Grand Theft Auto Was Once Voted Least Likely to Succeed by Its Own Studio
Grand Theft Auto V was a historic launch for Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, but some GTA series creators weren't always too optimistic regarding its future — once regarding it as "most likely not to succeed."
In an interview with BBC 5, GTA 2 producer Colin Macdonald described the early years of working at DMA Design, now Rockstar North, and how GTA's first game back in 1997 didn't have the most favorable outlook. At the time, Macdonald said they were working on seven projects, and a DMA staff survey showed which games the studio felt would be the most and least successful.
"The one voted most likely not to succeed was Grand Theft Auto," said Macdonald. "That's because, mid-development, 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 the grassroots level, there wasn't a lot of confidence in it."
Macdonald went on to explain how a troubled GTA "wasn't really regarded well for most of the time it was in production" and went through a lot of iterations. The earliest pieces of the series began from an experimental project, where players roamed as a dinosaur destroying buildings. Later on, DMA added cars to the game and changed its focus.
GTA's messy 90s rise to its current successes are chronicled in the seven-part podcast series from BBC 5, Bugzy Malone's Grandest Game. Macdonald, and the recording at large, go on to describe a GTA team far removed from today's vision but still knew they "had something special."
Despite those early inklings of a failure afoot, GTA has ushered in historic successes for Take-Two Interactive and the games industry as a whole. In 2013, GTA 5 reached a record-breaking $1 billion
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