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00:09Welcome to MojoPlays and today we're going back to the beginning and diving into the earliest days of Rockstar's crime
00:17saga before the series made the jump to 3D and became the industry standard for open worlds.
00:22Listen right, we're looking for a lad who can do his stuff. I've heard you a bit tasty. No messing
00:29around or you get a slap.
00:31Alternate Versions
00:41GTA 1 didn't walk into the world looking like a PC crime industry leader.
00:46Instead, DMA Design was originally writing the thing for Sega Saturn and the Nintendo 64, those fat little cartridges and
00:54discs that were supposed to own the living room.
00:56But the PC build was the version they could actually finish without waiting on hardware that kept moving the goalposts.
01:02It shipped on computers first, then PlayStation showed up a couple weeks later like it had been the plan the
01:08whole time, while Saturn and the N64 never got a cart.
01:12You can feel that scramble when you play it now, because the city is a top-down toy that still
01:18thinks it might have to live on a console with no memory to spare, and then it just... doesn't.
01:23The funny part is how normal that sounds in hindsight.
01:31QA Files
01:37Buried in GTA 2's leftovers is the sound of a studio yelling at itself.
01:43Dozens of unused text strings beg you to please report dead brief to Alan Jack and Willie Mills, which are
01:50the most 1990s bug report I have ever read inside a finished game.
01:54And then, somebody left arse biscuits in there like a dare.
01:59Those fail lines still think like GTA 1, where you blow a job and that phone is dead forever.
02:05No retry, no maybe later, just a city that briefly stops offering you work, forcing you to treat every pager
02:12like it might be the last decent score on that block.
02:15GTA 2 loosened up, but the files never got the memo, so you can still hear the old punishment sitting
02:22in the unused text, waiting for a tester to trip it and send Alan another dead brief.
02:28Machine gun, armor, health!
02:32GTA 2, Berlin
02:34Unit 24, there's a desk 90, 50, Chicago
02:41Job complete!
02:42Somebody at Take 2 looked at GTA 2 and said, sure, but what if it was 1980s Berlin before the
02:50wall came down?
02:51That was the kind of pitch that sounds great on a flight and then dies when the people actually building
02:56the city explain how they work.
02:58Remote offices were already running ahead of Rockstar's real pipeline, which is a fancy way of saying the map existed
03:04as a fantasy while DMA was still trying to make anywhere not crash.
03:09GTA 2 on N64 and a weird little GTA 1.5 got floated in the same pile, but none of
03:16it ever shipped.
03:17You still get the joke though, even in 1999 they already knew the sequel's real product was a place you
03:24could sell, and Berlin was just the first city that didn't make it out of the travel brochure.
03:40In 1998, DMA had big ideas for the GTA series and wanted you to treat buildings like pinatas.
03:47A design doc for GTA 2 describes planting a bomb, blowing a structure down floor by floor, with debris slapping
03:55pedestrians on the way down, and then the plot either staying as rubble or turning back into pavement you could
04:01drive.
04:01In the 1990s, this was not a modest feature request, it was a second game hiding inside the one they
04:09shipped.
04:09What you got instead was a city that looked busy until you noticed the scenery is basically painted onto the
04:15world, and only the cars are allowed to have a bad day, so you can understand why they cut it.
04:21Keeping a living street stable was already a fight, and letting every block collapse into physics homework would have turned
04:28that framerate into a crime of its own.
04:35Wasted!
04:36Missing Arsenal
04:38GTA 2's cutting room floor is armed like a cartoon armory that failed health and safety.
04:44A microwave gun was supposed to fry a cone of people, which is both hilarious and exactly the kind of
04:50toy DMA would invent after too much coffee.
04:53An electro baton still half lives in the files, like somebody implemented the first half of a bad idea and
04:59then got called into a meeting.
05:00Instant Gang would have rented you 40 seconds of hired thugs, which is the most honest description of friendship in
05:07the series.
05:08The wishlist also wanted a dummy tracker, stingers, and a silencer pickup, because of course it did.
