How the world’s biggest game flickered into life above a Dundee chippy (and why women like me LOVE to play it

I‘Then I get a call on my phone from a drug dealer’

T’S SATURDAY night and I’m at a bit of a loose end. My husband’s away for work, there’s nothing on the box and a large glass of Merlot has been poured. Time to relax. What better way than to go for a drive? I hop into the first stolen car I see and push down on the accelerator. Before long I’m zooming through busy city streets at a dangerous speed, the radio blasting out hiphop at full blast. Then I get a call on my phone from a drug dealer and I’m so distracted, I crash my car straight into a wall. Never mind. I can always steal another one, as long as I can find my gun.

No, I haven’t lost my marbles or turned to a life of crime. The wheel I’m behind tonight is virtual. It takes me into a neon, glowing landscape of fast cars, dark alleyways, and millions of other unlikely gamers, just like me.

I’m the first to admit that, as a 45-year-old woman who’s never driven anything faster than a Mini Cooper, I’m far from your classic video game player... but then, that is the glossy, illicit allure of Grand Theft Auto. It’s reckless, silly fun and really rather addictive, whether you’re a game-mad teenager or a middle-aged slow-lane crawler like me.

Perhaps that is what has made Grand Theft Auto – 25 years on from its creation – not just the world’s most successful computer game, but the most successful media title ever created. That means it’s more popular than any movie franchise, including Star Wars, and has raked in more money than any book series including JK Rowling’s Harry Potter.

Its latest incarnation has sold 155millionplus copies and generated more than $6billion (£4.9billion) in revenue. Grand Theft Auto is not just a video game. It’s a phenomenon.

It was created in Scotland, and is still being made here, making it one of the country’s most astonishing success stories of all time.

It is also one of its most controversial ones. Grand Theft Auto has been banned in several countries, been accused of promoting violence in children, and long courted controversy thanks to morally dubious gameplay that involves deliberately knocking people down, torture, and the use of sex workers.

Even the marketing was cynical. The company hired late, disgraced publicity guru Max Clifford to plant stories in the national press to stir up concern, while questions were asked about it in parliament.

But no one knew what lay ahead when, on November 28, 1997, the very first version of the game was released. Initially, it wasn’t even a big hit with the developers who made it, Dundee-based DMA Design. One producer recently revealed that a few months before its release, a straw poll amongst DMA staff voted it the least likely of their seven games in development to succeed.

At that point, Grand Theft Auto had been in development for three and a half years. DMA – which had been created in the 1980s above a chip shop in Dundee by a group of young men who had met at the weekly meet-ups of Dundee Computer Club – had recently enjoyed a big market success with the game Lemmings, which had sold internationally and led to a number of spin-offs. It allowed them to work on a number of different game ideas, one of which was Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

But to the astonishment of its millions of fans today who zoom around its pin-sharp virtual streets in glossy, high-speed cars, it originally started as a dinosaur game.

‘You played a dinosaur roaming around the city,’ explained Colin Macdonald, who joined DMA the year GTA was released. ‘But because the city looked so good, people lost interest in the dinosaurs and started going, “Those cars, can I take control? Can I get out? What if I had a gun?’”

‘The first version of GTA was called Race’n’Chase. The game penalised you if you ran through red lights. But eventually you’re like, “People don’t want to stop at red lights.”’

It’s a fair point. After all, who wants to play a game of virtual traffic wardens when they can find the real thing just outside their door? Instead, the Grand Theft Auto that was released in November 1997 allowed gamers to play as a criminal, driving cars and getting into scrapes across three virtual cities. Stealing cars was encouraged, as was running over anyone who got in your way.

It was dangerous and different, an open world game that allowed you not just to follow set missions, but park up and make your own adventures, too. The fledgling home-gaming world had ever seen anything quite like it.

Grand Theft Auto became an immediate bestseller. Within a year, global shipments to retailers of both the PC and PlayStation versions had surpassed one million units. But not everyone was a fan. The game’s shaky morals sparked protests in both the UK and Australia, while the Police Federation of England and Wales branded the original game as ‘sick, deluded and beneath contempt’. Brazil banned the game altogether.

The release of Grand Theft Auto II in 1999, and GTA III in 2001 did little to dampen the outrage. The third instalment of the game, which featured hyper-realistic graphics and the ability to pay for sex workers, saw it branded ‘Most Offensive Game of the Year’ while Australia banned it, leading the company to eventually issue a modified version of the game for the country which would pass its censors.

In a rare interview the reclusive Leslie Benzies, who was running what had by then been bought over and rebranded Rockstar North, said that the company had come in for a fair amount of opprobrium.

