Grand Theft Auto is 28 years ago today.
The original Grand Theft Auto game released on November 28, 1997, on Windows and MS-DOS. Yes, the franchise started as a PC game, before coming to the PlayStation in the following month.
A special port of the first Grand Theft Auto was made for the Game Boy Color, and released in October 1999.
The Origins Of Rockstar North
Before Grand Theft Auto and Rockstar Games, there was Race’n’Chase, DMA Design, and BMG Interactive.
DMA Design is a game studio founded in Edinburgh in 1983. In a different time, they got their start making games for 8-bit UK microcomputers.
In fact, its first original hit was Lemmings, a game they made for their publisher Psygnosis. DMA also spent three years making games for Nintendo, giving us Unirally for the Super NES, and Body Harvest for the Nintendo 64.
The Origins Of Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto
DMA Design had a prototype for an open world game, taking design ideas they first explored in Body Harvest. Called Race’n’Chase, it let you play a police officer tracking down crimes across a city.
This game idea got the attention of Dan and Sam Houser, two brothers working for BMG Interactive. The Housers convinced BMG to take on the game as publisher.
However, when BMG’s parent company Bertelsmann decided to leave the video game industry, everything changed instantly.
Take-Two Interactive, previously known for making FMV games like Daedalus Encounter, decide to become a publisher. They found and decided to acquire BMG Interactive’s assets.
Along the way, they brought along BMG’s staff, including the Housers, into a new publishing label called Rockstar Games. DMA Design was then renamed Rockstar North.
The Original OK Game That Was Grand Theft Auto
At that point, Rockstar North had also flipped Race’n’Chase’s design on its head. This time, you were the criminal, a free agent going around the city running errands for different crime syndicates.
But before the breakthrough of making a full 3D game, this Grand Theft Auto was a 2D game that used a top-down perspective. Instead of cutscenes, you had dialogue appear as scrolling text like an RPG.
This Grand Theft Auto wasn’t quite as relatable as the 3D games. In fact, it’s a marked downgrade from Body Harvest.
But much like FromSoftware, Rockstar North had a vision for game design that was simply ahead of its time. As imperfect as it was, this was the awkward start of the future industry giant.
The Weird Way Rockstar Doesn’t Recognize Their First Grand Theft Auto
Rockstar used to make it available for free alongside Grand Theft Auto 2 and an earlier game they still have the rights to called Wild Metal. For reasons we still don’t know, Rockstar has chosen to pull these games.
So unless you find one of the original copies of the game, or managed to get them when Rockstar gave them away, you can’t easily get it today.
It’s an odd note to note this anniversary on, but our optimistic hope is that Rockstar has been working on a remake and that project has simply stalled. Hopefully they can announce that remake for us someday.
