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Original GTA Design Docs, Dated March 22nd 1995
An anonymous reader writes "Mike Dailly, part of the original GTA team at DMA Design, just posted scans of the original design documents for Grand Theft Auto, which were recently unearthed. It makes for interesting reading!"
After following the link, hit the "Newer" button to scroll through the "Race'n'Chase" documents in order. It's interesting to see what concepts they felt the need to state explicitly back then. "If a player-controlled car has a serious crash, it will blow up after a short time. Hence, the player must get out of the car and find another one."
Dude who posted them was from DMA Design, the original developers of GTA. They're now known as Rockstar North.
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Seems a bit pointless to document what they have there.
It's a *very* rough outline of a game, almost like saying "It's going to be like Game X but possibly better!". The only details are things like the pixel-size of a block and the map size in blocks which seem a bit odd to document that early - surely something you'd leave until later when you know how the engine reacts.
It looks like they already knew what they were working towards and this was just a formal document that doesn't lock down very much or actually describe what choices were made or why. Although there are a few "surprises" like they envisaged a school crossing with children on it (yeah, that would go down well when you can run them all over), or various race modes, or being able to control external cars with a mouse, and having a 2D-SimCity-like view for slow computers, none of that really comes to fruition and was obviously rejected almost immediately after this document was written.
About the only interesting thing is the timeline (which kinda leaves a lot of games in the modern era in the dust), really.
Come on. The game is nearly 20 years old now. And there were tons of games in that kind of era. Surely *one* of them must have some interesting documentation available somewhere. This just reads like: "We're already writing this game but management wants us to follow this formal process - let's just make stuff up and pretend we were aiming for this design already".
I'm disappointed that the words "Murder Simulator" aren't in there anywhere.
I've never found a quick way to download flickr sets. Closest I've come are old apps that have had api access blocked off. It's such a hassle to manually pick the high-res images and download them all to the same folder. Short of writing my own program to do it, does anyone have a good way to get all these images?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/22/dailly-news-gtas-original-design-document/
(it is also linked in the comments of the currently linked article)
Imagine what GTA IV Docs would look like now with all the interactions possible in the game... It's amazing to see how much the complexity of the game evolved.
I don't think the hooker gimmick came in until GTA 3, which was almost a completely different kind of game. I was never offended by the part where you could take a hooker to a quiet place, whereupon your bank balance would fall a bit, your car would rock around a bit, then she'd get out of the car and walk off.
What was more unpleasant was that you could then beat her up, to get your money back plus a bit more. Yet, having included the (implied) car sex part, how could they avoid this without breaking the sandbox element? You have an attack button. You have a weapon in your hand. The only thing they could do would be to create classes of NPC who were magically immune to your attacks, which would really break immersion.
The defence I can offer is that the game doesn't require you to kill prostitutes. It doesn't really reward it (the money they drop is hardly significant). It must give you the ability to do so in order that the world is consistent. If you choose to do it, that reflects more on you than on the game designer.
I don't recall any child murder from GTA3 onwards. GTA 1/2 may have had children, but since they were tiny cartoony sprites, it's a fairly different prospect.
Mind you, I don't really see why murdering adults is less objectionable than murdering children.
Original article instead of some idiot's shitty photo blog: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/22/dailly-news-gtas-original-design-document/
"DMA Design was founded in 1988 by David Jones, Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly in Dundee, Scotland."
Given that the last name on this list is the guy who posted it, you might be hard-pushed to keep him to an NDA from the company he founded.
Sometimes, you know, people just put stuff online because they want to and are allowed to. Like sometimes they open-source their engines, or grant distribution permission for their old (emulated) titles, etc. I know if I ran a software company, I'd keep it in the news for a few years by just leaking out details of big-name projects I'd done in the past to keep the name alive and interest there.
Hell, back when Bullfrog were making Syndicate they produced a series of articles for one of the computer magazines that used the Syndicate graphics and showed the code and techniques they'd used to move them around on an isometric grid. Nothing "secret" but they had snippets of actual game code in there and it was for a programming article on, basically, "how to make a game like Syndicate".
Ha ha! As it happens, I am the idiot. I didn't realize the flickr link belonged to the originator of the docs.
