Original GTA Team Skeptical About Upcoming Movie

Last week the news broke that the BBC was working on a feature film about the dramatic creation of the Grand Theft Auto series. “Not so fast,” says the original creative team, who insists to GamesRadar that the creation of GTA was far from dramatic.

Their main issue is that Jacked: The Outlaw Story Of Grand Theft Auto, the book the movie will be based on, is more than a little sensationalistic, they say. Before Rockstar were rockstars, they were a development team located inside the larger British game company DMA Design. Steve Hammond, a writer for the series, says “I find it quite telling that no-one from DMA I’ve spoken to so far seems to know anything about it. With Rockstar’s famous reticence to talk to anyone, that makes the only behind the scenes source David Kushner’s book Jacked, which frankly has me a bit worried.”

David says game development is actually a long and tedious process of coding and bug-finding, and neither activity makes for compelling movie-watching. He also says there was no specific moment when GTA officially started, no “Eureka!” scene that would have to be included for the drama to be effective. The original GTA started as something called “Race ‘n Chase” and evolved from there.

David has made some speculation as to the movie’s content: “My prediction is that the DMA Design part of the story will be an opening text crawl before the main credits, then skipping directly to GTA III. Otherwise, I wonder if the GTA team will be portrayed as badasses and bad boys compared to the other teams, as per Kushner’s book? In reality, no more or less bad/weird/outsider than any other team.”