On September 17, 2013, one of the most popular games of all time released on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, Grand Theft Auto V. The game sold over $1 billion worth of copies in 3 days, is the fifth highest rated game on Metacritic, and went on to release a remastered version on Xbox One and Playstation 4 a little over a year later with new features. Grand Theft Auto is one of the most successful games, critically and financially, everyone knows about it! But I’m here to tell you about the development and some facts about Grand Theft Auto V you may not know in celebration of the second anniversary of Grand Theft Auto V!
Shortly after the release and success of Grand Theft Auto IV in April 2008, Rockstar decided in order to make a bigger, better Grand Theft Auto game, they’ll need a bigger, better team. They decided to use majority of their studios to go from the 360 person team at Rockstar North to over 1,000 people from Rockstar NYC, Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar Leeds and many more Rockstar studios. Adam Fowler, technical director at Rockstar, said that even though they game was being worked on in multiple countries, they were still all working closely and communicating to make sure the game worked. The game was developed for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 originally, ending that console generation with a big bang, and the team found they could render the game with extreme detail compared to Grand Theft Auto IV now that they were more familiar with the consoles after working on Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and many other titles for these consoles. The game was so big it had to be put onto two discs for the Xbox 360, one disc was used just to install assets that didn’t fit on the other disc, and the second disc was used to play the game, this isn’t unusual for Rockstar to do since they are so ambitious, Max Payne 3 was two discs and L.A. Noire was three discs.
Grand Theft Auto has always been a bit stiff in the controls and mechanics, just look at San Andreas today. Rockstar set out to improve combat, driving and even add some new game changing features. Grand Theft Auto V introduced three playable characters that you could switch to at any time you wanted, this was to not only to keep the game from feeling stale in a gameplay aspect but for the story as well. The characters are so different but so similar at the same time, Franklin is a gangster who repos cars for a living, Michael is a retired bank robber who went into witness protection after giving up his bank robbing crew, and there’s Trevor, who is a psychopath who murders, deals drugs, and is all around insane. He is basically the character incarnation of the average Grand Theft Auto player. Rockstar came up with the idea of having three playable characters while developing San Andreas in 2004 but felt they didn’t have the technical capabilities to execute it the way they wanted. After the release of Grand Theft Auto IV they decided to release two downloadable “episodes” for Grand Theft Auto IV, both of the downloadable pack included a new protagonist that was different from the other two characters but still somewhat similar and they’re stories were interwoven and connected and these were so critically well received that the idea for Grand Theft Auto V was greenlit. There were many ideas for how they would incorporate the three character idea, early on they were considering three separate stories, and then it was being considered that they would have the characters come across each other at certain points, similar to Grand theft Auto V but it was finally decided to have it all be one connected story. Money is a central theme in Grand Theft Auto V, The team decided this in response to the Global Financial Crisis in 2007 and 2008. In an interview with the New York Times, Rockstar’s Dan Houser stated “We wanted this post-crash feeling, because it works thematically in this game about bank robbers”. Personally I feel some of the “post-crash feeling” Got cut from the final game, there is some pieces of that in the game but I remember seeing in the reveal trailer a shot of a man hammering in a “For Sale” sign into the front yard of his home, due to what is most likely financial issues. You never see much of that in the final game, which is somewhat disappointing because it seemed like a very cool and unique idea. Another reason for money as the central theme is for the heists, there was an amazing response to a mission in Grand Theft Auto IV called “Three Leaf Clover”, the team felt that even though it was received as one of the best missions in the game that they never delivered the thrill of an adrenaline pumping robbery!
One of Grand Theft Auto’s biggest characters has always been the map, it plays an important role in setting the tone, it gives you an extraordinary playground to explore, and has a vast amount of things to do inside of it. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you had one of the best depictions of New York City in gaming, Liberty City. Even though it was a parody of New York, it accurately depicts the city! You could visit Times Square, The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State building and drive across one of the many various bridges in New York! There were hot dog vendors scattered around constantly yelling at you to purchase one of their greasy pieces of meat slapped into a bun, homeless people shouting crazy things at you, and sometimes you would see fights break out and cops would arrive to break up the fight! Rockstar decided to revisit the setting from one of their most popular games, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. But this time, instead of taking the map of San Andreas and making it a bit more modern, they recreated it almost entirely to be a much more accurate Los Angeles. The team went multiple times to California and visited landmarks and visited with people who lived there to capture the atmosphere so they could create it as best as possible in the game, they took over 250,000 photos and countless hours of video footage to create Los Santos just the way they wanted. The game isn’t a one to one scale representation of Los Angeles because they wanted to create a world that the player could quickly get comfortable and familiar, so it is smaller than the actual Los Angeles but it does contain lots of parodies of key features and landmarks from the city of angels. A lot of people who have visited L.A. or live there have remarked how accurate it looks to the actual city and some players have even taken real photos of locations in LA and put them side by side with an image from the fictional Los Santos and Rockstar managed to get some of the craziest little details from something like a sign on the side of the street in L.A. and put it into Los Santos. To give a scale of how large Grand Theft Auto V is, it is larger than the size of Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption and San Andreas put together.
