(keyboard clicks) (upbeat music) - [Man] Just sit in the car
and keep the engine running. Any questions? - [Man 2] No boss, no problem. - [Man] If anybody gets in
the way, you know what to do. - Grand Theft Auto III
was a red letter day, not just for Rockstar Games, but for the entire video game industry. It was the first game that felt like it was took place in a
living, breathing world. Because before GTA III, Grand Theft Auto games looked liked this. It takes a very special
blend of circumstances for a game like Grand
Theft Auto III to come out. And that's what today's episode of Greatest Hits is all about. Most people assume that
GTA is made in America, and thanks to Rockstar's
global network of studios, that's now, in part, true. But the game about racing
and chasing around US cities was originally created in
the most unlikely of places, a post-industrial port town
on Scotland's eastern coast. DMA design was founded in Dundee in 1984 by a group of friends who
met at a local computer club. Over the next 15 years, the studio created the Lemmings franchise, cult classics, like "Body Harvest", "Space Station Silicon Valley", a Kirby title that never
saw the light of day, and a couple of games about stealing cars you may have played. There are a lot of games to cover here. So to do this, I'm going to have to spend a couple of months reaching
out to as many folks who worked with DMA designs as possible, which is tricky because some of them have fallen off the face of the earth. Others left the industry a long time ago, and don't wanna talk
to some weird Irish guy and more still, still
work at Rockstar North. And if you know anything about Rockstar, is that they're one of the most cagey when it comes to talking to the press. So we're also going to
be using our friends at the Video Game History Foundation to unearth some never before
seen assets and concept art. And seen as we're forced to
do this whole thing remotely, we're hiring a video team in Scotland to go and fill in the other
big character of this story, the city of Dundee. So what's the point of this video? Well, aside from having just a fun, nostalgic romp about a
bunch of old classic games, I wanna answer a question
that's been bugging me for a really long time. A game him like GTA doesn't
just happen out of nowhere. So what was it about DMA
design and about Dundee, and about that time and place that created one of the most important
video games ever. And there's one more thing we
need to cover in some respect. Whenever we talk about Grand
Theft Auto or Rockstar North, there were certain names that
sort of bubble to the surface. People like the Houser
brothers and Leslie Benzies. I wanna know how influential these people were at the start and
when they joined the story and really who are the
names we don't know about, who are the unsung heroes
of the story of DMA and Grand Theft Auto? When did the story of DMA design end? And when did the story
of Rockstar North begin? All right, I have a lot of research to do, and Scottish people to interview. And you have a lot of
Celtic accents to listen to. So let's just roll the intro. It's the only reason any of
you watch this show anyway. (upbeat electro music) (mysterious music) DMA design was founded in the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club in the Scottish city of Dundee. Dundee had been a successful
sea port for centuries, and it was during the 18th century it found itself in the
heart of the textile boom, supporting a network of jute mills, which employed some 50,000 workers. But when the textile industry
collapsed in the 20th century, it left tens of thousands
of laborers out of work and desperate. The manufacturing industry
that came in to fill the void would set the course
for the city's future. It could have been anything, cars, sofas, washing machines, but two days before Christmas in 1946, it was the American
watch manufacturer Timex that opened its first plant in Dundee. Crucially in 1981, the
plant took on a contract for Sinclair Research Limited and suddenly the factory was
producing computer systems for the UK market. So while in other towns
it was cars, sofas, or washing machines
falling out of the back of local delivery trucks, in Dundee it was ZX Spectrums. So first things first, if I'm gonna be able to tell the story of the early days at DMA design, I need to talk to one
of those four founders and thankfully through Twitter
and emails and whatnot, I've convinced two of them to have a chat. Mike Daily and Russell Kay. - I went to this computer club in Dundee. It's in the college. And I think in the chemistry lab. And you got to take your computer along, But also you had to take your TV with it. So it was the old CRTs that took on a bus, couple of journeys to get there. So I met Steve, Russell
and Dave at this club. And so him and Russell met, we all kind of got together 'cause we were really interested, in making stuff for computers, rather than everybody else at the club that was just swapping games and things. And it just kind of went from there. Russell and Dave were doing a game called "Moon Shadow" on the Spectrum which eventually became "Zone Trooper." And for somebody coming in, to see somebody actually making a game that's gonna be commercial game. It's like, "Oh look, they're doing stuff." Especially up in Scotland because there was no companies up here. So any kind of dev was interesting. - We all really wanted to
work on the actual games, not just sit and play games, which is what half half
the people did at the club. I worked on the Spectrum, Mike did stuff on Commodore
64 and things like that. Dave actually worked at the Timex factory. He had the inside scoop on how things were actually put together
and things like that. He left Timex. We took on a contract to convert a Commodore 64 game to Spectrum, that was taking a very long time. And Dave wasn't really
interested in actually doing it. He wanted the new shiny he bought, Amiga. That was when he came up
with idea of doing "Menace". - [Danny O'Dwyer] Using
his redundancy from Timex, Dave bought an Amiga 1000 and got to work on his
first game, "Menace" under the company name Acme Software. This was pure bedroom programming. Dave would code in his parents' house, while Mike went to Russell's house to code using a plank of wood balanced
in a drawer as his desk. Dave eventually managed to
sign a deal for "Menace" with famed Amiga publisher Psygnosis. And after the deal was signed, they changed the company name to DMA because a company in America
was already using Acme. - That game got published and he started getting some money for it. And at that point he realized, you know, what's the point in staying
at college and all that stuff. I could go and make money on that. So he decided to give up college and start doing it full time. And he started on "Blood Money" and he was getting kind of
advances and stuff for that. So halfway through "Blood Money" he decided we would start the office and asked me if I wanted, you know, because he
was starting the office, do I want a job there. "Yes, please." What usually happened
is, myself and Russell would be doing ports and
Psygnosis would be paying Dave or DMA for these. Then he'd pay us, me obviously, salaries and Russell as a freelancer. And that would keep the office going while Dave looked at original work. That was the idea, is that the ports would
keep the company going. So just to kind of be honest,
like Psygnosis had us going. - [Danny O'Dwyer] As more work came in, they'd hire whoever seemed
capable of doing it. Russell's mate Gary Timmins
would hang around the studio, playing with pixel art and
then Dave offered him a job. One of the reasons they did
so much work for Psygnosis was that it was the closest
publisher to Dundee, still about four hours across
the border into England, down into Liverpool. By August of 1989, they had
grown into this humble office, sat above a baby shop This is where Dave coded "Blood Money" with the help of remote
graphic designer, Tony Smith. This is where the growing
team of game developers worked on ports, made tech demos, talked about other games
and bounced around ideas. David decided that his
next game would focus on the AT-AT like walkers
from "Blood Money" and had animator. Scott Johnson, recently hired from the local McDonald's, create some enemy sprites to walk around underneath the walkers. But Mike Daily thought
that the 16x16 sprites weren't quite small enough. And so unlike the scale
of "Star Wars" AT-AT's, the walkers didn't look
particularly tall and impressive. And so began a conversation
about how small you could animate a sprite while retaining believable movement. While all this was going on, another creative problem was being solved. Russell was fawning over a particular gun from the game "Salamander" that traced along the
bottom of these screens. This mishmash of conversations and ideas and problems would eventually lead to DMA's first greatest hit. (playful music) - We've been having this argument that, how many pixels do you actually need to make something that could move properly and Mike wanted to prove that
you could make them tiny. There was a game on the
Commodore 64 called "Beachhead" and that had very small
characters that had the really nice animation. Other people had been arguing that "Prince of Persia" where it
was quite large characters that had really nice animation, that you couldn't get that animation in such a small number of characters and Mike wanted to prove us wrong. (playful music) The chap who did all the
animation, Gary Timmins, he was always amazing to
watch while he animated because he would have a pixel for an arm and a pixel for the other
arm and then the legs and then the head. And he would animate these pixels to get them to just the way
that he wanted them to walk and he would spend hours and hours just moving this one pixel. "It's the wrong place,
it needs to be there. There you go." - Okay, I edited this whole section not thinking I'd have to
explain what "Lemmings" was, but I've just realized it's
like a 30 year old game. So here is the briefest
explanation for the gameplay of "Lemmings" for all you
young whippersnappers. Basically you start each level with a bunch of these little
lads walking across the level. You have a bunch of jobs
you can assign each Lemming. And the idea is to dig,
climb, and crawl your Lemmings from that entrance to an exit
somewhere else on the level. It was the biggest
thing in gaming in 1991. Dundee even has this
commemorative statue in a park, just down the road from
the boys' early office. And if you go to the shop
underneath the office, there's a plaque saying that
they made Lemmings here. Of course, none of this explains
why they look like this. What is this thing?