05:14Playing the shipped game, you can tell they kept the weapons that could clearly be understood from a rooftop camera,
05:20and quietly buried the ones that needed a paragraph of explanation before the first shot.
05:24Can't get enough GTA content? Then head to Mojo Play's 24-7 live stream for all the best content that
05:30gaming has to offer.
05:32Scan the QR code on screen to join us live for non-stop fun.
05:36A stolen motor.
05:41The mission names in GTA 2 would rather be clever than cool.
05:46GBH is just the UK legal term for grievous bodily harm, dumped into a pager like a police report with
05:53a punchline.
05:54A stolen motor is Dundee slang, the kind of sentence you only write if you grew up where that is
05:59how people actually talk about nicking a car.
06:02DMA knew the rest of the planet would stare at it and keep driving, and that's the charm.
06:07These games were already selling an American crime fantasy built by Scottish weirdos who refused to sand their jokes down
06:14for export.
06:15You feel it in the radio, the mission text, and the way the job sounds like a mate calling you
06:20an idiot from a pub phone.
06:22The Grand Theft Auto series went global, but the grammar stayed local on purpose.
06:271034 in South Central.
06:33Scottish Code
06:39If the mission text didn't give the game away, the cheat codes most certainly would have.
06:46Nine in a row is Rangers' ninth title year stuffed into a coded message.
06:51It's Gallus is Scot slang sitting there like a password your cousin would invent.
06:56Superwell is Motherwell getting a quiet nod while the rest of the world wonders why a crime game cares about
07:02football.
07:03Brother Marcus's known associates are Wooly, Bobe, Soapy, Hen, and The Bairn, which sound less like a gang file and
07:10more like a roll call outside a chip shop.
07:12Every one of the codes is DMA leaving fingerprints on a product BMG was busy selling as an international menace.
07:20You can punch in a code expecting invincibility and get a geography lesson from Glasgow instead.
07:26I love that they didn't translate it because the cheats still work, but only the locals get the joke.
07:31You listen to me, you two-bit motherfucker! I hear you're working behind my back!
07:38Leftover Face
07:46GTA 2 has a spare clawed hanging around where the health display lives.
07:51A bald, blue-eyed leftover head that doesn't even remotely match the clawed speed from the live-action short.
07:57Movie clawed looks like a person, while file clawed looks like a UI icon that escaped the HUD and refused
08:04to leave.
08:04There is also a busted face left over from GTA 1, still sitting unused like the old arrest screen never
08:11got the news that the sequel had moved on.
08:14None of this changes how the game plays, it just reminds you how handmade these things were.
08:20The faces got recycled, swapped, and abandoned between builds, and nobody cleaned the drawer.
08:26When you hear people talk about clawed like he arrived fully formed in 3, this is the funnier origin story.
08:37GTA 2
08:39Female Lead
08:40On PC, GTA 2 lets you pick more than one flavor of criminal, including women who could steal the same
08:47cars and ruin the same afternoon for the games and PCs.
08:51PlayStation got the men-only cut, which is the version a lot of people remember because that was the box
08:56in the shop.
08:57The series hasn't handed the whole map to a woman as the lead, which is a wild sentence to type
09:03about a franchise that will let you run over a marching band.
09:06You can argue marketing, hardware, or who buys crime games, but DMA's answer at the time was just to ship
09:12what each format would take.
09:14Playing the PC build now feels like peaking at a future two decades in the making.
09:19Brutality
09:25Early on, the cops in these games were supposed to behave like cops.
09:30You know, pull you over, be annoying, and maybe write you a ticket in spirit.
09:34However, testers got a taste of the alternative, where the police just ram you because it was faster and funnier.
09:41And suddenly, nobody wanted the traffic stop fantasy.
09:44DMA leaned into the violence because the room laughed when the squad car got turned into a weapon, and that
09:50choice still defines the series.
09:52GTA isn't a driving game that happens to have crime.
09:56It's a city that treats a bumper like a punchline.
