MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
It appears as if no-one from the original Grand Theft Auto design team is involved in the BBC’s upcoming dramatization about the game’s creation.
The show was announced last month and it was reported yesterday that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe is in negotiations to star. Also confirmed was the fact that it’s based David Kushner’s 2012 book Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.
Some of the [GTA developer] DMA people had a large Facebook chat about [Kushner’s book] and my favourite quote was ‘well, they got the fact of GTA’s existence correct’,” DMA writer Steve Hammond told GamesRadar.
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.
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.
The true experience is a great deal of hard slog, fixing bugs, which doesn’t exactly make dramatic television. The biggest hurdle that a drama will have to overcome – possibly by sheer invention – is that there wasn’t a single defined moment when GTA came into being. No singular act of creation, no flash of lightning, no sense of something which was destined to be forged in a mighty act of creativity.”
The 90-minute drama is due to start shooting this month.