Once Grand Theft Auto V released in September 2013, Players quickly discovered easter eggs and other mysterious things in the game, Once you 100% the game, if you go to Mount Chilliad at night while it’s raining and you have all 3 characters on top of the mountain a UFO will appear. Players quickly started searching for answers as to why this UFO has appeared and discovered a mural on a wall next to the cable cars on the mountain, the mural contained a drawing of a UFO, an egg, a jet pack, a bunch of X’s that are possibly events or objects that trigger something, and a large UFO drawing on top of what seems to be an outline of the mountain, probably the UFO I mentioned above. To make this even more mysterious, players discovered another UFO above Fort Zancudo, the ingame military base. If you try to land on it via Helicopter the vehicle will stop working and fall to the ground leading you to an inevitable explosive death. There are more UFOs scattered throughout the sky over some key locations, and some UFOs look way different than others drawing even more questions from players. Players have tried lining up the mural on Mount Chiliad over the in game map to see if it would lead to anything, it was eventually discovered if you line it up correctly on the mountain you will discover five chalk drawings of UFOs similar to the one drawn on the top of the mural. On some of the drawings there seem to be drawings of rain clouds and a mood, and other things that may lead to triggering some sort of event. Some of the drawings are also faded and you can’t see the full drawing so some players don’t know how to trigger the event for that drawing. People have hacked into the games files to see if there is any clues as to how to solve this and have found nothing substantial. Nobody has found out what any of this means in the two years the game has been out but some people are still dedicated to finding an answer even though there may not be one.
In every game there is cut content, whether it be weapons, characters, or even parts of the story. Developers cut content from games due to it maybe not working technically for the game, isn’t necessary to the game and many other things, it just happens and some of the cut content can be much bigger than others. Rockstar is no exception to any of this, they sometimes even keep some of the code from the content in the game! Whether that’s a mistake or not is unknown but it definitely makes you wonder on how different the game could’ve been with some of this cut content. Some of the content I’m about to mention can be seen in early screenshots and trailers for the game and I’ll do my best to link to some of them if I can! Also, keep in mind some of these things may show up in future DLC and they didn’t have time to finish some of these activities for the final version of the game so they were cut entirely.
Some map icons left over from the game were discovered, showing many cut side activities from the game. Some of the activities featured are, Air Hockey, Basketball, Playing pool, drug trafficking, pimping, and even a heist on a nice house with a horse for the icon. (Heist possibly on Martin Madrozo’s house could have replaced the mission where you tear down his deck when chasing the tennis coach, horses could be at the horse track behind the closed Casino.) One of the icons mentions a Lamar icon, SPOILER ALERT for the end of Grand Theft Auto V, at the end of Grand Theft Auto V Franklin is given the choice to kill Michael, Trevor or to team up with them and kill anyone who has ever wronged you. After discovering the Lamar icon, I went and found that Lamar was going to be a playable character after Franklin would have been killed in the final mission of the game, similar to Jack Marston replacing John Marston at the end of Red Dead Redemption. This would have changed the game in a major way, being that Lamar may have had a special ability different than Franklin’s driving ability, new missions to play, and maybe even some new characters. This was most likely cut due to not being able to finish in time, or deciding to save him as a playable character in future DLC.
There’s many fascinating things about Grand Theft Auto and Rockstar itself, which you can learn more about in the upcoming BBC TV drama, Game Changers, centered around Dan Houser and Jack Thompson and the controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto. I’d like to do more features like this, a “History of…” series could provide you all with interesting facts about things you may have never known and help you learn some things! With that said, if you would like to see more features similar to this, let us know! If you have a suggestion for a game/series or developer you would like to see us write about in a similar way, tweet us @XboxMAD or leave a suggestion in the comments of this page!
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.