Grand Theft Auto only exists because of a glitch

A mere four days after release, the official trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 had already amassed over 130 million views. For comparison’s sake, the trailer for GTA 5 took 12 years to clear the 100 million mark. Please don’t feel too sad for GTA 5, though; it’s already sold over 190 million copies across what also feels like millions of different platforms.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a series that has been so consistently popular for so long, but GTA has also enjoyed a near-exponential level of growth. Even though the mainline series has been dormant for over a decade, It’s impossible to picture the gaming landscape of the past twenty years without GTA and the games it has influenced. It’s equally hard to believe that the series didn’t spawn out of someone’s stroke of genius of trying to have fun by breaking the law in a simulated world. But that’s not the origin story of GTA.

The GTA series was almost dead on arrival

Before Rockstar was a thing, there was DMA Design (which would later become Rockstar North). This company was known mostly for the success of Lemmings, another series where players could indulge in some mass death, but they were trying to expand their horizons.

DMA began working on Race ‘n’ Chase, a game that would have players picking between playing as cops or criminals. Interestingly, it would end up becoming the original GTA, but not before getting almost canned by order of the distributor. The game was incredibly unstable, and, even when it didn’t straight-up crash, the handling of the cars was just abysmal.

Saved by the most lucrative error in gaming history

But then there was a light at the end of the tunnel, which ironically came in the form of what developer Gary Penn recalls was probably a bug on an old Gamasutra (now Game Developer) interview.

A mishap in the cops’ route finding code rendered cop cars too aggressive. Instead of trying to block players from passing through, the cop cars were the ones trying to ram through players. Programmers exist to fix these issues, but solving this one would’ve carried a bigger issue: ending all the fun provided by the accidentally rabid cops.

“Oh my God, the police are psycho — they’re trying to ram me off the road.” Penn said of the cop problem, “That was awesome, so that stayed in. It was tweaked a little bit, but that stayed in because that was great fun.”

The team had come across one of those one-in-a-million good problems, one so good that it completely revitalized the game. This was the first element of the game that really worked, and thus the catalyzer to what would end up becoming one of the most lucrative and beloved gaming series in history.