No More Rockstars: A World Without Grand Theft Auto

DStecks

Part 2 of Gamasutra Interview with David Jones and Mike Dailly, February 20th, 2014
By Leigh Alexander

GAMASUTRA: Last week, we discussed the work you two are doing at Sega West,

JONES: Well, the parts we aren’t barred from discussing by NDA.

[Jones and Dailly chuckle]

GAMASTURA: Obviously. This week, I’d like to talk about some of your early work. You two are games industry veterans; not many high-profile developers working today can say they were making games in the mid-90’s.

DAILLY: Well, the stuff we were doing in the 90’s wasn’t exactly comparable to what we’re doing now.

JONES: Yeah, the 90’s… weren’t great for us.

GAMASUTRA: I understand you both got your start together at DMA Design.[1]

JONES: Yes, we were both working at DMA when it went belly up.

DAILLY: The last project we were working on was a car game called Race ‘N Chase[2]. That game spent so long in development, because we just couldn’t make the damn thing fun.

JONES: Eventually, the project just got canned. We’d spent so much time and money developing it that a studio closure was probably inevitable.

DAILLY: Of course, we all lost our jobs over it. Afterwards, rumour had it that some of the execs made a pretty penny selling the Lemmings IP to Microsoft in the fire sale.

JONES: Race ‘N Chase wasn’t all loss, though. That was where we really hit on how interesting a more open type of game could be, compared to a linear structure.

GAMASUTRA: Which of course influenced Manhunt.

DAILLY: It’s nice that you’re eager, but aren’t we supposed to be the ones who say that?

[Jones smiles]

GAMASUTRA: Sorry.

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[1]: DMA Design was the game studio responsible for both the Lemmings franchise, and the early Grand Theft Auto games. After the success of GTA, it renamed itself Rockstar Games, and is known today as Rockstar North, and it continues to develop the mainline GTA installments.

[2]: Race 'N Chase was the working title of what would eventually be renamed Grand Theft Auto. IOTL, the game's development was incredibly troubled, until the developers stumbled onto an AI tweak that made the police AI incredibly aggressive. The testers found the chases to be much more fun once the police were trying to run them off the road, and the whole game was rebuilt around the police car chase system. ITTL, the developers never happen to stumble onto that solution, and DMA runs out of funds during development. This is our POD.
 

DStecks

Mission Statement

Hello everybody, and welcome to No More Rockstars, or, Thank God it's Not Another Console Wars TL.

My goal with this TL is to have minimal steering. Unlike Jesus Walks, this isn't intended to be a character-driven narrative with a human interest story behind it. This is going to be more "pure" althist, trying to extrapolate the consequences of a POD. To achieve this, I'm giving myself two loose rules as to the progression of the TL:

1) Minimal butterflies. I'm not going to change things significantly that would not be affected at that point of the TL. So, I'm not going to allow myself to fudge the commercial performance of games unrelated to GTA, unless I can come up with a legit reason why GTA not existing would affect that change. This means that the 90's are going to largely play out as per OTL, and we're probably going to skip most of them.

2) No incredible changes without incredible reasons. Don't expect company mergers or any of the typical video game timeline BS unless there's an extremely good reason why GTA not existing would cause that. That's not to say that there won't be major changes, but those will come in due time, due to pile-ups of small changes.
 

DStecks

Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Murder Simulator​

The year was 2000, and Sega was floundering. Even though they had been first on the scene to the sixth generation of consoles, the Dreamcast was proving uncompetitive against the fifth-generation consoles still on the market.

Sega’s last console releases had been a quagmire of failed marketing that had probably contributed more to the Dreamcast’s failure than anything to do with the Dreamcast itself. The Sega Genesis had proved to be a tremendous success, but the Sega CD and 32X add-ons had done much to kill any goodwill the console had earned.

The Genesis’s follow-up, the Saturn, had been strangled in the crib by an ill-begotten launch. Sega had announced a September ’95 release date for the console, but in a fit of pique, decided to release the console in May, 4 months early. This hurt them in three distinct ways: first, because the release was a surprise, there was no marketing in the lead-up to it, so consumers at large had no idea that the Saturn was already on store shelves. Second, the console was only released at four selected retailers: Toys "R" Us, Babbage's, Software Etc. and Electronics Boutique, alienating other retailers. Third, Sega neglected to inform their own developers about this change of release date, meaning that the Saturn had only a tiny handful of launch titles.

