Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (40 page)

‘Did it backfire?’ wonders Buckland, of the certification strategy. ‘Well I’m not so sure. It wouldn’t have got so much press otherwise.’
Carmageddon
spawned a franchise that sold two million copies around the world; but it’s a good game – it could be expected to. The real lesson of the ban and the ensuing press storm was more
immediate.
Carmageddon
entered the charts at number one.

Arguably
Lemmings
could be thought of as one of the most violent videogames of all time. It revels in thousands of graphic deaths per hour, animals are sent to the
slaughter in cruel traps, and a
frustrated player can unleash an apocalypse that kills all of them in a string of furry pops. But the lemmings die with cute squeaks, and
are tiny. And when the violence is too small to be real, it seems developers can get away with a lot.

When Keith Hamilton, a software engineer writing code for credit card terminals, interviewed for a new programming job, it wasn’t even particularly clear what the company did. The location
was an anonymous building in Green Park, Dundee’s main industrial estate, and there were few clues in the company’s name, DMA Design. But it didn’t take long for the pieces to
click.

The interview was conducted by David Jones, by now an industry celebrity, and Mike Dailly. They were looking to replace Russell Kay, the man who had named
Lemmings
, but had since left
to start his own development company, Visual Science. Hamilton was taken on to write
Lemmings 3: All New World of Lemmings
.

‘It was my introduction to the industry,’ says Hamilton, ‘to the chaos that it was.’ He had left a company making payment systems, one that could scarcely have been more
security conscious, and come to a developer in a continuing state of anarchy. ‘Things were made up as they went along. It was a fast-growing company, quite chaotic. I enjoyed it!’

DMA’s first
Lemmings
sequel had been a decent seller, and the plan with the third game was to focus on more detailed lemmings. But somehow the magic was lost. ‘The lemmings
were effectively bigger – I think that spoilt it,’ says Hamilton. Jones agrees, ‘I couldn’t think of any new way to take
Lemmings
at that point.’ The third
game ended DMA’s six-title exclusive deal with Psygnosis, and meanwhile Nintendo had been courting DMA – the Japanese company needed imaginative, top-quality launch titles for its new
rival to the PlayStation, the Nintendo 64.

DMA always worked on several projects at once, but there was no doubt what the most prestigious game in the stable was. The Nintendo 64 promised state-of-the-art 3D graphics that would shame the
PlayStation, and DMA had designed a pioneering game to
exploit them.
Body Harvest
was a science fiction adventure with a gruesome theme – aliens harvesting
human flesh – and a compelling gameplay hook. Once the player had landed, they had complete freedom to find their own way around the levels, which were so large that they would need to
commandeer vehicles to navigate them.
Body Harvest
promised to be revolutionary and the competition to be on the development team was fierce.

Keith Hamilton, however, was assigned to DMA’s other project.
Race ’n’ Chase
was the working title of a cops-and-robbers game for the PC. It wasn’t well formed
yet, but it was already apparent that it would use conventional, even outdated graphics technology. ‘We hired a big team of mostly inexperienced people,’ says Hamilton. ‘Which was
a very dangerous thing to do when you look back at it. But hiring experienced games programmers wasn’t possible, there just weren’t any.’

So there was a certain character to the
Race ’n’ Chase
team. They were overwhelmingly young, mainly recent graduates, and almost everyone was in their twenties. None of the
group had children, or real commitments, and every single developer was male. Hamilton is unambiguous on whether this informed the design choices for
Race ’n’ Chase
.
‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

Conventionally, games are pitched at publishers with a written brief and a demo. Instead, the
Race ’n’ Chase
team filmed a schlocky crime movie, with the developers as the
stars. ‘We staged car chases round the streets of Dundee,’ recalls Hamilton. ‘We didn’t especially close streets or anything, we just had people at either end watching out
for when it was safe.’ It was intended to show the mood of the game: gangster-themed car chases, cops and criminals, shoot outs. ‘We had guys hanging out of windows pointing guns at
each other, and it was just the programming team.’ As far as he can tell, a copy of this has never surfaced.

