GTA 1 Was a Disaster

Grand Theft Auto is a cultural phenomenon. GTA V alone has pulled in over eight billion dollars in revenue. The franchise has shaped an entire generation of open-world game design. It is, by almost any measure, one of the most successful entertainment properties ever created.

GTA 1 was a disaster.

Back in 1997, a small team at DMA Design in Dundee, Scotland wasn't even trying to make Grand Theft Auto. They were building a game called “Race 'n' Chase” — a cops-and-robbers driving game where you were supposed to play as the police. Development officially started on April 4, 1995, with an 18-month timeline. It took 30 months. The game was boring. Testers hated it. The AI was broken. Cars handled like shopping carts on ice. The top-down camera made it nearly impossible to see where you were going.

A mess. Going nowhere.

Audio manager Colin Anderson later admitted: “Grand Theft Auto was one of maybe eight or twelve projects. The only one out there that anybody ever cares about now is Grand Theft Auto, but at the time we didn't know that.” It wasn't even DMA's golden child — Body Harvest was considered more promising.

It wasn't that much fun playing cops. It felt like the game was working against you.

That single pivot saved the game — but it didn't fix the game. GTA 1 shipped with atrocious controls, a camera that actively fought you, missions that were more frustrating than fun, and a save system so punishing that most players never saw the later cities. IGN gave it a 6 out of 10, calling out its “fast-food programming and careless design.” GamePro was harsher: 2 out of 5 stars.

Here is what matters though: DMA Design shipped it anyway. The game sold over 3 million copies. They learned from every frustrated player, every scathing review, every broken mission. They iterated. And they kept iterating until Grand Theft Auto became Grand Theft Auto.

This is the story that nobody tells about great software. Nobody ships a masterpiece on day one. Not Rockstar. Not Blizzard. Not any team that has ever built something worth remembering. The first version is always rough. What separates the games people forget from the games that define generations is simple: the willingness to keep building.

Picture this: you've just stolen a sports car in Liberty City, you're tearing down the highway with cops on your tail, and the camera decides now is the perfect time to zoom all the way out until your car is roughly the size of a grain of rice. You can't see what's ahead. You can't tell road from sidewalk. You slam into something — a wall? A lamppost? Another car? Who knows. You're dead. Welcome to Grand Theft Auto, 1997.

DMA Design built GTA 1 with an auto-zoom camera that pulled back as you gained speed. On paper, this made total sense — you're going faster, so you need to see more of the road ahead, right? In practice, it was a disaster. At high speeds the camera zoomed so far out that your vehicle became nearly invisible against the city grid. The constant zooming in and out created a nauseating pulsing effect, especially during chases where you'd accelerate, brake, accelerate again. Players reported genuine motion sickness.

Then there was the top-down perspective itself. The visual language for “you can drive through this” versus “this will stop you dead” was essentially nonexistent. A dark patch on the ground could be a shadow, a puddle, or a concrete barrier. You learned the map not by reading it visually but by memorizing which objects were solid through repeated, painful collisions.

The entire visual foundation of Grand Theft Auto started as a dinosaur tech experiment. I had been experimenting with a tech demo — a dinosaur game where you roamed a 3D city from above, destroying buildings. I added cars driving around to bring the city to life, which brought on the idea of having someone driving a car instead of controlling the dinosaur.

On foot, things somehow got worse. GTA 1 used what players would later call “tank controls” — press left and your character rotates left, press up and they walk in whatever direction they're facing. Every firefight felt like you were fighting the controls more than the actual enemies.

And the driving — the thing GTA is about — felt like steering a bar of soap across a wet countertop. Cars were floaty and oversensitive simultaneously, a combination that shouldn't be possible but DMA Design somehow achieved.

Here's what's important: none of these were lazy decisions. The auto-zoom camera was a thoughtful solution to a real visibility problem. Tank controls were standard for the era. The top-down view was a deliberate artistic choice that gave GTA its identity. These were smart people making reasonable calls that simply didn't survive contact with thousands of actual players.

Every builder knows this feeling. At EndGame, our early combat UI made perfect sense in testing — until real players told us what actually confused them. The fix was never in the original plan. It came from listening.

Here is a truth that every game designer learns the hard way: bolting new ideas onto an old foundation is a recipe for pain. GTA 1 was not designed as GTA. It started life as Race 'n' Chase, a top-down cops-and-robbers racing game. Then DMA Design saw something wilder in the chaos — what if the player could just... do anything? — and pivoted the entire game late in development.

No Save System: The Cruelest Mechanic

You had one life to make it through each city chapter. One. Die at the hands of the police, get crushed by traffic, make a single catastrophic mistake after an hour of progress — and the game sent you back to the beginning of the entire level. No checkpoints. No save slots. Nothing.

This was not a design philosophy. It was the absence of one. The save system was simply never built into the original architecture because Race 'n' Chase did not need it — racing games reset naturally between events. When the scope exploded into a sprawling open city with missions and progression, the save infrastructure was not there, and apparently nobody had the time or mandate to build it.

Mission Objectives: A Guessing Game

You answered a payphone. A message played — once, quickly, with no log to review it. Then you were expected to execute. The top-down perspective that worked brilliantly for open-world chaos worked terribly for navigation and objective clarity. City blocks looked nearly identical. Waypoints were minimal or nonexistent.

I'd never heard the term sandbox before.

Sandboxes are very simple. Put some toys in a world then leave it alone!

