We have a strange story today about the longest running, and most successful, Grand Theft Auto game of all time.
As reported on RockstarIntel, the actors who played Grand Theft Auto V protagonists Ned, Shawn, and Steven have all revealed that Rockstar commissioned a Grand Theft Auto V documentary while they were making the game, but they also cancelled it. So one would be right to ask, what happened here?
Ned Luke (Michael De Santa), Shawn Fonteno (Franklin Clinton), and Steven Ogg (Trevor Phillips) all got together for an autograph signing event, that came with a live Q&A stream, courtesy of Streamily. This came out from that Q&A.
Ned revealed it for everyone, saying:
“What’s nuts is we had that behind the scenes camera going the whole time and they never did anything with it. That would have been gold”.
Steven then said:
“I think at one point, didn’t we discuss like how cool to make the making of… so at this point we’d have the documentary on the making of GTA”.
Luke also mentioned how funny the whole idea was.
Obviously, the actors who played the protagonists in Grand Theft Auto V aren’t the people in a position to make a Grand Theft Auto V documentary, or release those materials. Since they were the ones being filmed, it sounds highly unlikely that they would have had their hands on them either.
This raises a lot more questions than answers too. If Rockstar was planning to do something behind the scenes-related with Grand Theft Auto V, then why did they change their mind? Was there something that they didn’t want to reveal during production? Did they not like what they saw in the dailies? Or did they simply lose interest?
We feel the need to remind readers that Rockstar Games was under investigation for having a toxic workplace culture. Particularly serious accusations of crunch for their most popular and successful games rocked the company. So there really is something to the theory that they changed their mind about this project midway because there were things that they didn’t want to be covered in a documentary about them.
In any case, this would have definitely been of interest for not only fans of Rockstar, but the community of gamers, and the industry as a whole too. Grand Theft Auto V was their transition point from single player games to live service games, and Rockstar stuck with many of their choices on that 2012 release through three console generations.
Whether there were serious reasons this never came to pass, or Rockstar simply lost interest, we may simply have to chock this one up as another piece of lost video games media.
