The studio that created Grand Theft Auto once voted the action-adventure game “least likely to succeed” in an in-house survey of developers.
DMA, who went on to become Rockstar North, spent three-and-a-half years developing the original Grand Theft Auto before it was released on November 28, 1997.
According to Colin Macdonald, who joined DMA a few months before the launch of GTA and went on to become producer of GTA 2, “there was an informal staff survey on which of the seven titles they were working on would be the most successful and least successful. The one voted most likely not to succeed was Grand Theft Auto.”
He went on to tell the BBC that “the direction of the game wasn’t clear. It was also quite buggy – you couldn’t play it for more than a couple of minutes without it crashing, so certainly at grassroots level there wasn’t a lot of confidence in it.”
“GTA went through a lot of different iterations and was quite a troubled development, and wasn’t really regarded well for most of the time it was in production,” he added.
However, as development went on, MacDonald said that they knew they had something “special”.
“The fact that the team were playing it in their own time is a really strong indicator of that, but there are countless games that come out every year that are creatively and technically brilliant but just don’t sell particularly well, for whatever reason,” he said. “It’s been quite a surprise to see it still do so well a quarter of a century later.”
Earlier this year, Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two spoke about how it wants Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) to “set creative benchmarks for the series, our industry, and for all entertainment”.
Whilst there’s no release date for Grand Theft Auto 6, Rockstar did say back in February that the title was in “active development”.
In other news, Dr Disrespect has had his Call of Duty account banned for seven days due to the use of offensive language in Warzone 2‘s proximity chat.
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