The problem was that GTA 1 took the “leave it alone” part a little too literally.

What GTA III Did With All of This

GTA III launched four years later and solved every single one of these problems with almost embarrassing clarity. Manual save points at safe houses. Mission objectives displayed persistently on screen. Waypoints on a mini-map. Checkpoints within longer missions.

None of those solutions were accidental genius. They were direct responses to what GTA 1 had failed to do — problems that players had complained about, that DMA Design (by then Rockstar North) had catalogued and committed to fixing.

We see this pattern at EndGame too. Every bug report our players submit, every “this feels off” message in the chat — that is the iteration cycle. The features players ask for today become the mechanics they love tomorrow.

Grand Theft Auto almost never existed. What shipped in 1997 was not the product of a clean design document executed with precision — it was the mutant offspring of a failed racing game, held together by duct tape and stubbornness, where the single most important feature was discovered by accident.

DMA Design spent years building Race 'n' Chase. The concept was straightforward: cops and robbers in cars, viewed from above. It was, by most internal accounts, not very fun. Multiple people overseeing the project's progress actually tried to shut it down, forcing the DMA crew to fight to keep development alive.

Then a bug changed everything.

During testing, the police AI — which had been programmed to pursue and intercept the player's vehicle — started behaving far more aggressively than intended. Instead of pulling players over, cop cars would ram the player's vehicle off the road at full speed, relentlessly chasing them through the streets with an almost vindictive energy. The behavior was broken. It was not what the designers had specified. But the testers kept playing. And playing. They found being hunted by psychotic AI police genuinely thrilling in a way the intended gameplay never was.

DMA Design made the critical decision: lean into it. Race 'n' Chase pivoted from a cops-and-robbers racing game to a crime sandbox where the player was always the criminal, and the aggressive police became the core tension mechanic. The game was renamed Grand Theft Auto.

The Controversy Machine

BMG Interactive hired Max Clifford — a notorious British publicist known for fabricating scandals — to promote GTA before launch. His strategy was simple: make establishment figures lose their minds.

He fed stories about the game's violent content to right-wing politicians and tabloid journalists. Lord Campbell of Croy raised a formal question in the House of Lords about whether the government intended to counter the release of Grand Theft Auto — a game that hadn't even shipped yet. The Daily Mail ran headlines about a “criminal computer game that glorifies hit-and-run thugs.”

The game was called “sick, deluded and beneath contempt” in British tabloids — and it sold 3 million copies.

Max Clifford was the real genius here. He made it all happen. He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved.

We honestly didn't really understand the fuss. But on reflection, until that point, the vast majority of games were made for teenagers.

The Engineering Lesson

The software engineering parallels are hard to ignore. Every mature codebase carries the DNA of what it used to be. Layers of refactored intent sit beneath the surface — the racing game beneath the crime game, the prototype beneath the product, the dinosaur tech demo beneath the city engine. The teams that build great things are rarely the ones who got the architecture right on the first try. They are the ones who recognized when something unplanned was working better than something planned, and had the discipline to pivot toward it even when the codebase screamed in protest.

EndGame has its own version of this story. Our combat system started as one thing and became something different — not because the original plan was wrong, but because our players showed us what they actually wanted. The willingness to pivot toward that signal, even when it meant reworking systems we had already built, is what separates a forgotten project from one worth remembering.

The critical reception of GTA 1 was the definition of “mixed.” Here's what the gaming press actually said:

The GameBoy Color port was particularly brutal, scraping a 57% aggregate on GameRankings.

IGN's review captures the paradox perfectly: GTA was “a fun game but with some major problems that could've been fixed.” The freedom was intoxicating. Everything around it — the controls, the camera, the missions, the difficulty — ranged from rough to broken. The game was simultaneously innovative and infuriating.

But here's the thing about a 6/10 that changes the world: nobody remembers the score. They remember what came next.

Consider the distance traveled. In 1997, GTA 1 was a top-down, barely-controllable chaos simulator built from a dinosaur tech demo and a broken racing game — a Frankenstein codebase that IGN called “fast-food programming.” Four years later, GTA III reinvented open-world gaming in full 3D and changed the industry forever. By 2013, GTA V became the most profitable entertainment product in human history. Eight billion dollars and counting.

That arc did not happen because Rockstar got lucky. It happened because they treated every release as a lesson. GTA 1 taught them that player freedom mattered more than structure. GTA II taught them that atmosphere needed depth. GTA III was the payoff — the moment where years of iteration crystallized into something revolutionary.

Sam knew what he had with GTA, even if the rest of the world didn't appreciate it.

In March 1998, BMG sold its interactive division to Take-Two for just $9 million. That $9 million bet became the most valuable franchise in entertainment history.

This is exactly the cycle we live at EndGame. We are building in public, on-chain, with real players and real stakes. Every bug report you submit, every piece of feedback you drop in the chat, every feature request, every time you tell us something feels off — that is the iteration cycle in action. You are not just playing the game. You are shaping it.

The combat system, the powerups, the stream, the economy — all of it evolves because you push us to make it better. Players who reported bugs got permanent boosts not as a gimmick but because their feedback literally made the product better. That is not a reward program. That is acknowledging the truth: the best version of EndGame is the one our community builds with us.

The best version-one products are not polished. They are honest. They ship knowing they are incomplete because the alternative — waiting for perfection in a vacuum — produces nothing worth playing.