Even the people who helped create Grand Theft Auto have not been allowed to play Grand Theft Auto 6 before launch, the BBC reported. After a 13-year wait, two delays and several high-profile leaks, the next chapter in the nearly 30-year-old series is approaching. Developer Rockstar Games has kept the release tightly under wraps. "We're all waiting to see what they've done," co-creator Dave Jones told the BBC, sitting with the original game's writer and publicist, Brian Baglow, at Abertay University in Dundee. Asked whether either had played the new game, Baglow shook his head. "I've got the pre-order," he said.
The first Grand Theft Auto was released in 1997 in Dundee by DMA Design, a relatively small team by later standards. After the puzzle hit Lemmings, the studio had been toying with a racing game initially called Race'n'Chase. "At DMA, we always wanted to do something different," Jones said. "What was the unique spin we could put on it?" Part of the answer was a premise players now take for granted: "just getting out of the car," so a player could steal vehicles and run about on foot. The team first imagined a game in which you could play as a criminal or a police officer, then dropped the second option because it would require players to behave "by the book." "At some point we just said, you know what, it's way more fun playing the bad guy, so that's what the game was about," Jones said.
Sales were a "slow burn" compared with Lemmings, Jones said, partly because you had to "play it to get it." "For the whole of the year that GTA came out, it just kept going and selling and selling," Baglow said, crediting word of mouth. Themes of criminality and violence sparked controversy and even debate in the UK Parliament, though it later emerged that much of the outrage was generated by publisher BMG Interactive as a marketing stunt. "We just did things that we felt were fun," Jones said. "We never at any point kind of thought, should we do that? Is it controversial?" The original game used a top-down 2D view, but it set the template for the satire that later, much larger GTAs still use. Guardian video games editor Keza MacDonald has said that, even in an exaggerated version of American cities, the series' Scottishness showed in its humour and outsider perspective.
The verified news is that the original creators have no early access and are waiting like everyone else, not a review of GTA 6 or a new official release date beyond the long-flagged launch that is now close. Jones and Baglow are watching, pre-order in hand, to see what Rockstar has done with the idea they sketched in Dundee almost 30 years ago.