It's not a Lemming. It's got like green hair
and no mouth or nose. It's wearing blue overalls.
It doesn't make any sense. So of course that was the
first thing that came to mind. Why did they look like that? This is a game made in the nineties, so naturally the answer
was something ridiculous. - [Mike Daily] The color of
the green, white and blue was to do with the EGA color palette because you had limited colors there. So on the Amiga
could have been anything but doing it on the PC,
there's this limited choice. So it was either green
hair and blue dungarees or blue hair and green dungarees. I mean, just, it was just decided that the blue dungarees
and green hair was nicer. - And we all sat and talked about what the game could actually
be and things like that. And I did the prototype because we decided that 10 Lemmings wasn't enough. 20 wasn't going to cut it.
We had to have a hundred. We just did things for fun,
you know, that was kind of, it was pretty much just
a lunchtime kind of, "Alright. I'll have a wee think about how we could do that." If we were going to make the
Lemmings follow the landscape, like I was saying, it's the Salamander bullets that followed the landscape. How would you actually go about that? I had an idea on actually
how to go about that. And it took me a few
lunchtimes to kind of, to kind of put a little prototype together and then it took another few lunchtimes to work out how to draw
hundreds of them at once. - [Mike Daily] So, I
mean, Lemmings itself, the guy that came up with the scales and we got them and that was the scales, it wasn't like it was, "That's not going to work, we'll do another one, we'll do
another one, we'll do this." It just, that was what we got
and we worked around with it. Lemmings took about nine months or so. Once we started doing levels, we were getting like a tenner a level if we got into the game or something. Which when you look back at it, it wasn't that much really. I think Dave managed to get a couple in but they weren't particularly good ones. We kept making these levels thinking they'd be great and we'd solve them in like three seconds and then he'd go, "Well,
that's not right." And then he'd go away and
try and make them harder. Steve didn't get any levels in, they just didn't really work very well. So it was really me, Scott and Gary that got the levels done. And we all had really different
approaches to doing them. I really liked making big pictures and making you play through them. Whereas Gary ended up
putting in like three blocks and then one skill and you had to get out, and they were really tricky. But we were all trying to beat each other with these levels and just
making them as hard as possible. - My levels were never very good. You know, I'm better at writing the code, than actually making things like that. When you do a PC game back then, you didn't just have the one graphics card and back then you didn't
have anything like DirectX. So you weren't writing
just one set of code, I had to write a VGA, EGA, CGA and each one quite
different from each other. It wasn't a lot of common code that you could actually have. From day one they were Lemmings. That was always the name. - And were they Lemmings, like you'd say, like that's a Lemming, that's
the animal, a Lemming-- - No. - Or were they Lemmings, like
the concept of a Lemming, like a sheep? - They were the concept of a Lemming. They were following each
other no matter what happens, even to the point of death and they were never meant
to look like a Lemming, not the actual creature. In fact, I don't think we
could have even told you what a real Lemming looked like. No, as far as we were concerned,
they were real Lemmings. They were a cultural
reflection of ourselves and we originally wanted to do all the ... do we have the lemmings
dressed up as Batman and Robin, and as the Addams Family and
as the Monsters and stuff like that, you know? So a lot of what they've done
with Lego and things like that was what we were thinking
about in terms of Lemmings. They were a no-man that you
could put everybody into. - [Danny O'Dwyer] In the weeks and months after it's release, Lemming's
steadily built an audience. It wasn't an overnight
success, but as time passed, ports to other computers were demanded. And so DMA had to expand to meet it. The studio more than doubled in size with some developers working on ports and others developing
a sequel to Lemmings. But while the studio was larger, Dave Jones' business
plan was still the same, have a solid backbone of
porting and contract work that would pay for the
development of original games. So in 1991, while they
worked on Lemmings II, DMA was using their newfound
fame to score a contract with one of the biggest
game companies in the world. - Up to about '95, 'cause we started obviously
doing Lemmings II, we started doing like SNES stuff as well. I did the SNES version of Lemmings II, but we also started getting
interest from Nintendo for doing other things as well. And we actually had
Miyamoto up at the offices while we were doing that as well. Between '92 and '95 we did
Lemmings II on three platforms. We did "Uniracers" on the SNES. We did start doing a Kid Kirby game, but we didn't, we just
didn't finish anything. So that ended up getting
canned which was a shame because it was a proper
Nintendo Kirby game. - Right. - It could have been
good fun, but just, yeah. - Is that from them Miyamoto visit? What was that like,
having Miyamoto in Dundee? - I didn't really know
who he was at the time. Because it was, you know, early nineties, it's like, he wasn't the huge name everybody knows of him later. It was just, you know, it was a guy coming around and trying to wear something neat. And will be standing behind
you, sort of, that's kind of it. - [Danny O'Dwyer] Kid Kirby
was one of a number of projects that never saw the light of day. And this was kind of par for the course for studios like DMA back in the mid 90's, kind of like record companies, studios would often have multiple
projects going on at once. Taking bets on which
one would be a success, with shorter dev time and much less known about consumer behavior in video games, it made sense that some
games just didn't take off. But DMA was also suffering from
other common growing pains, while some teams within the studio had the right mix of
experience and personalities, others didn't. And while a great team didn't always necessarily create a great game, a bad team, never did. - You could tell from working with a team, whether they were,
whether they had traction and the game was going forward. Cause that was, that
was the first barrier, DMA was famous for actually
never finishing things. I'd just come off "Union Racers" and "Union Racers" was a
really functional team. And I went across to work on Kid Kirby and that was just totally different. That was my first experience of, "Hang on, I thought game
development was like this, but it's like this." So yeah, it's just personalities involved, the approaches of people. So yeah, when it got
canned in the end, I was, I was not particularly shocked. - At the end of Lemmings
II, I wasn't particularly, because I had quite a lot to
do with the original Lemmings. I wasn't really particularly
happy with Lemmings II You know, we had so many
skills in Lemmings II. It was unbelievable. And as we actually
discovered at the very end that there's about 10 skills that we hadn't actually
used in any levels. We had to just go back in
and just go and add them in. I hadn't been particularly
happy with the way in which Lemmings II had actually been run and I decided to leave and that was when I
started Visual Science. - [Mike Daily] After Lemmings up to 95, we grew from those five to 10, up to '95 would be about 50 or so. And then when the GTA stuff
kind of got signed with BMG, GTA, Tanktics and Clan
Wars all got signed, and that was a big deal. I mean, that was a couple
of million quid contract. And the company went up to like 130, 140. So we had lots of
offices, second building, lots of Dave's stuff as well. So it grew hugely. - I vaguely remember job interviews, but we were totally making
it up as we went along. You know, that's the honest truth of it. Nobody really knew, there was
no template you could follow. Nowadays, you've got people
who've come through university, they've trained to do video games. They're all fluent in
