Many already know the GTA series exists because an oversight made the cop cars too aggressive, and attempting to evade them was more fun than the game the devs had originally set out to make. Decades later, the creators have opened another treasure trove full of GTA secrets.
Why is GTA open world?
When originally envisioned, GTA was going to be a very linear game that allowed players to choose missions. The devs believed, however, that creating a front-end menu would’ve proven too much of a hassle, so they just made the player do the work of walking or driving up to the places where they’d begin the mission. And that’s how history was made: due to laziness.
And, if you’re a developer who painstakingly creates complex menus for players to choose missions from and your game has never sold as much as GTA, how are you feeling right now?
GTA music had a rough start
Ever since GTA 3, the series has been correctly credited with allowing millions of people from various generations to learn of and enjoy bangers from the past that they likely wouldn’t have otherwise. It did what Stranger Things did for Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill and Metallica’s Master of Puppets, but for hundreds of classics. That didn’t happen right from the start, though, as even though the game’s publisher, BMG, was also a music publisher, it didn’t allow the developers to feature their songs in the game for free, passing on an incredible chance of showing them to an entirely new audience. Sadly, the developers had to make their own music for the first two games, delaying GTA’s arrival as a music ambassador for the youths.
How GTA radio stations came to be
The original Grand Theft Auto featured different songs that played so the developers could gauge what kind of music would better fit the game, not because they immediately knew this would make the game highly memorable.
The original version of the game didn’t even intend to play the entirety of the tracks, opting instead for 30-second segments of songs. Luckily, the developers had the right idea and decided to split the songs between the various stations and keep them at full length.
Cop cars in GTA behaved more realistically than they needed to
Do you ever get the sense that cop cars in GTA just spawn a few feet ahead of you, already ready to ram you in a way that will likely also kill their driver about one second after they were born? Well, that wasn’t the reality of the original GTA, where cop cars spawned by their respective police stations, drove all the way to the player’s location, and only then rammed players in the most violent way imaginable. Spectacular effort for something nobody could ever possibly notice!
GTA traffic lights were also realistic, though who would know?
I doubt anybody would notice if GTA 6 came out and all of its traffic lights were blue and purple. GTA players are just built to ignore them, and I know damn well you know that too. That was likely heartbreaking for lead programmer Keith Hamilton, who claims he’s the only person in the world who’d actually stop at the traffic lights, due to all the work the team put into making them work.
GTA was almost a pioneer in diegetic cues
Tired of all the hand-holding modern gaming gives players through huge arrows and unmissable yellow paint? GTA came close to inspiring a future where developers would find more interesting ways of guiding player progress. The developers originally tinkered with the idea of making the cars’ indicator lights show them where to go. Neat idea, too bad this is often a game about getting your car bashed in and wrecking the lights. So, the devs scrapped it and went with a huge goddamn yellow arrow instead. Instead, it was Sony’s The Getaway that started using indicator lights as a gameplay cue, but it didn’t end up influencing many games down the line.
A lot ofGTA was designed on the go
I always thought that whenever an ambulance showed up in GTA, it was to award me with a cooler vehicle to steal for running someone over. Nope, it turns out it really was there to help the poor pedestrian get in a state worthy of getting run over again. Still, when they saw the scenario play out, they began thinking like me and even added the option of using the emergency lights to have cars move out of the way. It turns out much of the game was made with this feature-creep mentality, and I may be a more naturally bad person than the devs behind the absolute crime simulator.
Nintendo missed out on the GTA boat
Nintendo, the family-friendly video game company, actually came close to bringing GTA to the Nintendo 64 but ultimately decided to reject the project. GTA’s devs have revealed that they were actually happy about this, because they didn’t know how to get the game to play music without the CD space afforded by PlayStation’s discs. You know who wasn’t that happy? Shigeru Miyamoto, who later joked to GTA studio head exec Dave Jones, that “maybe we should have stuck with it.”
The GTA devs feared Driver
Imagine working on a humble-looking top-down game that’s likely already about to be shunned by anyone over 30 for its content, then seeing how the original PlayStation was also about to get Driver, one of the slickest-looking crime capers of all time. And they were actually right to be afraid, as Driver on the PS1 outsold GTA three to one. Still, as you might be aware, the GTA series would go on to do alright.
