Drinking pints in Dundee’s Ascot Bar after a Chinese meal at the nearby Mandarin Garden, the DMA Design team felt a sense of relief rather than celebration at the Grand Theft Auto wrap party.
They did not have high hopes for the global sensation before its release on November 28 1997, with GTA voted the least likely out of seven DMA games in development to be a hit.
Producer Colin MacDonald, 48, says: “There was little indication GTA would be particularly successful.”
But what happened next was the stuff of dreams.
The franchise would instead grow from humble beginnings in the City of Discovery to become one of the most successful in the history of gaming.
And it all began a decade before GTA rocked the British establishment.
That’s when DMA Design was established by David Jones, who hired former classmates Mike Dailly, Steve Hammond and Russell Kay to work alongside him.
The firm started off with shoot ‘em ups before creating Lemmings, one of the biggest games of the 90s and a bona fide classic.
Its success allowed the young Dundonians to invest time and money in other projects.
Step forward Grand Theft Auto.
Incredibly, Colin says the gun-slinging game that whipped up moral panic in the House of Lords was originally about a dinosaur on the rampage.
He told The Courier: “We knew it was a really fun game; normally by the time you finish working on a game you never want to play it again.
“But a lot of the team were still choosing to play it multi-player in their own time at lunch, which is always a good sign.
“Many games though were moving to 3D and we were worried that just being fun wasn’t enough to overcome the inevitable negativity that came with still being 2D.
“Earlier in 1997 there had actually been an informal vote of which of DMA’s games currently in development was most likely to be a hit, and which was most likely to fail.
“GTA had a difficult development, and even three years into its three-and-a-half year development it was still unfocussed, unpolished, and so buggy that it was borderline unplayable.
“So very few people thought much of it – and it was voted least likely to succeed of the seven games.”
He added: “Every month there are amazing games released that get little attention and some games that sell huge numbers yet aren’t anything special.
“But certainly having the capacity to iterate and evolve is crucial in virtually every successful game; the original GTA game started out as a dinosaur game, with the player controlling a dinosaur the rampaged through a top-down city.
“Cars were added to bring the city to life, and when someone decided to try making the cars driveable, they found that to be more fun than being the dinosaur!
“Initially the game was focused more on the driving, with a working title of Race’n’Chase, before evolving again with the ability to get in and out of cars, and turning into Grand Theft Auto.
“The executable file of the final game that everyone ran on PCs to play was called ‘Dino.exe’ because the team never got around to changing the filename though.”
So were there a few sore heads after the wrap party?
Colin said: “I’d only just joined the team at the very end of GTA1 so I didn’t feel it was my place to join the team for the meal, and just went along to the Ascot afterwards.
“Although there was undoubtedly a few sore heads, I don’t remember it being a particularly prestigious party – for many of the team I think it was a relief to celebrate what had at times been a painful three-and-a-half year development.
“GTA was unique in being not only an open-world game, where players didn’t have to follow a linear path to progress but also in that the ‘distractions’ were often more fun than the linear path, because they took the form of whatever people wanted them to be.
“Combined with slapstick violence, humour, good writing, a ground-breaking soundtrack, a controversial but effective marketing campaign that led to the game being banned in several countries, and a well-timed ‘demo’ version given away on magazine covers.
“But it wasn’t an immediate hit – it was a slow burn, as word of it spread.”
Max Clifford and the House of Lords
GTA courted controversy before it was even on the shelves thanks to a PR frenzy orchestrated by disgraced publicist Max Clifford, hired by DMA’s publisher BMG Interactive.
Lord Campbell of Croy expressed outrage in the House of Lords over the game’s “thefts of cars, joyriding, hit-and-run accidents, and police chases”.
GTA was then banned in Brazil in 1998 but the controversy and heated protest simply made the game nearly irresistible.
Colin says: “Although we weren’t involved in the marketing, we were aware that the controversy was actively courted.
“Now-disgraced publicist Max Clifford was involved, and when there were stories about a ram-raid on a warehouse leading to the theft of thousands of copies of the game, we all just assumed he was behind it in order to generate another headline.”
More than a quarter of a century on, GTA’s birthplace is a place transformed.
Named the UK’s first City of Design by the United Nations, Dundee’s new billion-pound waterfront development with the Victoria and Albert Museum at its heart is bringing visitors from far and wide.
Genes, games and joysticks now share the same status as jute, jam and journalism.
Colin says: “Dundee was still on-the-up then. It felt like the opening of the DCA a year or two later in 1999 was a real turning point for the city, but working our way along the Perth Road on a Friday night was a real highlight.
“We actually had a reunion of a bunch of DMA staff at the Jahangir in Dundee just back in August there and although some of us have kept up, a number of people have scattered outside of Scotland and to other industries, so almost every time someone walked in they looked up and down the table and remarked how much older we had somehow gotten!”
From Drouthy Neebors to New York
The ex-Channel 4 Games Commissioner – a former Monifieth High School pupil who later graduated from Abertay University – left DMA Design in 2000.
He now works with various different Scottish games and technology companies, including Rivet Games and Speech Graphics.
Colin recently joined accountancy firm Johnston Carmichael’s Tech Advisory Board.
But fond memories of producing the early instalments of the GTA franchise are never far away.
He adds: “One of the stories that I both love and cringe at, was when we were finishing GTA2.
“We’d worked countless late nights and weekends for much of the year, and with about two weeks to go had finally produced the gold master – the copy of the game that would be sent to the duplicators for the initial run of one million CDs to be pressed.
“It was Friday night so we went off to Drouthy Neebors on the Perth Road.
“Unfortunately a late problem was found, but in the days before mobile phones were commonplace, someone had to phone my girlfriend at the time to find out which pub she thought we’d gone to.
“And then had to drive into town to track us down, and ferry us all back to the office in the Technology Park at about 9pm to hurriedly fix the problem, produce a new gold master, which was then sent by taxi from Dundee down to Heathrow Airport in the small hours, to be flown by Concorde to New York, tested over the weekend and at the duplicators for Monday!”
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