all these software tools. But remember, this was like pre-internet, so nobody could download a tool from, from a website and
figure out how it worked in their own time and
then come and use it. We were getting people coming for jobs who literally hadn't a touched a computer. Yeah, I think people
forget just how pioneering a lot of that stuff was back then. And particularly before the internet, like when you couldn't
just Google something. You literally had to
know someone, phone them, wait for a magazine to
come out, go to a library in order to find this stuff out. It's, you can't comprehend it now. It's a totally different world. - All right, you probably
noticed the new guy, right? His name is Colin Anderson. And as the keyboards in
the background suggest, he was the audio director
at DMA for several years, I got his email through
somebody else at the company who suggested Collin could speak to the variety of teams that
were working at the studio once they expanded after
the launch of Lemmings. So let's set the scene. DMA has now ballooned up
to about a hundred people and they're working on multiple projects. And while "Lemmings" had been a success, it had come because of this
sort of brainstorming ideation that had come from everyone in the studio, everyone was sort of like,
had their paws and fingers in Lemmings to a certain extent. With the studio much bigger and working on loads of different games, that type of creativity,
it's not exactly scalable. On top of that, the studio
had had a lot of turnover and new hires. Some teams were functional
while others dysfunctional. And hey, while we're at it, let's throw in the thing that
killed more studios in the UK than anything else. The move from computers to
consoles, from 2-D to 3-D. To solve this, the studio
broke into different teams and took on a lot of
projects over the next era. During the next few years a two game deal with GT-Interactive was signed, as was a four game deal
with BMG Interactive. The next game we're here to talk about is the most notorious of the bunch, even if nobody expected it to be. So Mike and Russell, who I
managed to get ahold of early on, they were also able to
speak to Grand Theft Auto and so was Collin. But at this stage, I really wanted to talk to more people at DMA. People who had worked on GTA and other games at their studio. And this is where I started to run into a little bit of trouble,
because GTA was a funny team. A lot of them hadn't
made a game before GTA and some of them didn't
make one afterwards. And I also wanted to see what it was about the other teams at DMA. What was it about certain
teams that made games that were hits and other ones
that maybe weren't so much? And there's one thing
though that was commonplace with everyone I talked to about GTA, is that for all the
folks who worked on it, right up until when it was done, nobody thought this was a hit. (hop hop music) (car engine roaring)
(hip hop music) The original pitch for Grand Theft Auto was a game called Race and Chase, a top-down driving game
set in a contemporary city where you could chase cars, play as cops, or be the robbers. In recent years, the
original design document for this game has surfaced. But as part of their research
for this documentary, our friends at the Video
Game History Foundation uncovered a bunch of new assets, including some original
sketches from artist Donald Robertson, and these 3D pedestrian
designs by Stewart Waterson. According to lead artists, Ian McHugh, the plan was to render out
frames from these animated models for the pedestrian sprites. But never quite worked and
then Stewart left the project. So they ended up hand drawing the sprites in D-paint instead. - I did the initial prototype for GTA, the game itself was team driven, and the whole design and everything, everybody in the team contributed
to the direction of it. Although Dave took the
major decisions to go, "Okay, it's gonna be cops and robbers and it'll just be robbers,
and we'll do this." Everything else that made the game really fun and entertaining
was suggested by the team and implemented by the team. The initial part, when I
did the graphics engine, so it was this top down engine, it obviously went through
a couple of iterations. With the spinning isometric on first and we'd add the top down
in what we call Lego vision because it was made out of blocks. That top down perspective
made you concentrate on the city and all the things moving within that view and make it busy. The engine itself being top
down, allowed GTA to work. (horns blaring) (sirens blaring) - So, you know, for the
first few months of its life, it was called Race and Chase
and you were a policemen and you were trying to clean up the city, but it was only once we actually got a playable kind of prototype,
demo up and running, it became apparent that
if you're a policeman, if you are going skidding
through the park, knocking push chairs and
buggies out of the way and running over old people,
families having picnics, you had to get penalized because it didn't make any logical sense. You know, the cognitive
dissonance just, was vast. So, you know, the decision
was made by the team and the team had autonomy
over all of this. Let's get you to play a criminal. Let's see how that feels. And yeah, that was the turning point. - Now all the people in here are working on what DMA hopes will
be it's new blockbuster. It's a game called Grand Theft Auto. It's gotta be finished by the end of June. So they're involved in some
pretty hard work in here. It's all about a car
chase through the streets of a fictional, probably American city. Here are some of the maps
they've been working on. And Dave here is one of
the software designers, he's been trying to put it together. - One interesting thing
I think a lot of people kind of overlook in this study is, the team that did Grand Theft Auto, none of them had made a game before. It was a brand new team. You know, they'd all come
from different backgrounds, very different, previous
rules and everything. So, so this was a first. It grew and evolved. And if one part of the
game wasn't working, like the car handling, it was awful. - The initial driving
model just didn't work. And then a guy called Pat
Curr came along and says, "Look, here's, here's
something that works." - Pat Curr, he was working on Cobra. It was a little prototype of a box. And it was, just messing
around with physics handling and it done some sort of
really OTT Hollywood style, crazy, skiddy, sort of
beautiful little car control that rear ended at fish tails. And it started skidding
around and I'm like, "This is fantastic to
play, this is brilliant. This needs to go in." And that made all the difference because the handling was so bad. - And just basically gave us little driving cars, went into the game and it was really nice and that fixed an awful lot of the issues because part of the GTA is obviously the driving
has to feel really good and the original GTA, it was
great fun to drive about, - And it's because there's
fantastic things like the, I don't know if you're aware about the aggressive police in GTA. That's one of the funniest things where police cars are just so crazy because if car was trying to go, they were trying to drive through you. So it's a bug. They weren't, they
weren't meant to be doing what they were doing. And the car was trying to drive, this car was trying to drive through you 'cause the route got messed up. So of course it feels like you're being attacked by a police car. It's a fantastic feeling. So all these lovely little
accidents and, you know, different people feeding
in different things. - I think the other part that really cemented the game was
all the radio stations and stuff that went in as well. We called Anderson and these musicians, I think six of them. They had all these kind of
fool music radio stations. And that was just a huge addition to it. - If you look back at that
original design document for GTA, the mention for audio is something like, there will be one megabyte
of Ram available for sound. That's the, that's the audio design. So it changed a lot along the way because we certainly didn't
start out with the idea of radio stations and it
wasn't going to be CD based when I started on it, it was gonna be, it gonna be a floppy disc version of it. So there was no way they