By the time the Dreamcast rolled around, Sega as a hardware maker was on its last legs. The console had an incredibly solid reception stateside, selling more pre-orders than it could actually ship out at launch. The Japanese launch, though, was incredibly weak, enough to cancel out their American success. And then the PlayStation 2 hit the market, and things started slipping away for Sega.[1]

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Gamasutra Interview with Peter Moore, President of Sega of America, March 23rd, 2002

241px-Peter_Moore_at_Xbox_Cup_2006.jpg

GAMASUTRA: Thanks for sitting down with us, Mr. Moore.

MOORE: It’s my pleasure. So, I understand you want to talk to me about, well, I think we both know what you want to talk about.

GAMASUTRA: Manhunt.

MOORE: Of course. So, what would you like to ask me about with regards to Manhunt? Lord knows I’ve been fielding questions about it over the last few months.

GAMASUTRA: Is it true that you were the driving force behind the game’s development at Sega?

MOORE: Basically, yes, Manhunt was my baby. Want me to give you the rundown of its inception?

GAMASUTRA: I’d love that.

MOORE: Well, to start at the start, things were looking pretty bad for us after the PS2 launch. We really weren’t sure if we’d be able to compete with them. Sales in America were promising, but the Japanese sales just weren’t enough. This isn’t really public knowledge, and I’m not sure if I should be telling you, but things were bad enough that if nothing changed, the Dreamcast would probably be dead by now.

GAMASUTRA: It was that bad?

MOORE: It was bad. We had a lot of great games, but no real “must-have” titles. I guess the word they’re using for that now is “killer app”, right?

GAMASUTRA: Yeah.

MOORE: It was in early 2000 that we heard about a startup in Edinburgh that was shopping around a horror title. Now, my first thought was that the PlayStation already owns horror, we’re not going to be able to go up against Resident Evil.

But then they say they’re doing it as an “open world” game, like Shenmue. I know how hardcore Shenmue’s fans are, so that had me intrigued. I wasn’t sure how they were going to make that work with horror, but the demo they showed us proved it worked.

GAMASUTRA: But that wasn’t all you noticed in the demo, was it?

MOORE: [pauses] No.

[Moore stops for a moment to contemplate his response.]

At first, I really wasn’t sold on the level of violence. It had me concerned, really seriously concerned. It’s a pretty disturbing game. I asked them why it had to be so violent.

GAMASUTRA: What did they say?

MOORE: They said that it was the whole point of the game. That the game is, fundamentally, about exploitative violence. What’s often lost in the controversy over the game is that Manhunt is supposed to be a satire of violence in media. Now, whether you buy into that, that’s up to you, but the fact was that you just couldn’t cut the violence.

GAMASUTRA: So why did you decide to publish the game?

MOORE: We didn’t, at first. We told them no.

GAMASUTRA: So, what changed?

MOORE: They came back to us, with a guy you may or may not have heard of, named Max Clifford[2]. He’s a publicist, and they’d brought him on to try to help sell the game to publishers.

GAMASUTRA: That’s not usual, is it?

MOORE: No. They must have been pretty desperate to get a publisher. The studio was made up of people who’d been out of a job when DMA Designs shut down in ’97, and I think they were pretty anxious to get a steady income.

GAMASUTRA: So, what happened the second time?

MOORE: Clifford brought up Night Trap[3]. At the time, I wasn’t really sure where he was going with it. He sold us the game on the idea that it would be controversial, just like Night Trap had been, and that the controversy would sell the game better than any marketing campaign. It was a little distressing, but by that point, we were willing to try just about anything.

GAMASUTRA: Did you have any reservations about a controversy-based marketing campaign?

MOORE: Oh, of course. I don’t need to tell you about the asses Acclaim have made of themselves trying to stir up controversy[4], and I didn’t want Sega to be thought of that way.