09:59Next time a wanted star shows up, and the first official response is a full speed kiss to your taillight,
10:05that's not a bug in the AI.
10:07It's a tester preference that escaped the lab and became policy.
10:1520-Minute City
10:17GTA 2's design bible pointed at Mac's headroom, then dressed the streets in Blade Runner and Akira until the manual
10:30could call it a dystopian urban hell and stand by it.
10:33Radio chatter makes the year feel like 1999, while an old site said it was actually 2013.
10:41The timeline is still a mess, which is perfect for a game that already looks like the future went cheap.
10:47You drive through anywhere and the skyline keeps telling you this is the world of tomorrow, while the pager still
10:53sounds like last week.
10:54That 20-minute city idea is the whole joke.
10:57A place so compressed and hostile it feels like a TV signal without traffic.
11:023 would later pick a more realistic New York mask, but GTA 2 stayed neon and unhelpful on purpose.
11:10A sequel that would rather be remembered as a bad transmission than a postcard.
11:22Against the odds.
11:23We are building a crime syndicate of extraordinary magnitude.
11:28We extort money in the tradition of our ancestors.
11:32Mid development, somebody ran an informal poll of seven DMA titles and Grand Theft Auto won, least likely to succeed.
11:41This isn't some humblebrag story they invented after the money showed up either.
11:45The game crashed every couple of minutes and nobody in the building could explain what the game was without using
11:51their hands.
11:52The pitch was a city you were allowed to treat badly, but was stuck with a camera that made everything
11:57look like a toy until the siren started.
11:59From the inside, it looked like a project you hid from visiting executives.
12:03But then people bought it, the tabloids screamed, and suddenly the least likely game on the whiteboard became the entire
12:09company.
12:10I prefer the real origin story better than the myth that they always knew the series would become a runaway
12:16success.
12:17Nice work, kid, but the shit's at the f***ing Fred.
12:20The cops are crawling up my ass with flashlights looking for you.
12:24Stomping Dino
12:25Mike Daly's engine test wasn't the crime saga we all know and love.
12:30Instead, it was a top-down 3D city with a dinosaur flattening buildings,
12:34which is the only correct way to prove a renderer works if you have any joy left in your body.
12:39Cars were added so the streets felt alive instead of like graph paper,
12:43but then somebody let the player get out of the car and race and chase stopped being a racing pitch.
12:49That one single change is the entire series, while everything after it is commentary.
12:55You can still see the dinosaur logic in the way GTA treats architecture as something you are allowed to bully.
13:01However, always remember they never started with satire of America.
13:04They started with a lizard on a block and a question about whether a pedestrian could become a problem.
13:10The answer was yes. Obviously yes.
13:12Race and chase.
13:19Before it was Grand Theft Auto, the design doc wanted modes and lots of them.
13:25Cannonball run, demolition derby, bank robbery, bank robbery, but you were the cop.
13:30Street names were supposed to get barked over the radio while you flipped a printed map like a tourist having
13:35a stroke.
13:36Gary Penn later said the quiet part out loud.
13:39Nobody wanted to be the cop because of course they didn't.
13:42Being the cop is homework, but being the idiot with the stolen hatchback is a personality.
13:48That's how a racing concept with a civic duty option turned into the most profitable argument against following instructions in
13:55video games.
13:56The printed map is the detail that still gets me.
13:59They were really going to make you navigate the game like a human in the real world.
14:03Thankfully, however, they let you ignore the job and the genre changed.
14:16First,
14:17Conspiracy Files
14:18GTA 2 hides a joke file cabinet under Heist Almighty, questionably titled Penetrator, because subtlety was never Rockstar's pedigree.
14:27Inside are notes on Aliens, the Kennedys, the Kremlin, the CIA, the NSA, and DMA themselves, which is the correct
14:35order of importance if you work at that studio.
14:37It reads like a paranoid conspiracy board held together with string.
14:41Nothing in the files changes a single mission.
14:44It just lets the game wink that the city is already lying to you, so the developers might as well
14:49be on the list.
