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Dan Houser shared some insight into how Grand Theft Auto III ended up with its impressive and surprising in-game talk radio.
Dan was asked in the recent IGN interview how Grand Theft Auto’s radio stations came together.
Dan said this:
I think that was a two-year development cycle, GTA 3. And the first year was done by the team in Scotland under Leslie (Benzies), getting the whole thing kind of stood up technically.
And then we were able to drive around the world for more than a minute and thought, how do we fill this with absolutely no money?
Do we fill this with content and talk radio? Me and Laz were like, well we can do that cheaply.
And then then someone came up with the idea of, let’s have characters from the game call into the talk radio.
And at that moment it began to be like, “This is kind of magical how it’s all tied together.”
The Origins Of Chatterbox FM
You probably already know Leslie Benzies. He was once one of the top creative producers at Rockstar alongside the Housers. Unfortunately, his reputation has since taken a hit because of his big dud under Build A Rocket Boy, MindsEye.
But we know not everyone knows or remembers Laz. Well, that’s actually Lazlow Jones, another creative mind at Rockstar who joined Dan Houser in his current company, Absurd Ventures.
Lazlow was a key figure in making Grand Theft Auto’s in-game car radios come together. To fill in the dead air while Grand Theft Auto III’s Claude was out driving, they came up with the idea for a working car radio.
But they made this game before Rockstar had the money to license real world hit singles. So Dan is actually referring to a time when they made the car radio idea work before they could afford to do that.
There were also other ways that Rockstar could have done this. For example, they could have hired a recording company to make ‘sound-alikes’ to license real world songs more cheaply.
They could have also commissioned original music. But Rockstar’s vision was far bigger than what Sega had when they released Out Run in 1986.
Why Lazlow Was Important To Grand Theft Auto’s Radios
Lazlow’s big contribution was his own voice work as a character actor. He proved to be so good that he would make a real world radio show of his own, with the help of radio and podcast hosts Opie and Anthony.
Lazlow also got some famous talents to join him in the recording booth. That included Opie and Anthony, Bill Burr, Wil Wheaton, and Fred Armisen.
But ultimately, what made the radio idea work was having the characters in the game call in. This added lore to those characters in an organic way, and made the game more entertaining overall.
The apotheosis of this in Grand Theft Auto III was when Maria called in to tell Lazlow about his boyfriend. That happened to be the game’s protagonist, your character, Claude.
