GRAND THEFT AUTO WAS ORIGINALLY ABOUT DINOSAURS

The Game You Know

When Grand Theft Auto 3 was
released in 2001, it didn’t merely change
the video game industry — it completely
reshaped it into its own image. Not just
in the whole “sandbox” and “murdering lots of prostitutes” thing, but
little things like stats counters: when GTA3 came out, the idea of a
“distance traveled by foot” in the “pause” screen seemed like an
insane novelty.

The Game We Almost Got

One word: “Dinosaurs.” According to a 2010 Gamepro article, the GTA
series was first conceived as a sim, when designer David Jones was
working at his start-up DMA design and came up with the top-down
view of the city. He wanted to create a game with a living, breathing
world, and when he asked himself what people would want to see in
that world the answer was, obviously, dinosaurs. He even got so far as
to design the city and populate it with the prehistoric beasts before
deciding that maybe kids these days were more into Hot Wheels
than Jurassic Park.