Race ’n’ Chase
morphed and mutated over its development, but at its heart there was always a simulation of a city. The design was low-tech – Mike Dailly devised a
graphics engine with an old-fashioned,
overhead view. The player looked down on the cars, about an inch long on the screen, as if from an imaginary helicopter hovering
above the road. There was some 3D in the design: the buildings swept past as the player drove a car, and the view zoomed out to show more of the road as their speed increased. But it was a
primitive aesthetic, a league behind the already fashionable technologies for immersive, first-person gaming. At first sight,
Race ’n’ Chase
had more in common with elderly
8-bit games such as
Spy Hunter
and
Micro Machines
.

But this impression of primitivism hid
Race ’n’ Chase
’s true aspirations. It was a fantastically ambitious game where the city was coherent and filled with autonomous
inhabitants. Traffic obeyed laws and drove with purpose, queuing at red lights and pulling out of the way as an ambulance drove by blaring its siren. Pedestrians wandered the pavements, jumping
from the path of oncoming vehicles and fleeing scenes of violence. It felt like a real environment – the city had a soul.

Moreover, the player wasn’t locked into a car; they controlled a human character, who wandered the streets just as the other pedestrians did. But players could also climb into cars, and
when they did, the whole city responded. Even in early versions of the game, the spark of ingenuity was there. ‘You need that, to make you think that it’s a real place,’ says
Hamilton. ‘Almost to make you think that if you turn it off the city’s still there, that it’s carrying on without you.’

As the game was developed, the simulation became ever more comprehensive, producing effects the player might never even notice. ‘If you run somebody over, the ambulance does actually come
all the way from the hospital, and wee guys pick them up on a stretcher, take them into the ambulance and drive all the way back,’ explains Hamilton. ‘Unless obviously you interfere and
crash into it or something.’

And that was where the technology trade-off was spent.
Race ’n’ Chase
’s as yet unproven team were very conscious of the competition. ‘At the time, we were quite
envious of the technical prowess of
Carmageddon
,’ says Hamilton, but there was little chance of them
matching it. In any case, simulating the workings of a
city instead of detailing its appearance was a deliberate decision. ‘Processor time is always precious – we wanted to spend it on the simulation of the world,’ says Jones.

In the brief for
Race ’n’ Chase
, and the first versions that DMA built, gamers could choose whether to play as a police officer or a criminal. But the team quickly found
that playing the good guys was tiresome – every pedestrian became an obstacle, every traffic law a bind. ‘I remember when I played the game, I used to stop at the traffic lights and
drive within the speed limits,’ says Hamilton. ‘Nobody else bothered. It was more fun to break the law.’

Once given the freedom, DMA found that players kept steering away from law-abiding decency. ‘It wasn’t that much fun playing cops,’ says Jones. ‘It felt like the game was
working against you. When you switched places, it just felt so much better.’ For a while the design team persevered, with the player offered both sides of the law. But the pull of immorality
was proving irresistible; in the team’s offices, nobody was playing as the police for fun.

Eventually DMA capitulated to the real draw of the game, and
Race ’n’ Chase
became an arena for improvised criminality. There was an undeniable, mischievous pleasure to be
had from goading responses from the simulated city: sending traffic dashing out of your way, letting loose with weaponry and watching the pedestrians panic. A reward system was put in place that
made crime pay. Running over pedestrians and stealing cars clocked up points, shown as dollars, which unlocked new missions and cities.

The cops remained, but now they were a balancing mechanism. As the player committed crimes, they would generate a ‘wanted’ level, and police cars would give chase. The attention of
the authorities escalated in line with the player’s errant behaviour, until the whole army, complete with tanks, was in pursuit. It could bring on a delicious sense of rising panic where
frantically evading the police for a small misdemeanour could lead to larger crimes, and an innocent skirmish could turn into a thrilling, city-wide pursuit.

