Grand Theft Auto, the original, the game that started it all. What would have happened if it never came out? And it very nearly didn't, to hear Gary Penn talk about it, senior producer and then creative director on it."That game was pretty much nearly canned every bloody week," he tells me inWhy was it nearly canned? Because"it was going nowhere and it was awful" - Penn isn't one for mincing his words.
Penn remembers the moment things began to change. A programmer called Patt Kerr came up with a new physics model for driving."It was just this box, I think it left a little trail behind as well to better emphasise the motion, and it fishtailed and skidded around. The first time I saw it I just smiled like a dick," he says."And you just go, 'This is sooo cool.
"We ended up with five of us [going] into the offices for the final of it, and we had to play five new games that hadn't been released," Penn says. He can't remember what they were but they were on a variety of platforms. And he did pretty well, not winning but coming third behind Julian"Jaz" Rignall - another name you might recognise - and someone in first whose name he can't remember, which feels like a stealth burn to me.
It was a formative time for him, and for writing about video games. That personality-led reporting remains to this day, with many teams trying to recreate a sense of extended family playing games alongside you, the reader. Penn remembers working a lot, smoking and drinking a lot, not sleeping a lot, and playing games a lot. And he was intoxicated by the status it was giving him.
He eventually fell in with publisher EMAP where he experimented with a fortnightly edition of Computer and Video Games , before eventually being asked what he wanted to do, at which point he came up with an idea for gaming magazine The One."I think in some respects I was trying to do Edge before Edge but didn't have the ability to do it," he says. But after a few successful and award-winning years"I left EMAP in a strop as well".
This is not Gary Penn but Dave Jones, someone Penn worked closely with both at DMA Design and on Crackdown afterwards. The interviewer in the video is me! It's taken from an on-stage talk I did with Jones at Spanish conference GameLab a few years ago. He also talks about Race n' Chase/GTA.
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