Today, Grand Theft Auto celebrates 25 years since the release of the first parts of the series, which have already been worth billions of dollars. The game has achieved unprecedented success in the world of the video game industry, a success whose seeds were planted two and a half decades ago.

The series was launched by Dundee-based studio DMA Design. Some may be surprised to learn that the game was in its infancy and threatened to fail, even though the developer himself was losing hope in it.

Grand Theft Auto has a wobbly birth

Developer Colin MacDonald, who joined DMA Design just a few months before the game's 1997 release, said that midway through the development process, there was an informal survey of studio employees about which of the seven titles they were working on at the time would be the most successful and the most likely to fail.

Interestingly, the majority of participants in this poll voted that Grand Theft Auto is the game that will fail in the end. He added:

This is because the direction of the game wasn't clear halfway through development. It was also riddled with bugs – you couldn't play for more than two minutes without it crashing, so there was definitely not a lot of confidence in it from the development team's point of view.

McDonald added that at the time he joined the development team, although things were going smoothly at DMA Design, the game's development was experiencing a lot of problems and turmoil. Even the development team saw that it was not a good game.

He added that as the game neared completion, the team was addressing the points they considered negative and reevaluating and adjusting for better, and they were happy to have reached this stage in the development process.

It was a dinosaur game at first..!

GTA fans might be surprised to learn that the series actually started as a technological experiment, with a dinosaur as the main character, explains Colin:

Mike Daily, one of the original founding programmers at DMA, was originally experimenting with the technology as a way to show what 3D buildings could look like from the top down. So he basically created a dinosaur game. You had this city moving around in some form of 3D, but you were a dinosaur walking around destroying buildings. That's how Grand Theft Auto started.

He added that after that several vehicles were added to give the game world a kind of dynamism. So the idea came from a member of the development team when he said: What would the experience be like if the player could drive a vehicle instead of a dinosaur.

Grand Theft Auto is starting to build

From here, the idea was launched, which most team members agreed with at the time, and the name Race 'n' Chase, or “before and after”, was chosen at the time.

After that, another idea came from one of the team members to make the player get out of the vehicle and move from one place to another and return to another vehicle. From here, the Grand Theft Auto game started to become what it is now.

Although the idea was completely deviated from the basic idea with which the game started, this also did not prevent many technical problems from arising. Diary said:

When you fundamentally change a game like this, all sorts of problems arise. You've developed a program that no longer does what it was originally intended to do. So there are a lot of problems - the game is buggy and crashing a lot, and the team feels like the whole process is completely changing because it's not doing what it was originally intended to do.

Daly added that despite these constant changes and developments in the basic idea, the game felt dynamic in the end.

During the final stages of development, or the so-called polishing process, the development team managed to add many visual, kinetic, and sound effects, such as sliding areas and radio stations. All of these elements make the world of Grand Theft Auto feel more alive.

MacDonald adds that while GTA only began to form its final form in the last six months of development, there were clear signs that it could gain a large audience.

The team played during lunch hours, which is always rare. It's common knowledge that after you've spent a few years developing something, you usually get tired of seeing it again – the last thing you want to do is watch it again in your free time.

At some point, the development team managed to obtain licenses to add more vehicles, weapons, and different environments to the game. Colin added that despite the game's uneven delivery, the development team had a feeling that something was going to happen.

We knew we had something special here – the fact that the team is playing on their own time is a strong indicator of that – but there are countless games released every year that are great creatively and technically, but don't achieve the commercial success they were hoping for.

It may come as a surprise to many fans of the Grand Theft Auto series to learn that this is how the series began. Especially with the huge success the series has achieved in its modern installments. Even though the game has yet to be released, GTA 6 has been a big and loud buzz every time we get a leak or rumor talking about it, so what about the fuss that will be going on around its release?!!

On this occasion, what was the first part of the series that got you into the world of Grand Theft Auto when you first tried it?