were gonna be using CD audio. One of my best days at work ever was when Dave Jones turned up and said they were canceling the floppy version and it was gonna be a CD release only. And I think the N64
version vanished as well. And that was great because suddenly, DMA design had a problem, which was, they had a game that looked 2D even though it had that
sort top-down 3D thing that when you saw it moving,
actually looked pretty good. But when you saw it in a
screenshot, it looked pretty naff. So they had this game that
looked like a 2D game on a CD. And no matter how high res you made those, those textures and maps and whatever, it was never gonna come anywhere
close to filling that CD. And back then, like when
people paid for a CD game, they expected it to use that technology because CD was cutting edge. So we needed a story that made use of it. And we didn't have one. So I just put my hand up and said, I think I knew how we
could make use of that CD. And then Craig Conner, who
had been working on the game, one day the whole team just
turned up, all new start. They all sat at their desks
and Craig was on that team. It was just random. He didn't come in to work on that game. He just came in and sat at that desk. If he'd sat at another desk, history would have gone in
a completely different way. So I'd given Craig the task of writing kind of 10 or 20 little sketches of music, just tasters of what kind of music could we use in this game? Cause the premise at that
point was still to use a single type of music across the game because nobody put in
different types of music in games at that point,
that would have been crazy. And so he sat down, he wrote all these
different types of music, some dance, techno, pop. And I just went to review
them at his desk one day, he was playing them and
they were all great. They're all great pieces of music. And I remember thinking, that's a shame, we're gonna lose. we're
not gonna use all of these. And without thinking about
it, I just said to him, what would be really cool is like, if we could get some kind of
radio stations in the game where you could play all
these different types of music so that you could have all this. - [Game Radio Host] 68 89FM, Head Radio. And I wasn't thinking about it at all, it was something, it
was an offhand comment and I would have forgotten all about it, except for Craig's face when I said it. I saw Craig's face and his eyes lit up, you know, in that kind
of, that might work. (hip hop music) (horns blaring) - Now this is DMA's music department. As you can see, they do
use real instruments here. Let's find out what they've been doing for the Grand Theft Auto project. Craig, what have you been contributing? - I'm working on a radio
station at the moment, the hip hop station. There's a variety of different stations in each car that you go into. - Every time you get into a
car you get different music? - Yeah, different station. So this is a hip-hop channel that we're in the middle
of doing just now. - So you're not just
taking it all off a CD. You've actually composed the-- - No, everything's
composed in-house, yeah. - Amazing amounts of work.
We'll let you get on with it. - All right, okay. (hip hop music) - If you're interested in learning more about the audio design of GTA and the work that went into creating it's various radio
stations, check out episode 51 of the No Good podcast where we have an extended chat with Colin Anderson. GTA's development was long and difficult, but many at the studio told us, that while the production
was a bit of a mess, all the extra time they
had to finish and polish it was what saved it from
being a commercial flop. Brian Baglow was hired as a writer and joined the Grand Theft Auto team at a point where all the games missions were already completed. His job at the time, to retrofit these missions with stories. - Each of the cities, you could go down to wherever you wanted, but the missions were
incredibly limited, you know? So you could, your character
could run to a building and get in a car, drive a
car to another location, get out the car or drive into a building come out, jump onto a motorbike, zoom to another point in
the city, shoot a guy, and then, you know, take a
different car to the docks. And so what happened with it, the level designers were building that as a series of activities
and I was then backfilling and going, "What are we doing?" And that was compounded by the fact that not only was it entirely non-linear, but the only way we
could convey information was through a pager that had, as I recall, I think it was 120
characters or 110 characters. It was certainly under Twitter. And so everything had to
be done through the pager and the pagers could be triggered by either driving over
a specific tile on a map or by picking up a car. So what I did was, I ended
up going out and basically jotting down every single
heist movie, crime caper ... You know, crime thriller
that I could think of from the last 50 years and going, you know, all the good bits. Remember the elevated train chase in "The French Connection"? Right, that's going in. It's the heist gone wrong
from "Reservoir Dogs". Yes, I'm having that. And so the whole thing was, was implied. (car crashes) There was so much in there
that you could discover. You know, simply driving down an alley and smashing through some crates and watching them go boom through to, you know, the kill frenzies with all the little remote
control cars and everything. The fact that the more you played, the more aggravated the police got, your wanted level went up. Realizing that you could take
cars through a spray shop and a bomb shop, you know? There's all these little
things that came together. It rewarded you the more you played it, the more you explored it,
the more you experimented, the more stuff you found. You know, so it made you feel like you meant something in the world, you were affecting change. - [Danny O'Dwyer] The missions in GTA along with the radio stations
and size of the city, all contributed to making this game feel a little bit more
real than it looked. When you talk about GTA now, people bring up all the controversy in the UK press at the time. But most of this was actually
a guerrilla marketing campaign executed by BMG themselves. For the team in Scotland, the violence was nothing more
than cartoonish nonsense, just like Lemmings was. And here's another thing Lemmings and Grant Theft Auto shared, a bunch of sprites following each other. The only difference,
was in Grand Theft Auto, you could run them over. - [Game Announcer] Kill Frenzy! - We always viewed it as
Tom and Jerry cartoon humor because it's so distant. You didn't really see it. It's almost Lemming-esque in
it's kind of death sequence because it was tiny little pixels. So it didn't really matter. You run over them and it was funny. It wasn't that Carmageddon in your face where you see somebody
splattered on your screen. We never really viewed
it as any kind of issue. I think the only, I mean, to
prove the point was that the, you know, the Gouranga thing. Running over the Harikrishnas. All the scores add up and everything. It all goes down to that
arcade roots that it came from and all the missions and
everything came along later. So that Gouranga thing just, you know, it was a multiple kill situation
that you would have had in the arcade with the spaceship where you just killed them all. And it was the same kind of thing. (radio chatter) (soft music) - [Danny O'Dwyer] DMA worked
on the PC version of GTA, it was the PlayStation
version that brought the game into living rooms all around the world. Russell Kay had left after
the development of Lemmings II and founded his very own
studio, Visual Sciences. But then one day deep
into GTA's development, they got a call. - So DMA had been working
on Grand Theft Auto for quite awhile. We got a phone call,
initially it was pitched to us that they were needing a bit of help with the PlayStation one version. And Sega Saturn, actually. It turned out they didn't have
it rolling on either of them. And to tell you the truth, the team had no technical
knowledge as to how they were actually
going to do this at all. And we thought we were gonna have to ditch some of the game
itself to make it fit. But actually we managed
to get everything in, except for trains. While we didn't have trains that, that you could get into