I told Clifford about my concern, and he reassured me that the key difference was that the controversy would be organic. Acclaim was obviously just trying to stir the shit, but a game like Manhunt could raise controversy just through its core gameplay.

And I guess you know what they say; Sega does what Nintendon’t. [Moore chuckles]

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[1] IOTL, the PS2 launch marked the beginning of the end for the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast's disastrous Japanese launch meant that there was no real way for the American division to sell enough consoles and games to turn a net profit. Grand Theft Auto III was a huge launch title for the PS2, and many have called it the console's killer app. Without GTA3, the PS2 isn't quite as dominant, buying the Dreamcast more time to get a lasting foothold in the market.

[2] Max Clifford is the man arguably responsible for the success of Grand Theft Auto IOTL. He sent the game to various British MPs that he knew would raise a stink about it, and single-handedly managed to make the game a national talking point in the UK. ITTL, the DMA Design survivors still manage to hook up with him, since he had an established reputation for publicizing things in this fashion.

[3] Night Trap was a controversial Sega CD title that Sega pulled from the market after it became a national controversy in the USA.

[4] Acclaim was a publisher with a reputation for attention-grabbing publicity stunts, like offering money for the first couple to name their baby "Turok", or other, even less savoury PR stunts.
 

DStecks

Chapter 2

Chapter 2: A Rising Tide​

Gamasutra Interview with Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski, June 19th, 2011

160px-CliffyB.jpg

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the release of Manhunt, the infamous Dreamcast title, here at Gamasutra we’re doing a series of interviews with game developers who worked on Dreamcast titles, about their views on the controversial classic, and how it influenced their work on the console. This week, we’re sitting down with Cliff Bleszinski, better known as CliffyB, lead designer at Epic Megagames and creator of Jazz Jackrabbit and the Unreal series.[1]

GAMASUTRA: Thanks for sitting down with us.

CLIFFYB: It’s all cool, I love you guys’ work. It’s my pleasure.

GAMASUTRA: Thanks.

CLIFFYB: So, Manhunt, huh?

GAMASUTRA: That is what we’d like to talk about.

CLIFFYB: Fucking classic. Just a really solid game. Like a lot of people, that game was a big reason why I bought a Dreamcast at all.

GAMASUTRA: So Manhunt was all that drew you to the console?

CLIFFYB: No, no, like, that sounded bad, just… OK, here’s basically how it was for most of us: Manhunt was the game that got us in the door, but once we were there, we realized just how many cool as hell games we were missing out on.

GAMASUTRA: Can you remember others in particular?

CLIFFYB: Of course I can. Shenmue is obviously untouchable, Power Stone 1, Jet Set Radio, Soul Caliber. A lot of really great games. You know, I actually looked into the sales figures a couple years back, and I found something kinda weird.

GAMASUTRA: What’s that?

CLIFFYB: Manhunt didn’t sell nearly as well as you’d think. I mean, it was a bestseller, but when you stack its sales figures against most of the big PS2 titles, it hardly compares. Not bragging here or anything, but most of the games I worked on for the Dreamcast clobbered Manhunt’s sales figures.

I think what happened was that, more than anything, Manhunt raised the mystique of the Dreamcast, especially among kids. Let’s not kid ourselves, Manhunt was not a particularly mature depiction of violence, though I guess that’s kind of hypocritical for me to say. That’s always been the dirty little secret of gaming, really, that kids totally do play M-rated games, and in a lot of cases are the only ones really interested in some of the hyperviolent stuff.

Manhunt was this cool taboo thing that all the kids wanted to play, so all the kids wanted Dreamcasts. And, my theory is, a lot of kids got Dreamcasts from parents who then refused to buy them Manhunt. So they played Sonic Adventure, or Jet Set Radio, or Power Stone. Heh, god, I wonder how many boys came away from that game with a belly dancer fetish…

GAMASUTRA: So you think Manhunt’s success has been exaggerated?

