Mike Dailly, programmer, artist

I was DMA Design’s first employee. Dave Jones, its founder, took me on in 1989 and we started bringing all these young people into our Dundee HQ. By 1994, I was working on a game engine that evolved into something called Race and Chase. You could play as the cops or you could play as the criminals.

Dave was fascinated by the idea of just giving players the tools and letting them do what they wanted. There were maybe seven programmers working on it. All the little effects, like being able to run pedestrians over, came from someone saying: “Hey, it would be cool if you could do this.” When we first got the driving part done, everyone huddled around to see it working. It was brilliant, just bombing around the city, but it was still bug-ridden and the demo was always crashing. The buildings weren’t right, though it did have a nice feel.

We had a major fallout over car collisions, too. They just didn’t work. The code was like spaghetti junction. I ranted at the team for letting it get in such a mess. But I think the guys who did the PlayStation version had a bigger challenge when we handed the game to them. It needed a huge amount of memory and the console just didn’t have it.

I’d no idea GTA would be so big. When we did Lemmings, we all thought it was great – but we weren’t sure anyone else would. That’s how development works. You should always set out to make a game you enjoy playing.

Paul Farley, game designer

I was one of three designers who got put on GTA. We were a bit disappointed. “What the hell is this?” we thought. It looked like a crappy 2D driving game. And it wasn’t even a game at that point, just a prototype. Then we had the idea of allowing the player to pick up missions by visiting phoneboxes, and it became much more free and open. There was resistance from the coding team, though: they’d never envisaged a player exploring a game for two or three hours. They were thinking: “OK, we just need to make sure we can prevent the game from crashing for about five minutes at a time.”

Me and the other designers were each given a massive sheet of graph paper and told: “OK, start designing a city.” We just sat and said: “Where is this set?” We thought America, obviously, and decided we’d take the essence of Manhattan, San Francisco and Miami. These became Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City. It was before the days of big budgets, though, so there were no fact-finding trips to the US. We had one PC with internet access for research. Other than that, we went to the library. We’d come in on a Monday and say: “What movies did you watch at the weekend? What music are you listening to?” That really informed the game. We had guys who were really into cars, others into heavy weaponry. We’d bring in our favourite childhood shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team, and take inspiration from movies like Speed, which we referenced a lot.

Moral issues? Grand Theft Auto

We wanted to poke fun at US culture and could do pretty much whatever we wanted, since from day one the plan was for it to be 18-rated. Sometimes we went too far. In one mission idea, which was later cut, you had to go around burning churches. You’d probably be arrested for putting that in a game now, even though it was all very tongue in cheek.

Everyone remembers the Hare Krishnas, who’d dance along the pavement. I think that came from a bug: groups of pedestrians would start following one person around and we thought: “Can we use this? What sort of people walk around in a long line like that?” And we thought of Hare Krishnas. Most of the team didn’t care about the moral issues though Keith Hamilton, the project leader, always stopped at the traffic lights, much to everyone’s amusement.

Strangely, GTA was the runt of the litter. The visuals weren’t great: it felt like something left over from the Commodore Amiga era. But from the very start, we thought we were making a great game. There was an arrogance. Walking into HMV and seeing it at No 1 didn’t surprise me. We just felt, well, this is what DMA does. But its longevity has been the big surprise. We never thought it would end up being the number-one entertainment franchise in the world.