Original Grand Theft Auto Creators Discuss Origin of Series

Grand Theft Auto  is expected to be one of the biggest games of the year, but the series barely made it off the ground when original developer DMA Design, which became Rockstar North, struggled to put the game together. Gary Penn, who was a producer and creative director for the original Grand Theft Auto in 1997, recently revealed in a video interview with The Guardian that the various teams who worked on the game had trouble unifying and making the game function:

"The writers were driving at one way. The level designers were driving at another way. They weren't meeting in the middle ... So you ended up with something that read badly, that made no sense, and it kept breaking."

As the team fought to make "Grand Theft Auto" operational and realize their vision of an open-world game, the title was met with several attempts to destroy it entirely. 

"The milestones they were meant to uphold didn't really materialize. We'd have conference calls at least once a week with the US. They wanted to kill it every week. Every week they wanted to kill this game, and we'd have to argue to try and keep it going, because we had some faith. Anarchic almost makes it sound sexier than it really ought to be. It was just messy," Penn explained. 

While it may seem wild today that "Grand Theft Auto" struggled to get released, the reality was that the studio was populated with nascent talent at that point, as opposed to the veterans at Rockstar nowadays. Penn went on to discuss the challenges Rockstar faced making the game with such an inexperienced development team.

"It was like trying to nail jelly to kittens. Eventually there were enough hands to hold this thing together, but please nobody move, because this thing is going to fall apart. That's what it felt like right at the end. It was like, we'd just got to put this out now because if we don't, it's just going to break again and we've lost it forever."

With "Grand Theft Auto 5"'s release coming on Sept. 17, it's interesting to hear the series' origin story and how the original came to be when it was released in 1997 for the PC and original PlayStation. Without Penn, it is very possible that the series would have never come out and been the dominant force it is today.