‘How the hell did we ever get away with it?’
In a video posted on The Guardian, DMA Design recounts the troubled development of the original Grand Theft Auto. After hearing first-hand from the game’s creators, it seems like nothing short of a miracle that it was finished, to say nothing of the impact it would go on to have.
“The writers were kind of driving at one way. The level designers were driving at another. And they weren’t meeting in the middle,” said creative director and producer Gary Penn. “So you were ending up with something that read badly, that made no sense, and that kept breaking.
“We would have conference calls every week — at least once a week — with the US. They wanted to kill it every week … and we’d have to kind of argue to keep it going because we had some faith.”
Penn summed up the development as being “like trying to nail jelly to kittens.”
The making of Grand Theft Auto: ‘Like nailing jelly to kittens’ [The Guardian]