‘We’ve had such a beating over the past three years,’ he said. ‘If I get into a confrontation, once I’ve

Friends who were brains behind it

had my beating, I ask if they’ve ever played the game. Invariably they haven’t.’

He added: ‘There is a big fear factor here. It’s the coming of the railways... It’s Elvis shaking his hips. It’s cars going over 25mph and making people explode.’

Fellow Rockstar North founder Sam Houser, meanwhile, pointed out: ‘There is nothing in the game more or less violent than an episode of The Sopranos, but because it is a video game, people react differently. Not sure why.’

Benzies, a dashing Aberdonian, started working for DMA at the age of 24, and took the helm of GTA along with brothers Sam and Dan Houser during an acquisition move which eventually gave birth to the company known today as Rockstar North.

The trio, along with art director Aaron Garbut, have always been notoriously publicity shy and for many years cultivated a culture that was shrouded in the sort of secrecy you’d expect from a spy agency, rather than a computer games firm based in the centre of Edinburgh.

One of the only times the four were seen in public was in a valedictory appearance at the Baftas in 2014 when they were awarded a coveted Bafta Fellowship in recognition of the outstanding and unprecedented impact they had made on the entertainment industry.

It was certainly deserved. The previous year, the latest version of the game had become the fastest selling entertainment product in history. Within the first 24 hours of its launch it broke industry sales records by earning almost £500million.

But after releasing five versions of the game between 1997 and 2013, there has now been no follow up for nine long years. For a successful movie franchise this might have been the kiss of death. JK Rowling would certainly have felt the heat from her publishers if she had waited nine years between Harry Potter instalments.

And yet not only does Grand Theft Auto still retain its loyal core of millions of fans, it’s picked up millions more, many of whom weren’t even born when the first GTA was released.

This may be because as an open world game, Grand Theft Auto is constantly evolving. Part of the game’s allure is how immersive that world is. It has its own radio stations, its own meet up spots, and endless quests and adventures to go on. Rich narratives interlay with film-quality images, while virtual worlds unfold into more, highly detailed inner landscapes. You can lose yourself for hours, and never get bored. Players can go off and do whatever they like, interacting with other players online. Its very unreality means that at times, it uncannily mirrors the real world.

In February 2020, when violence gripped the streets of Hong Kong as protesters clashed with riot police, similar battles took place in the GTA city of Los Santos, with players armed with Molotov cocktails trashing subway stations and firebombing police vehicles, dressed in hard hats and gas masks that closely resembled what their real life counterparts were wearing. Chinese government supporters dressed in police uniforms fought back.

While the game itself has not had a new release, Rockstar is constantly adding new elements, from underground nightclubs with real-life DJs giving real-time performances (an add-on which became hugely popular during the Covid-19 pandemic) to test tracks for car racing.

The question now is, when will the 200 or so staff who work in hushed rows at Rockstar North’s Edinburgh offices, a stone’s throw from the Scottish parliament, release Grand Theft Auto VI?

Benzies left the company in 2016 after a protracted legal case, while Dan Houser left in 2020. His brother Sam, who now lives in New York, still helms the firm, and is said to be keen to get the new version out. There have been rumours of a trailer before the end of the year, and a release by, perhaps, 2024. The technology that powers computer games has moved on enormously since its last release, meaning expectations will be sky high.

Meanwhile, 25 years from its debut, the impact of Grand Theft Auto on Scotland as a whole has been palpable. Rockstar North’s very presence makes it a country the computer gaming industry takes seriously.

There’s been a wider knock-on effect to the Scottish economy, too. Some of the original DMA Design team members convinced Dundee’s Abertay University to launch the world’s first computer games courses. Today, Scotland boasts more than 400 computer firms employing more than 1,300 people, an industry that rakes in £350million a year.

And then there are ordinary Scots like me, who just like driving around on sunny streets shaded by palm trees on cold winter’s nights. I bought my copy of Grand Theft Auto V in 2014, a year after its release, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm, consigned it to a shelf for a year or two. But like a favourite sitcom or a well-loved book, I keep coming back to it.

There are always new places to explore, people to meet, and cars to wreck (and I really am terrible at driving the cars, so much so that for a while, I travelled everywhere by taxi).

It’s interactive and strangely calming, an escape from the troubles of the real world, and goodness knows there are enough of them right now. Instead it’s a portal into a seamless fantasy world with stunning graphics, excellent music and a wry, sophisticated sense of humour. And aside from all that, it’s just jolly good fun.

Pass me another glass of Merlot. It’s time to get behind the wheel again...

‘It’s cars going over 25mph and making people explode’