14:51Three later made conspiracy feel like texture on a radio, but GTA 2 put it in a pickup that felt
14:57like contraband.
14:58You steal a car, you steal a secret, and somehow both of them are probably nonsense.
15:03Trust no one, especially whoever named the file Penetrator.
15:07Fake Outrage
15:13The moral panic around Rockstar's crime series was not an accident that just randomly happened in Grand Theft Auto.
15:21BMG and the publishers fed tabloids hit-and-run stories months earlier and watched peers stand up in the House
15:27of Lords like the game had already burned a village.
15:31That is how you do marketing with a wig on.
15:34They needed the box to feel dangerous before you had even seen a screenshot of a tiny car hitting a
15:39tiny man.
15:40And it worked so well the series has been living off the hangover ever since.
15:45Play GTA 1 now and the scandal feels bigger than the sprites on the screen.
15:50But that was the point and how a top-down crime toy becomes a national problem if you mail the
15:55newspapers first.
15:56You honor our family.
15:59You have our gratitude.
16:02Original Respect
16:03It's everywhere.
16:05Shotgun.
16:08GTA 2's respect system was a messy little foreign policy.
16:13Seven gangs, jobs that made one side like you and the other start sharpening knives, and loonies bumping into Saibatsu
16:20until the whole map felt like a group chat going bad.
16:23It was ambitious and fiddly, which is the kind of idea that sounds brilliant until you have to explain it
16:29with a pager.
16:30They abandoned that knot for 3's cleaner crime epic, where the city still has factions, but the story drags you
16:36through them by the collar.
16:38You can miss the old version, but you also have to admit it was a lot of spreadsheet nonsense most
16:43players didn't want to get lost in.
16:45The sequel already knew Identity was the hook.
16:48It just hadn't learned how to make the gangs readable from a helicopter camera without turning the HUD into unnecessary
16:54homework.
16:57There's a 1034 in South Central.
17:00Real World GTA.
17:02In a few years, I'll be taking over the whole bread basket, and if you've got that special something, you
17:06can too.
17:07Now stop loafing around and get to work.
17:09London 1969 and London 1961.
17:13A real city, a real year, and no fake anywhere with a radio station glued on.
17:18Mission Pack editions let GTA visit a place you could point to on a postcard,
17:23which the series then treated like a dare it would never take again.
17:26After that, it was always only Liberty, Vice, and San Andreas.
17:31A collection of made-up maps with familiar bones.
17:34In London, you're not out somewhere myth-making America.
17:37You're nicking a mini in a year that your parents might remember.
17:41That's probably why it never became the template for future titles.
17:44Fantasy cities are easier to own, easier to joke about,
17:48and easier to expand without somebody writing to the developer about a one-way street going the wrong way.
17:54The London packs remain the odd little extras that prove they tried reality at least once.
17:59Well look, just so you don't come at us with a bleeding A-bomb next time, we're getting out of
18:06here.
18:06Elements of GTA
18:15Keith Hamm Yeltoon is the director's name put through a blender and handed a mission list.
18:20He sends you out for humor, gameplay, fun, and sweary words,
18:24which is DMA writing a design document inside the game and daring you to treat it like a job.
18:29Naturally, the collectibles are the pitch, so of course the context sounds like a man who has been in too
18:34many meetings.
18:34GTA 2 loves this bit, turning development language into street work so the city can mock the people who built
18:41it.
18:42You're not stealing cars for a crime lord, you're fetching the tone.
18:45And that's either the smartest joke in the game, or the laziest, and I've never been able to tell which,
18:51which weirdly means that it's working.
18:59DMA rewards
19:00Even the crates couldn't stay anonymous in GTA.
19:04Names like market building and little dominica courts are all little studio signatures sitting in the world like a business
19:11card you can drive over.
19:13DMA design had a habit of leaving themselves in the furniture.
19:16Not as a big easter egg cutscene, just a name on a place that never needed one.
19:21It makes the city feel like an office joke that escaped into the map, and later Rockstar maps will become
19:26infamous for radio and billboards.