in the PlayStation one, we still had trains that
just moved in the city, but a player couldn't get into a train. And so we had to cut
out one or two missions that were all revolved around trains. I don't know whether or not
the kept them into the PC one, or if they removed that as well. There was a question mark as
to whether or not because, from memory, there's three levels in GTA. We thought we were only
gonna be able to have two, to start off with it. And that was mainly a time thing, whether or not we would actually
need to be able to do it. 'Cause we also had to cut down
all the graphics pallettes. They'd done full color,
256 color graphics. And on the PlayStation one, we could only handle 16 colors per tile. People believed that the police were chasing you around the city. People believed that the
pedestrians were walking and they had sort of goals
that they were going for. People believed that there was other cars that were moving around
and, and had goals as well as to what they were actually going to do and that you could follow them. And they would be doing particular things. When in reality, that was not nowhere near what was actually going
on in the background. - [Danny O'Dwyer] It's at this point that some familiar names start to appear. Rockstar doesn't promote their
developers all that much. And as such, there are only a few names that tend to come up when
we talk about their games and usually for all the wrong reasons. Sam and Dan, the Houser Brothers have a long history of
work on the franchise, while producer Leslie
Benzies became notorious as a key player due to a 2016 lawsuit. We'll get to Mr. Benzies a little later, but it's at this point that the Houser's entered the picture. Sam Houser, son of an actress
and wealthy London lawyer had been working at the record
label BMG for a few years when he had the chance to transition to their new interactive initiative. It appears that around this time, Dan, his younger brother of two years wanted to get involved. - At Visual Science, we ended up hosting a
team from BMG interactive on the QA side of things
with one Mr. Dan Houser, as being a, he was embedded with us who just sat with us and
to play through the game and helped us find all the bugs. Sam Houser was just a
producer at that point. The DMA guys keeps saying
that they hardly ever saw Sam, but we had Sam around
our place all the time. I don't know if it was just
'cause his brother was there on the QA side of things, or if he saw the
PlayStation One as been the, the lead version or what. I don't know exactly, but he was very keen on
making sure that we had the, the PlayStation one version looking good. (upbeat music) A lot of people played
the PlayStation version. I think PlayStation
version was by far and away the most popular one. So I think that there was a generational thing going on there. You tend to find that if you were a child, you would play the PlayStation one. You, you weren't playing the PC one, but dads were playing the PC one. - [Danny O'Dwyer] The other
games that were in development were a mishmash of ideas, but many of them shared a similar DNA. A seed you could argue
was planted with Lemmings. They were all sandbox games. - Pretty much everything seemed to be moving towards this whole idea of what is generally called
sandbox games these days. And if you've ever been involved in making one of these games and I've been involved
in quite a few of them, including three Crackdowns and two and a half GTA's and so on. They are a nightmare. The company was growing. It was trying to, to mature,
taking on lots of people. You know, some of these
people had zero experience, but plenty of talent. In order to try and generate some more money to keep the company going, DMA did a deal with GT
Interactive for two other titles, "Attack" and "Clan Wars." So Attacks was kind of like a little, it was inspired by Japanese
cup noodle of all things. As it turns out, Pikmin ended up doing a very
similar sort of thing better, but attack was like little caveman, that wondered around in a group and they worked like a
little flock and they, they sort of attack dinosaurs and stuff. And "Clan Wars" was basically CNC with a kind of Scottish vibe. You know, both of those
again, two, you know, unique and original, interesting titles. - We never got a chance
to play those two games, but there were four other titles released by DMA design during this era. And they're all mad. So to help me explain them, I entrusted the help of Brian Baglow, who worked at DMA design and subsequently was PR manager for Rockstar to tell you all about "Space
Station Silicon Valley", "Wild Metal Country", "Tanktics", and of course "Body Harvest." (playful music) - So based on the success of Lemmings and some of the Adelaide games, DMA got signed to the dream team, which was the group of
developers around the world that Nintendo put together
to launch their new console, which was the Nintendo 64. And so they came up with a
game called Body Harvest, which was essentially a 3D
free roaming sandbox game in which you played a
time traveling commando who had to go back to various
periods in earth's history and defeat huge insectoid aliens. There were elements of GTA in there, because you could wonder
if wherever you want, you could pick up the weapons, you could go into buildings. It also had this sort of a very distinctly cheesy 50's sci-fi theme. It was, it's got a bit
of a cult following. I ended up going out to try
and pitch the game to Midway because Nintendo kind of stepped back. There was a constant sort of a bit, a bit of a battle because they
wanted it to be more Metroid. Every time we sent something over to them, they wanted it more family-friendly and then at the end of that
just kind of went off, you know? "Go." - It was a weird one because it spent so long
in development, right? It was about three games
over it's lifetime. I remember many people
being on various trips and just coming, like going
to Japan to speak to Nintendo. Oh, it was, it was a
really stressful time. That was one of those
ones where I was glad to be a few steps removed
from it and I would have hated to have being stuck in the front lines. I remember seeing what it did to John who was lead programmer. Yeah, that was hard going. - So Tactics was even by
the standards of DMA design, deliciously bonkers, okay? It made no fucking sense. You controlled a giant hovering creature in one of four time periods, dinosaur and a dragon,
something else and a UFO. Then you you could roam
around the landscape. You played it on a PC. So you used the mouse and you could swoop around the landscape and use your giant magnet
to pick up tank parts, or you can pick up boulders and take them to the Part-O-Matic which
was a big spinning disc somewhere on the landscape. Drop the boulders in and
recycle them into tank parts. And you can then also go and pick up sheep and drop them into the hopper and they would turn into tank parts, or you can drop them onto
the treadmill on the outside and it would speed up the
production of your tank parts. And your tanks came in tracks and engines and weapons and sensors, and you can put tanks
together in any format. So there were modules, you can build them. And then you could go off and play as a real-time strategy game to go and conquer people next to you. What was difficult about that? - It was definitely my favorite over the four games that BMG signed. Tanktics was the one I
was really excited about. I thought, this could be great. The unique selling point was gonna be the dynamically creative chain, put a magnet on the end. And it was gonna be,
the skill was gonna be in using that to pick things up. And unfortunately it was
one of those ideas that, that sounded much better
when somebody described it then when you actually
sat down to play it, when you realized that the main thing that your game hinges on isn't working, that's a, that's a hard day, because then you've gotta go
right back to the drawing board and go, right, "How are
we gonna make this work?" (dogs barking) - So "Space Station Silicon Valley" was set in a space station, which had been lost in space for years. And it was an experimental space station populated entirely by robot animals. All of a sudden it popped
back into existence, just in the new solar system. And so they send up