CLIFFYB: Oh yeah, definitely. It’s still got this mystique around it today, especially since it turned out to be such an omen of what Sega of America decided to do with the Genesis. Of course, nobody could really see what was coming next, Sega sure didn’t have anything in mind beyond “this game could sell well, let’s go for it”. It’s easy to impose hindsight on history, but Sega wasn’t choosing some grand new business direction by publishing Manhunt, even if that’s where it took them.

It’s really not possible to underestimate how much of a game changer Halo proved to be. And the last people to see that coming were definitely Microsoft.[2]

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[1] Cliff Bleszinski, IOTL, is the former design director of Epic Games and currently most famous for creating the Gears of War franchise, though around the time currently explored ITTL, his most famous games were the Unreal and Unreal Tournament series.

[2] Microsoft, for the first while, were quite reluctant to own the success of Halo. This will be explored further in Chapter 3.
 

Nivek

Excellent, something this board needs are more videogames butterflies, you can imagine the world with out those?

In general interesting the things, so not GTA and Manhunt is releasing ahead(the one pass as a stealth release and 2 was overrated) umm interesting about that, what will be more, you say not other console war TL but still will be ;)

Hey will DMA Design fold that easy? they still have that idea of Nintendo about a Kid Kirby Game(don't ask), maybe if the game fold, would ask nintendo to recover the idea?
 

DStecks

Nivek said:
In general interesting the things, so not GTA and Manhunt is releasing ahead(the one pass as a stealth release and 2 was overrated) umm interesting about that, what will be more, you say not other console war TL but still will be ;)
Click to expand...

Something I may not have made clear is that ITTL Manhunt is a pretty drastically different game from OTL Manhunt, in terms of some core features, and is just all-around a better game than OTL. Not as good as GTA3, but better than OTL Manhunt, which was all sizzle and no steak.

And what I meant by "not another console wars timeline" is that the consoles themselves aren't going to be a primary focus, the focus is going to be on the games. It's just that the continued survival of the Dreamcast needs to be established first to explore how that had its effects on the game landscape.

You're not going to see anything like console specs in this TL, the "console wars" are really just a means to an end.

As for the Nintendo deal, it's pretty clear that by the late 90's, DMA wanted to primarily work on adult titles. Ninty might bail out the Kirby title, but they aren't going to want to touch any of the proto-Rockstar games with a ten-foot pole.
 

DStecks

Damn, I wish I could remember what the hell direction I was taking this TL in. Moore seems to be alluding to some kind of major change in Sega's direction and I do not know what it was. And discussion of Halo is weird, since whether the XBox even exists in a world with a surviving Dreamcast is a big if.

In retrospect, it seems more likely that after a failed Race N Chase, the DMA guys would have simply disappeared into the mists of history; another failed indie developer that made a couple beloved early-90's games. And no GTA 3 meaning a prolonged life for the Dreamcast is an interesting notion, but not sure if I buy it 100%. I really have no idea where I was going with this one, and I wish I did.
 

Nivek

DStecks said:
Damn, I wish I could remember what the hell direction I was taking this TL in. Moore seems to be alluding to some kind of major change in Sega's direction and I do not know what it was. And discussion of Halo is weird, since whether the XBox even exists in a world with a surviving Dreamcast is a big if.

In retrospect, it seems more likely that after a failed Race N Chase, the DMA guys would have simply disappeared into the mists of history; another failed indie developer that made a couple beloved early-90's games. And no GTA 3 meaning a prolonged life for the Dreamcast is an interesting notion, but not sure if I buy it 100%. I really have no idea where I was going with this one, and I wish I did.
Click to expand...

Tell me more about your original plans, even if you don't want to continue, you should at least give us that review.

Xbox would have existed even if DC rocked and kicked names, heck even MS was interested in buy sega but sega wasn't ready to sell them(the future of their arcade division).

Etto, DMA existed before Grand Theft auto and would exist before, and wasn't indie at all, was a developers since 80's and they even work with nintendo in several games(uniracers who steve jobs killed as he feel entitlement of digitial unycicles, a kid kirby games never progress by reasons,etc). so they would have done something else? even maybe with nintendo?

still if want to continued, full steam ahead, would be nice.
 

Swiffness

Without GTA3, open-world gaming surely doesn't reach the faddish, overkill levels that it has IOTL. Bethesda would probably be seen as the standard-bearers for the concept instead - Elder Scrolls started before GTA after all.

