, on paper, an unlikely ancestor for one of the most notorious series in entertainment. That is precisely why the origin story is worth telling properly.

The project began life under the working title Race’n’Chase, and the initial idea was roughly what the name implies: you played a police officer chasing criminals through a city. The story most often told about its development is that the chase itself was the fun part, and that being the one being chased was more fun than doing the chasing. Somewhere in that realisation, the game turned around. The player became the criminal and the police became the obstacle. It is a small pivot that shaped everything that followed.

Gary Penn, who worked on the game’s design, has compared the finished product to Elite set inside a city, and the comparison holds up better than it first sounds. Like David Braben and Ian Bell’s classic, Grand Theft Auto is about freedom inside a set of loose rules. You take jobs when a payphone rings, you decide how to get to the objective, and you decide how much trouble you are willing to cause on the way. Your score climbs with your recklessness, and the police respond in kind. The famous chaos is less a scripted feature than the result of a small number of systems colliding.

The game gave you three cities, each modelled loosely on a real one: Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, echoing New York, San Francisco and Miami respectively. The names would return again and again over the next two decades, which is a little like finding out that a famous novelist’s earliest sketchbook already contained the map of her later universe.

Publishing rights and marketing matter here too. In Europe the game came out through BMG Interactive, and it is well documented that the publicist Max Clifford was brought in to help stoke controversy around it. Whatever one thinks of that strategy, it worked: the outrage cycle around a game about stealing cars became part of its identity before most people had played it. The modern pattern of a game’s reputation running ahead of its actual content starts here, and the series would go on to rely on it, knowingly or otherwise.

Revisiting it now, the surprise is not the violence, which is cartoonish at this scale and viewing angle. It is the difficulty. The original asks for score targets, tight driving on cramped roads with heavy vehicles, and a tolerance for restarts that modern open-world games have largely trained out of us. It is a game with real friction, and I think that makes it more interesting than its reputation suggests, not less.

The 1997 game is also a reminder that landmark series often begin as compromises. Nobody set out to define a genre. A small team had a driving game, discovered that the police were more entertaining as adversaries than as protagonists, and followed the fun. If you have never played it, treat it as an archaeological dig rather than a nostalgia trip: the tools are crude, but you can see every one of the later ideas being sharpened in the dirt.