earths greatest heroes, Dan Danger and Evo The Robot. And they crash into the space
station and Evo is junked. And all that's left is the
Silicon chip inside his head. You know, he's just a Silicon chip. He has no power. So he powers down really quickly and to survive he has to jump
into the different animals. And you can become all
these different animals, but they're different
variations on each animal. So you've got a dog, but then the dogs have
evolved and differently. So you had the dog on wheels,
which had rocket packs so you can have races. There was also a dog with wings and a lovely white scarf
and flying goggles. So you could go zooming
through the space station. And so you had to basically get through all of these different
levels, solve puzzles, get to an inaccessible
places, hit switches. Oh, the classic
platforming, the mechanics. - "The Silicon Valley"
team were a good team. They definitely knew what they were doing. Good bunch of people. They knew their stuff technically, they were curious, inquisitive and figured things out as we went. They were, they were pretty productive. And yeah, the game, you know, it was a classic DMA game. How do you market that? And that was always the
problem with DMA games, was we just focused on
developing something that made us smile and
that we love the idea of, but then when it came to
actually communicating that, I do not envy the marketing team at any of the publishers
we ever worked with. They were a good team, Lez
started as a programmer. He was lead programmer
before he was producer. He took over production later on. It was clear that it
needed more production, more hands-on production
and he was brilliant at it. He was just really good at it. And he worked really well
with Gary Pan as well. So Gary came in as
creative manager and he, he helped to sort of focus
that project a little bit as he did with so many of the games that DMA were working on. - They were working on
a game called Covert, which was gonna be sort of a
hunty, sneaky, stealth game. Couldn't get it working. So the team kind of flipped
and they came up with this open world game, again sandbox. We play tanks and the
tanks all had different characteristics, different performance, different handling and everything. And you basically had to
trundle around the planet, blow shit up and collect power potion. Again, you know, the sound was fantastic. I thought the level design was wonderful. Rockstar published it and
it came out on the Dreamcast as Wild Metal because I think the
consensus was the country, would make people think
it was a Western game. - All of these games are very different, but they do share one commonality. None of them got a sequel, but just like their greatest hit Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto did. ♪ Soul making ♪ ♪ Soul shaking ♪ ♪ Earth quaking ♪ ♪ Change ♪ - GTA 1 is still my reference point when people talk about
the importance or not of polish time, of post
production on projects, because I saw what GTA 1 was like when it was feature complete. You know, technically had everything that it was ever gonna have. And it was borderline unplayable, yet you fast forward six months and all you've done is tweak stuff. You know, you fixed bugs,
you've tweaked physics, you've changed bullet velocities. You know, you've improved all the audio, you've done all this
stuff and it came alive. You know, the team had been on it for three and a half years. That's that was a long time
back then, in the mid nineties, you know, that was a
long, painful development. You know, there was a few
people who got burnt out. So I think they just wanted to do something very different. And the obvious thing
was to change the setting and set it 20 minutes into the future, I think was the phrase. And so there was a lot
of sort of references of Frank Miller stuff and
everything going around because it was just right. We need to make this
substantially different. (hip hop music) I mean, it was a great team. So it was two years. And to be honest, that was,
that was the biggest challenge. I remember sitting down with
the marketing team at Take-Two and they needed us to commit
to a launch date 12 months out. I mean, it was completely unheard of, but the logic was sound because they said, right, we wanna put this in the sand because by this point the
first game had been a success. They wanted to put this marker down and tell everyone else, right, this is when the second Grand
Theft Auto game is coming out. So keep your games away from us. This is, this is our date. (car engine revving) - It was a worthy successor
to GTA 1, I hope still. The difficult part was when we had that five minutes into the future
design challenge, that was ... You get so much design done for free when a game is set in a contemporary ... Like, you know how weapons work, you know how cars work, if you don't, you can go
and look, or you can listen, you can, you can ask. As soon as you have five
minutes into the future, it's like, "Okay, how
do these weapons work? "So what design should we do, lasers?" And it just takes, you know, how do the cars work? Are they electric now? So there's so much more design to do on a game that's not contemporary. And yeah, we learned
that big time on GTA II. - The last sort of six, nine months were basically just a big, long crunch. I mean, no one was
chaining us to our desks, but we just knew, we knew we couldn't
knock off at five o'clock and get everything done and get the game shippable
in a state we wanted. So I can certainly remember one time where I drove everyone home
at seven in the morning, because we'd worked through the night. The gold master was due to be concorded over to New York or something. So we had to, we had to meet the Concorde and, you know, it got picked
up in a taxi from Dundee, taxi down to Heathrow and
concorded over to New York. So it was like, yeah, we need to just pull
out the stops here, you know? (telephone ringing) The thing that I liked most about it, that never actually
panned out how we talked, but it was the fact that there was no prescriptive mission order. You know, in the first
game you had the, you know, certain forms of driving
and you had, you know, you had limited choice. You know, you had a little bit
of choice what you could do. And obviously between missions, you could go off on tangents. What we tried to do with
the second game was, was really open that up,
and depending on how, how you sort of favored
with the different gangs, you were taking different missions. So we wanted you, the player to be much, much more in control. (explosion erupts) - [Game Announcer] Job complete. And we understood the gameplay
a bit better by that point. So, yeah, I think it was
a richer environment, richer set of missions. And most of the design decisions were made with the whole team, we basically evolved the game on the fly. And I think it was
every Wednesday morning, I would just go down to the team room and we'd all get around the
whiteboard and go, right! And we would just brainstorm stuff. So some of that would be vehicles. You know, what are some
of the functionality that the designers need to build into the mission structure, kind of got done by committee, which was great in terms of
getting the team bought in, but it was just a very different
structure to, you know, how you develop games now where ultimately it's a much smaller group
responsible for making sure` it's tight and focused, But it did mean everyone was bought in because it was it was all, you know, group decisions on what could,
and couldn't make it in. - [Narrator] In the city, respect is everything. (upbeat music) (sirens blaring) (car engine roaring) - [Danny O'Dwyer] The
intro to the game was like, sort of a super cutted
version of this movie thing that was used for marketing, right? - [Dan Houser] We were aware there was, there was a intro movie getting cut. We weren't really involved. I remember us all being
really impressed with it. So there was, there was no problems, but no, we weren't
really involved with it. On the first game, I think
there was a promo video shot and the dev team went out
and drove around Dundee and were hanging out a window shooting fake guns down at
the docks in Dundee and stuff. I don't know if that video
still exists, but yeah. You know, GTA was now big enough that we weren't gonna get