As for the unfortunate vaporwave nature of this TL, I assumed it was heading the direction of M$ bailing out/buying Sega. Because that's basically the only thing short of Alien Space Bats that could have saved Dreamcast....

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/08/why-did-microsofts-acquisition-of-sega-fall-through

...and it apparently coulda happened if Bill Gates was on board. I take "didn’t think that SEGA had enough muscle" as a diplomatic way of saying "Sega corporate is FUBAR, why make that Augean Stable our problem?".

So then.

  1. "Dreamcast" becomes the name of Microsoft's video game console brand instead of "Xbox"
  2. Halo releases on DC, does boffo numbers. It'd be funny if the DC's weaker hardware forced Bungie to cut down on the crap filler levels (LIBRARY) thus making it a better game. :D
  3. Halo becomes "a game changer" because its the real Killer App for SegaNet. IOTL Xbox Live launched a year after Halo's release and took another 2 years to break 1 million subscribers. But SegaNet is already well on the ground running by the time Halo debuts ITTL. Phantasy Star Online was at 200,000 users in early 2001! Sega had the online gaming infrastructure ready and raring to go, they just needed more time. Unleash the joy of Blood Gulch online play upon an unsuspecting gaming world and Microsoft will indeed be shocked by how their investment pays off.
  4. Dreamcast 360...
 
Tovarich

Tovarich

Banned
DStecks said:
Something I may not have made clear is that ITTL Manhunt is a pretty drastically different game from OTL Manhunt, in terms of some core features, and is just all-around a better game than OTL. Not as good as GTA3, but better than OTL Manhunt, which was all sizzle and no steak.
Click to expand...
Have to disagree there, I really liked Manhunt.
Indeed, if there'd been an open-world Carcer City then I'd probably still be playing it today.
 
Electric Monk

Electric Monk

Brief but neat, I quite liked it. I've got no problem with tiny timelines, and you saved the Dreamcast so we are all good, heh.

DStecks said:
1) Minimal butterflies. I'm not going to change things significantly that would not be affected at that point of the TL. So, I'm not going to allow myself to fudge the commercial performance of games unrelated to GTA, unless I can come up with a legit reason why GTA not existing would affect that change. This means that the 90's are going to largely play out as per OTL, and we're probably going to skip most of them.
Click to expand...

This is easy. Without GTA III Sony's The Getaway and Ubisoft's Driver franchises almost certainly take over some of GTA's sales (not most, but probably a quarter at the time)... depending on how much they were inspired by GTA of course.

Almost certainly more stuff too, but I'd have to think about that for awhile. Perhaps if you reboot the timeline someday :).

DStecks said:
MOORE: But then they say they’re doing it as an “open world” game, like Shenmue. I know how hardcore Shenmue’s fans are, so that had me intrigued. I wasn’t sure how they were going to make that work with horror, but the demo they showed us proved it worked.
Click to expand...

Alas, Shenmue came out at the end of 2000 outside Japan, and would not have a fanbase I imagine until 2001. Perhaps Manhunter is viewed as a game to combat ATL more GTA-like The Getaway?

Swiffness said:
Without GTA3, open-world gaming surely doesn't reach the faddish, overkill levels that it has IOTL. Bethesda would probably be seen as the standard-bearers for the concept instead - Elder Scrolls started before GTA after all.
Click to expand...

Eh, the only reason openworld didn't take off until GTA III was that consoles lacked enough memory to do it properly until the DC and PS2. Killing GTA III merely slightly delays/slightly weakens the openworld trend. Gamers LOVE openworlds, it'll still blow much up much like OTL. Maybe it'd develop in a better way, integrating RPG style quest lines instead of stupid boring garbage like OTL, lol :).

Swiffness said:
Halo releases on DC, does boffo numbers. It'd be funny if the DC's weaker hardware forced Bungie to cut down on the crap filler levels (LIBRARY) thus making it a better game. :D
Click to expand...

Weaker hardware would impact the good levels, primarily the lack of memory. I like where your head is at, though :).
 
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