Originally,
Race ’n’ Chase
had a formal mission structure. The player was tasked with killing certain targets, for instance, or delivering a
package without drawing police attention. Once the task had been completed the player would be dropped out of the game, back to a menu screen. But this broke the flow, and meant that the
consequences of the player’s delinquency were never followed through. In an inspired twist, the team built the missions into the fabric of the city – jobs were collected from phone
booths and activated at the player’s discretion. And importantly, the city lived on outside the missions: if the player wanted to cause mayhem for fun, there was no time limit or objective to
divert them. For all that completing missions was essential to progress, the foundation of the game had become unstructured, indulgent criminality.

And one crime above all the others gave the game its identity. There were dozens of vehicles in the city, and each required different handling and tactics. A light sports car could whizz the
player away from the trouble he had caused, while a heavy truck could ram through traffic. Dailly made sure every vehicle was available to the player; with a single key press, the character on the
screen would pull open the door of a nearby car, yank the driver onto the tarmac, and enter the vehicle. It was a transformative feature, not merely an entertaining animation or a way to rack up
points, but a complete shift in the scope of the gameplay. Now any street offered a toy box of getaway motors and the tools for causing pandemonium. It gave the game its pillar mechanic, and its
new name:
Grand Theft Auto
.

In 1997, gaming was still a young medium, yet it was already rare for a game to offer something novel. But
Grand Theft Auto
did just that, by creating a sense of the world’s
persistence and autonomy, and in the way that it supported and was disrupted by freeform, improvised play. Hints of these innovations had been seen in previous titles, but here they met in a
captivating blend – it was only after this game, and its successors, that the industry would look to name the new genre. ‘Open world’ gaming is one frequently used description,
‘sandbox’ another, and
Grand Theft Auto
is acknowledged, with
barely any murmur of dissent, as the form’s chief pioneer. ‘I’d never
heard the term sandbox before,’ said David Jones. Few had.

But
Grand Theft Auto
had influences, and one game in particular is mentioned repeatedly. ‘
Elite
, yes, yes!’ says Hamilton. ‘
Elite
was one of the
favourite games of mine when I was developing
GTA
, and I would certainly cite it as an inspiration. You could argue that it was the first open world. You could fly anywhere you wanted in
Elite
and you could pick up missions. It was pretty advanced for its time. Yeah, that was a great game.’ In some respects the comparison is uncanny: wanted levels and provoking
police attention, using money as the score, the possibilities for causing unstructured havoc.
Elite’s
co-writer David Braben understands the connection: ‘The first time I think
someone “got” why
Elite
worked well was when [DMA Creative Director] Gary Penn told me about
Grand Theft Auto
– which he described as “
Elite
in a
city”.’

Grand Theft Auto
was a team effort. Hamilton was the lead programmer, Dailly designed the look and feel and Jones was the creative director. But ideas and features fell out of the chaos
of development and anyone on the young team could add more. It was a style that suited their new gameplay. ‘Sandboxes are very simple,’ says Dailly. ‘Put some toys in a world then
leave it alone! But hanging it all together as a game with levels, that was the evolution that the whole team contributed to. They were the ones who ultimately designed
GTA
, based on
day-to-day playing, coding and what they thought would be cool.’ Their outrageous additions included tanks, rocket launchers, and a bonus multiplier for using a police car to run over
pedestrians. The movie
Speed
was still fresh in their minds, and the player was encouraged to cause havoc driving an ever-accelerating bus.

Grand Theft Auto
’s most notorious moment was a contribution from Hamilton. ‘I remember driving around in Glasgow and seeing “Gouranga” sprayed on a bridge and
just wondering what it meant. And looking that up gave us the idea.’ The word is used as a chant by the Hare Krishna movement, who believe it brings luck to those who say it. From the moment
Hamilton learnt that, a row of chanting
Hare Krishna monks would occasionally appear on the pavements of
Grand Theft Auto
’s cities. If a player’s car
mowed the entire chorus line down, the word ‘Gouranga!’ would fill the screen, and they would earn a bonanza of points.