away with doing that again. - And that makes sense
that you weren't involved because it always seemed
a bit like sort of, in Congress as well. Like that was sort of the
contemporary New York, clearly gangster type thing, but it felt different to
the retro-futuristic stuff. - I mean, a lot of the publishing and the marketing was
all done in New York. You know, the, the
picture, the cover art was, was taken from the top of
the Empire State Building just looking down. To this day, everyone thinks, you know, the game is developed in the States. It just, because it's got that vibe. And because there's not, in the scheme of things that big a deal ever made about it being something that, that comes out in Scotland. - History records Grand Theft Auto III as the final game from DMA design. But in truth, it was GTA
II where this story ends. DMA had been passed from pillar
to post over the late years, just before the release of
II Dave Jones sold DMA design to Gremlin Interactive
for one pound Sterling and around 2 million pounds in debt. And just after GTA II launched, Gremlin were in turn acquired by the French publisher Infograms. But family friendly
Infograms were concerned about the negative
publicity Grand Theft Auto may attract to them. So they look to offload
the studio pretty quickly. This is when Take-Two Interactive who wanted Grand Theft Auto bought DMA and made it part of their
new label Rockstar Games, which was being headed by two brothers recently hired from BMG interactive. Early copies of Grand Theft Auto III have the DMA logo on the back of the box. While later copies would feature the studio's new name, Rockstar North, but from all the people we talked to, the truth is that DMA came to an end when the studio moved
from their native Dundee to set up shop in Scotland's
capital Edinburgh. This is where Rockstar
North still calls home. This is where many of our interviewees decided to part ways with the company for one reason or another. Some of them had simply
just crunched on GTA II really hard and needed a change. Others still cited
Take-Two's corporate culture. They didn't really vibe with
how self serious it was, and they wanted to do something else. Others still just didn't
wanna move to Edinburgh, but some of them did
work in the early stages of Grand Theft Auto III. So I was hoping they'd able to answer the question that has been
bugging me since we started this, who was it that stuck around? Who were the people who were
there in the story of DMA that shepherded Grand Theft
Auto into this new era? (gentle music) - So the Silicon Valley team was superb. The core of that team was
Lez, who was the coder. And he was kind of looking after the team and there was Obbe. Obbe was fantastic, he
was a really sharp coder. And then Aaron Garbut, who
was the artist, very creative. And they were kind of
the core of that team. And they became the core of the GTA team. So, GTA III team and they were a really
good, tight, effective unit, really good at getting things done, which was the best thing about it. And they just had a really good game feel. They really understood the importance of how things should feel. I think it was Lez's belief in himself and Obbe and Aaron that
they would get these, they would be able to make
this game properly 3D. - It was essentially
the Silicon Valley Team that took over GTA and became the GTA III team at that point. So the Silicon Valley team, to my mind were the team that really
took it and ran with it. The way I always looked at it was, it took the whole of DMA Design and every game that DMA design ever made to make GTA III. Because when you look at what it became, it had bits of "Body Harvest" in it, the open world, vehicle 3D thing, they'd already encountered
and attempted to solve the design for how you structure missions in 3D world landscapes, same
with Silicon valley as well. We'd already done that. But then the physics part of GTA III came from "Wild Metal Country" because, I think it was Bill Henderson
was working on the physics. "Wild Metal Country" was
really heavy on the physics. You know what? If felt like to me, it felt like no one team within DMA on its own could have made GTA III. The only reason GTA III
happened was we had a great team who were really good at like focusing and producing and organizing, that had all the support around them from all these other projects that we'd learned hard lessons from. There were just a lot of
people who didn't know how to make games to begin with 'cause we were hiring people
who had never made games, but by that time in '99, 2000, we had people who had
made and released games and they knew what to do. And then it was a case of
getting the right people together to lead certain parts. Yeah, I don't think the GTA 1 team could have made GTA III and I don't think the Silicon Valley team could have made GTA III. To me, it took DMA design as
it was then, the whole of it. To my mind, it was that
institutional learning from, you know, the whole way through and all the mistakes that had been made on all the projects that
culminated into that one thing and really got that one over the fence. Like the commercial success
of it is almost by the by but just the technical, what
it became was incredible. It's fantastic to think that DMA ever produced a game as good as that. - Hey, so this documentary was done. And then I got an email from
somebody, somebody important who was like, "I worked on a bunch of these games at DMA and I worked at Rockstar. If you have any questions, let me know." It's the finished dock behind me. So this is about as late
a 11th hour interview as I've ever done. Hello? - Hey, how are you? - Hey, there we go. Not too bad, how are you keeping? - Alright, good to talk to you. Let me just say that I'm actually quite big fan of your series. I think your videos are amazing. - Thank you so much, that means a lot. Whenever we hear like, people
who actually make games, especially, you know, some
of the best games ever, watch our stuff, it's like the most humbling thing in the world. So, thank you so much. - Yeah, no problem. It's always fun to talk about
the good old days at Dundee. So, you know, anytime. - What are your, you know, strongest memories of your time working on "Space Station Silicon Valley" then? - It's really just comradery. It was a small team,
it was just 10 people. So four coders, maybe three
artists, three level designers, something like that for most of the time, it grew a little bit at the end. And you know, we did everything together. Like typically go out
drinking on Wednesdays and then again on Fridays, just with the team or with the company, there wasn't a design document that we had to strictly follow. But because everybody talked
to each other in a team, it all worked out in the end, you know? You can criticize other people and you can take criticism
from other people. That's half the battle because then you, you can have an open discussion. Everybody listened to everybody and it was just really
fun to work that way. So we finished "Space
Station Silicon Valley" in '99, late '98. And in '99 we set up
another office in Edinburgh because basically there was
quite a few people like me that didn't really love Dundee. I mean, it was fun to work at for a while, but it's a, you know, you couldn't see yourself
starting a family there. So they set up an office in Edinburgh which is just an hour up the road. And then, you know, I volunteered for it and most of the Silicon Valley team went there straight away. but it wasn't really a plan
for what we were gonna do. You know, it wasn't ... We went there and then
we kind of sat there. I said, "Okay, now what did we do?" So what ended up happening, is everybody started
doing their own project. So it was Leslie and Aaron and said, well, why don't we work on GTA III? because you know, GTA
1 was such a great hit, GTA II didn't do so well,
but we can take it into 3D and you know, they could see that, that it's gonna go somewhere. So they started doing that. And literally within two weeks,
like everybody just went, yeah, that's a great idea. So everybody sort of teamed
up and we started doing it. And in fact, it didn't
really come from management. It didn't come from New York, they just kind of let us do it for a bit. And then after maybe four or five months, they went, well, this looks pretty good. So, okay, carry on.