From comments of original article:
kregg says:
March 22, 2011 at 9:44 pm
Just for those who don’t like or have trouble browsing through the images, I’ve made a PDF Version of the high-resolution image documents for convenience. All pages are in the right order.
Also, I don’t own any rights to these images, these still are of Copyright to Mike Dailly, I’ve just put the images together in a PDF format for easy reading.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
http://www.javalemmings.com/miked/programming.htm
links to GTA and Lemmings docs...
I guess it's predicable that some people are focused on the whole "murder simulator" thing, which can't seemingly be separated from GTA. Since I was at DMA at the time (I'm mentioned in the first paragraph on pg 4), I can tell you that nothing like that was in our minds. What no-one seems to get - or remember - is that GTA was in large part a pisstake. We deliberately made the graphics bright and garish. We deliberately added humour. We didn't take it too seriously. If anyone still has the paper map that came with it (you didn't all pirate it surely?) just take a look at the adverts around the side. (I'm paraphrasing but... "Enjoy a meal while our technicians accelerate particles to the speed of light." - An advert for a combined cafe and particle accelerator!) GTA was a cartoon.
5.4 Players - "... will be playable by multiple players across a network ..."
Yet somehow this guideline was forgotten in later versions of GTA.
I'm not so sure why this example is especially interesting. Why would you not explicitly state that a player-controlled car would blow up soon after a serious crash, and that the player would have to get out and find another car? This was in a design document, was it not? That's exactly the sort of thing a design doc should have.
Oh, wait. Perhaps the submitter is not a programmer? That would explain the "developers should just know what I want; I should not have to explicitly state it" attitude. :-P
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
A game concept is a document conveys the idea of the game, a general overview of the game. Generally handed to producers before it is decided before the game gets a green light. A game design document on the other hand details _everything_ in the game, without leaving holes, the design document would have quite a bit more pages than 11.
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
I've played a fair bit of GTA in my time, and other than news reports, the thought of murdering hookers in GTA never crossed my mind. I wonder how this even started? It reminds me of all the news reports lately of over-the-counter convenience store drugs that I never new existed. The news is informing us what they are called, how to use them, and where to buy them. Seems rather odd to me.
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I've played a fair bit of GTA in my time, and other than news reports, the thought of murdering hookers in GTA never crossed my mind.
Again, it's a logical extension of the sandbox concept - if you give an NPC money for some service, and then kill them, you should be able to get the money that. This was fairly prominent in past sandbox games, too - e.g. in Fallout, merchants in first two towns could become useless fairly early, and killing them was a quick way to get your money back for higher-end stuff (of course, you could do even better by killing them as soon as you meet them and taking all their gear for free).
But sandbox was not prominent outside of RPGs, and those themselves tended to be more obscure than action games when it comes to sensationalist headlines - dunno why, really; I mean, in Fallout you could actually kill children, and they had all the same death animations as adults - head and limbs being torn off from a close-up burst or shotgun blast, gibbing by explosions, burning complete with screams, dissolving into mushy paste (from a plasma gun hit) etc. You'd think someone would pick that up long before GTA.
That's what design documents are for in the first place. Finding an explicit description of how a major part of the game is supposed to work in design documents is roughly as surprising (and interesting) as finding bread being used to make your sandwich.
Admittedly I've done much worse to the small beggar child in Deus Ex when it first came out and that looked much better than GTA ever did. As for morrowind and the like my crimes were much greater than I ever managed in GTA including exterminating towns but I think these things are overdone and sensationalised as in RL I'd always act the opposite, I'm a pacifist for one and jumped in on many fights to split them up including getting some heavy kickings whilst doing so but not retaliating so that isn't synonymous with coward btw. GTA 1 and 2 were only so successful due to Max Clifford hyping it so much. Yeah it was playable but appeared to be another clone similar to many other Atari ST games and 386 pc games I had before GTA came out much later, memory ain't what it used ot be but Hill street blues comes to mind which looked virtually the same and had similar dynamics for the out of car bits.
Hell, back when Bullfrog were making Syndicate they produced a series of articles for one of the computer magazines that used the Syndicate graphics and showed the code and techniques they'd used to move them around on an isometric grid. Nothing "secret" but they had snippets of actual game code in there and it was for a programming article on, basically, "how to make a game like Syndicate".
I remember playing around with that! Do you know which magazine it was in? Edge?