19:29You don't need to know the reference to enjoy hitting the place with a tank, but knowing the story behind
19:34the name just makes the impact funnier.
19:36Wang Cars
19:42In Residential, there are eight hidden GTA ones, and climbing into one teleports you to the lot like the game
19:48just admitted it has a back room.
19:51Find all eight, and the reward pile goes feral, giving you access to a flamethrower firetruck, mined sports cars, an
19:58armed tank, and all the sorts of toys that make the wanted meter feel like a suggestion.
20:02The name Wang Cars is exactly what you think it is, because DMA wasn't going to invent a respectable dealership
20:08name when a stupid one was available.
20:11This is GTA 2 at its most generous and its most teenaged mindset.
20:16The city hides a garage, the garage hides a punchline, and then the punchline explodes.
20:21If you only played 3 onward, this is the missing link between smart satire and what if the fire department
20:27was a war crime.
20:30I'm the town as I love you!
20:33Director Cameo
20:34Every now and then, your pager suddenly gets a very strict, Keith says observe the proper speed limits, then obey
20:42the rules of the road, in a game whose entire personality is designed around doing neither.
20:47This is game director Keith Hamilton peeking into the HUD to troll you, and with Hamilton's fudge factory sitting in
20:54the world as the other half of the autograph.
20:56Something subtle will always be better and more fun than a character model cameo, because he doesn't simply walk on
21:02screen, he nags.
21:04GTA 2 already talks to you like a bad boss, so of course the actual boss hijacks the pager to
21:10demand civility when he knows full well you are physically incapable of providing.
21:15Speed limits in this series are folklore, and Keith knows that, which is exactly why he says it.
21:21Swearing Penn
21:22GTA 2 is 18 rated and still barely talks.
21:27There are no big spoken performances, just text, radio, and the sense that somebody in Dundee is laughing.
21:33But then you find, I am Gary Penn and I am not Gary Penn, cheats that toggle offensive language on
21:39and off, and DMA named the whole gag after creative director Gary Penn, who is also Samuel Deaver.
21:46That itself is a closed loop of a self roast, in which the man in charge of the tone is
21:52both a swear switch and a character in the city.
21:54For a game that got dragged into parliament over violence, the actual naughtiness is a pair of cheat codes with
22:00a staff name on them.
22:02You can turn the bad words off, but you can't turn Gary off, and that sounded better in my head.
22:07Hidden Cheat
22:13Look at the North American PC cover closely enough, and the license plate 6031769 is sitting there like nothing more
22:22than a decoration.
22:23However, type it into the menu and you'll get infinite lives.
22:26This same string of letters also unlocked Level Select in Maniac Minor, which is a beautiful little theft if you
22:33grew up on British computers.
22:35The EU cover gives you Trump Tower instead, because the art department was already playing a different joke depending on
22:41the ocean.
22:42This is packaging as a walkthrough, and most players never touched it.
22:46They just admired the car and missed the password printed on the plate.
22:50GTA would get much louder about secrets later, but here, the secret is the shopped photo, daring you to treat
22:56box art like a manual.
23:05GTA 2 The Movie
23:13For the release of GTA 2, rather than make a trailer in the normal way,
23:18DMA shot a live-action short and let Claude Speed exist as a person, leather and stare and all, instead
23:25of a sprite the size of a headache.
23:28Most people who jumped on at GTA 3 have never seen it, which is a shame, because it's the missing
23:33bridge between a cute crime toy and something that's supposed to feel like a dirty film.
23:37The city in the game is still overhead and toy-like, but the short pretends you could cast it, and
23:43that mismatch is the whole era.
23:45DMA and the publishers were already selling a movie that the engine couldn't quite put on screen, so they pointed
23:52a real camera at an actor and faked the future.
23:55Claude got a face years before he got a three-dimensional upgrade.
24:08Have you ever played any of the original GTA games, or did your crime spree start with three?
24:13Share your favorite GTA memories in the comments.
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24:25Tone, Tone, You fool, Tone, Tone, Tone, Tone…