Just do what you're doing. Whereas before, it sounded
like they were actually planning to give it to
another company altogether, because GTA II wasn't really
working out that well, but at that point, they just kind of went, okay, fine, you do GTA III. (gun firing) Leslie Benzies did make a design document with everything specked out, like the weapons and the sort
of type of vehicles we have. But basically, I think
everybody was pretty confident that it was just gonna be GTA 1 in 3D. There's some things
that didn't really work that well in GTA 1, they have like, a lot of the missions you
do through phone calls. You know, that was really not something that we thought would
translate that well to 3D. It was kind of weird to
answer the phone everywhere. So we ditched that idea,
but these are minor tweaks. I mean, the gameplay was just great. It was just a matter of making it 3D And of course, 3D gives
you more opportunities too, all of a sudden the weapons
are more interesting. So you can have like, blow up this truck and there's multiple ways of doing it, with a rocket launcher and
the grenades or whatever. So, you know, sniper rifle
doesn't really work in 2D, but it works in 3D. So it just led to more
interesting missions just because it was in 3D. Now it was about 25 people. So basically the Space
Station Silicon Valley team, plus a few other people that
have finished their projects and maybe some new hires. But it was still the same, we'd still sort of go
out together and stuff, but it was just incredibly hard work. In fact, it was a lot
shorter than Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was three
and a half years maybe. And GTA was just two,
two and a half maybe. What was crazy was Vice City though, because that was just one year. In that year, we also did
the PC version of GTA III so that year it was, it was a bit much. But the GTA III was fun. Yeah, it was just fun. - Okay, so you were
saying that like 25 people in over the course of
like two and a half years made like the first open world city game and your enduring memory was that it was, it was a good laugh. - It was a good laugh, yeah. And there was still time,
you know, it is Scotland, there was still time to
get pissed twice a week. So it was all, it was all good. (police radio chatter) - From my conversations
with the early DMA folks, I'd come to understand that on the first two Grand Theft Auto games, Sam Houser had more of an
ANR, producer style role for the publisher BMG. While Dan did some QA
work on the first game and had written the second games intro from Rockstar's offices in New York. This office founded in 1998
when Take-Two started Rockstar after the acquisition of BMG Interactive. Dan has a writing credit
on Grand Theft Auto III, while Sam, an executive producer credit. So I guess I wanted to know how involved the New York Rockstar office was in the development of
Grand Theft Auto III. And ultimately what was work
like under corporate ownership, especially for a bunch of
folks who had worked at DMA. - They were pretty much hands-off
with GTA III I would say. I would say it was really up to us. And the game was completely
designed around the missions. Like people would come up and say, oh, this would be cool
a idea, maybe try this. And we tried it and it
was fun, yep that's in. It was not fun, it's out. Nothing to do with the story basically. And then it was up to
the story writers too, but it wasn't really a story. It's like you meet a character,
you do five missions, you meet another character. In the future, in the later games, New York sort of got more involved and took more charge of it. And they had their ideas
about how the story would be playing out. And the characters were more important. But with GTA III, there was very little, it was mostly wrapping a thin story around the missions really. Doing small games are like really fun because there's only so many people. So every person has like
a lot of responsibility. So I can look at GTA III and say, oh, I did that, or whatever, the clouds, I can make along list of things. But then as we moved along,
like got more programs, more artists, everybody
did a smaller piece. So at the end, you know, I
only did like a little bit, so it's just way more fun
to work on smaller projects. And after GTA IV, for me, that was a little too big a project. - What's your memory of DMA? Do you think DMA came with
you as well to Edinburgh, that I was still DMA during GTA III? And what is your sort of
like memory of what DMA was, I guess, as opposed to
what Rockstar North was? - I don't think of it
as the same company now. I think DMA stayed in Dundee and slowly dissipated into other companies and all the people that work there still. I think Dave Jones had
a lot to do with it. I think the freedom had
a lot to do with it. So yeah, now it just became different. It became more corporate
and not in a bad way, but more focused and more
sort of single track. Whereas in DMA it was all,
you know, it was chaos. It was like interesting projects, projects being canceled, new projects being started all the time. You know, that just disappeared. So DMA was something that
happened from '85 until '99. And then it sort of, as
far as I'm concerned, it just kind of went away. (mysterious music) - When I started this project, I wanted to celebrate
the legacy of DMA Design. And obviously, what I thought that was, was celebrating all the games they made and ultimately the one franchise
that took over the world. But from talking to all of these people, the folks you've seen and
others I talked to privately or over email, there's another legacy here,
a really important one. It's not just the games that they made, but it's the place they made them. Since the closing of DMA Design, the city of Dundee would go on to become one of game development's
most influential cities. Not just the many games
that were made here, but pioneering innovations in education, technology and entertainment. Inspired by a handful of local boys who made some of the
biggest games in the world, Dundee would go on to embrace video games as an industry that
everybody could be a part of, which is why today, a city in Scotland with a population just
shy of 150,000 people is recognized as one of the most important video game hubs in the world. - Way back in the mid nineties, Scotland had six development studios. DMA was the one that did Lemmings and Lemmings was one of the very first superstar, breakout,
international smashes. 22 platforms, millions of sales, and that's still fondly remembered. There are pubs in Dundee
that are decorated with Lemmings on every surface. I would argue that that's a, the fact that DMA was
there and Visual Science, really helped directly
inspire Alberta University to go, hang on, maybe there's something that we could be teaching
in this whole game thing, And they did, they
created the world's first first video game development university. You know, Dundee remains, the sort of the beating heart
of Scotland's game scene. Around about 50% of all
the development in Scotland is in and around Dundee. Dundee has reinvented itself. It used to be known for
juke, jam and journalism. You know, so it was an
industrial city before that, it was a shipping, bailing,
you know, port city. But it's now, you know, the waterfront is a place
of culture and creativity. And not only have we got the V&A Museum right on the waterfront, it's now getting a 4,000
seat E-sport arena, one of the first in the whole of the UK. So it's continuing to
innovate and pioneer, and it's still inspiring people across the whole of the country. You know, we made Grand Theft Auto, we continue to make Grand Theft Auto. It happened here.
It could happen to you. You can do it as well. (gentle music) (upbeat music) (horns blaring) (car alarm blaring) (car horn blaring) (people yelling)
(car horns blaring) (car horns blaring) (people yelling)
(car horns blaring) (police sirens blaring) (police radio chatter) - [Police Officer] Freeze! (police sirens blaring) (car engine revving) (car horns blaring) (police radio chatter) (keyboard clicking)
