The Making of Grand Theft Auto: London

After dropping out of high school, Blair Renaud worked in a game shop, selling state-of-the-art consoles: the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, GDO, and Atari Jaguar. Some of his most regular customers were from the local game studio, Imagexcel, which made a series called Quarantine - in which you drove a hovering taxicab through a post-apocalyptic city, picking up passengers and blowing away chem-crazed citizens.

“They asked if I wanted to test Quarantine II: Road Warrior for them,” Renaud says. “When that was done, I basically went into the boss’s office, and said, ‘I’m not leaving. I don’t care. I’ll go get coffee, I’ll do whatever you need. And then work on the next project.’”

Renaud came up with a real-time strategy game called Dark Colony, which pitted humanity against gray aliens on Mars. But before long, the Brits came calling, and Imagexcel morphed into Rockstar Canada.

“We changed hands a few times,” says artist Ray Larabie. “Our publisher ended up with Take-Two, and then one day they said, ‘Hey, there’s a new company called Rockstar Games’. They showed us the logo, and we got the cool jacket, and that was it.”

Rockstar’s background was in the world of music distribution, and it didn’t behave as if it were selling software. It actively courted controversy and embraced edge - pulling videogames kicking and screaming out of the toy box and into the adult world. Its guerilla marketing struck a chord with Larabie in particular. “They were going to raves and throwing CDs of Grand Theft Auto,” he says. “I thought it was super cool, I was totally hyped for it.”

Initially, Rockstar Canada was experimenting with an open-world WWII game.

“It didn’t really get that far,” Larabie says. “We’d made some tests, but there was really nothing to show. And these people were not really interested in that. They were interested in Grand Theft Auto because that was what was hot.”

All of Rockstar Canada’s developers were playing the original GTA at the time. “Because it was crazy,” Renaud says. “Like, ‘Oh my God, you can run people over.’” There, players were tearing up the 2D streets of Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City - loose abstractions of North American metropoli. But for the expansion pack, Rockstar Canada would be grounding the action in a very real place: London.

“Dan Houser came to visit us a few times, he’s so cool,” Larabie says. “He was super into the Kray twins, all that crime wave stuff. So I think it was his enthusiasm for it.”

GTA: London would be set in 1969, during the heyday of the Krays - when the pair ran protection rackets and nightclubs that extended to the West End. The Krays were murderers and enthusiastic participants in the Swinging Sixties, embodying the social mobility, style and non-comformist celebrity of an era in which British values were being openly questioned.

Top-down Minecraft

GTA: London would capture something of that grime and glamour - through the double-breasted suits of its playable avatars, and through a couple of in-game characters dubbed the Crisp twins. It must be said, though, that its depiction of 60s crime was often not terribly sophisticated. Today, Dan Houser is the celebrated lead writer of Red Dead Redemption 2’s slowburn cowboy elegy. But GTA: London was his first credited project as a writer, and its dialogue more often shoots for mockney parody than a clear-eyed depiction of time and place.

“Some posh nob is messin’ with one of Albert Crisp’s favourite boys,” one mission directive reads. “They want Jack to kidnap the nonce from outside the palace.” Another asks you to park an explosive-packed vehicle in the garage of a rival gang’s hideout. “But have a care, it’s stuffed fuller than an Earl’s Court rentboy.” This wasn’t period dialogue so much as a catalogue of Guy Ritchie-isms.

GTA: London took plenty of liberties with the layout of London, too.

“Rockstar gave us their editing tools, which was kind of like top-down Minecraft,” says Renaud, who designed the game’s map. “Everything’s built with cubes.”

The team pulled their reference material from all the London travel guides they could find in a local Canadian bookstore. Renaud had never visited the city himself. “I basically had to distill a map from that,” he says. “The artists would just give me these blocks, and I had to piece them together.”

The Thames ran through the middle of GTA: London, winding beneath Westminster and above Southwark as it does in life, cutting the map in two. “It’s not that much different than an island, right? It’s two islands at that point, rather than one,” Renaud says. “We tried to build it as close to the topography as we could. You’ve got all your major bridges, and Tower Bridge looks different than the other ones. I think there was a lot more open space in ours because you had Hyde Park.”

The game’s condensed streets preserved few of the quirks and curves of the capital’s road network. Instead, they more closely resembled the wide avenues of North American cities. Which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given that GTA: London was essentially a reskin of a game designed to mimic US norms. “The whole thing was basically a grid,” Renaud says.

Arguably, a more faithful take on London’s streets would have been disastrous - not only for GTA: London’s development time, but for players too. Asked to navigate a top-down urban landscape at high speed, they were often grateful for the wide, predictable corners. And Rockstar Canada did make some important concessions to UK driving: they switched the side of the road that NPCs drive on. “Which I think was a bit of a problem, just getting that logic right,” Renaud says. “And we had roundabouts, which weren’t in the first one, because there are no roundabouts in the States.”

Since UK vehicles are right-hand drive, lead programmer Kevin Hoare came up with a “speedy little hack” to ensure that players hijacked cars from the correct side. “Kevin’s ripped,” Larabie says. “He looks like a normal muscle dude, but he’s a programming genius.”

Upside the head

Larabie’s first priority was to replace all of the original GTA’s vehicles with era-appropriate cars - or ‘jam-jars’, as the Crisp twins would have it.

“We went to the Square One shopping centre in Mississauga, and we filled up a huge black garbage bag with die-cast cars,” he says. “The people in the shop were like, ‘No one has ever bought that many cars’. We bought all different scales, we didn’t care because we could just zoom in with the camera.”

Renaud photographed the collectable toys, before working his Photoshop magic to make them fit for in-game use. “I had all this experience on Super Nintendo and Amiga games, so it was in my wheelhouse working in limited palettes.”

Larabie had, in fact, visited London, to show Dark Colony at a trade show. “I saw Harrods, so I knew a few things,” he says. “I wasn’t an expert, but at least I had been there.” When he rebuilt the famous department store for GTA: London, however, the initial design was rejected. “Harrods wasn’t looking like Harrods,” he says. “I’d been inside, but I didn’t remember what it looked like from the outside, and I certainly didn’t remember what it looked like in the 60s. And so we had to exaggerate it. That was the only one I got blowback on.”

What Larabie lacked in knowledge of Knightsbridge architecture, however, he made up for in his unlikely adoration for Viz magazine, which he’d bought in stacks from eBay. “I was a real anglophile,” he says. “I knew all about Newcastle upon Tyne and the curry shops and the Kray twins from Viz magazine. I had this twisted view of England. I remember going over there and asking normal people about Viz magazine. And they were like, ‘We’re adults, we don't read that. That is for juvenile young men.’”

Viz did end up informing one vivid detail during development. “London was famous for having dog shit everywhere in the 60s,” Larabie says. “So I put little dogs’ eggs, as they call them in Viz, on the sidewalk. And set it so that if you see a poop on the sidewalk, you can do a handbrake on it and leave a big brown skid mark. That’s my only innovation I ever made in videogames.”

Renaud pulled double duties as map designer and sound director, watching 60s car chase movies like The Italian Job and Bullitt to try and capture their essence.

“At the time, all we had was crappy sound libraries,” he says. “So it was actually a lot of design, figuring out how to fake a sound in really short loops that are sped up and slowed down. I had no training and I was 20 years old, running around the office with a microphone. I was patching into VHS tapes and recording it onto the PC.”

At one point, Renaud was struggling to simulate the sound of the player’s car crashing at speed. “So I ran up behind one of the programmers with an empty two-litre bottle of Coke, and hit him upside the head with it as I recorded.”

The incident is emblematic of a mischievous office atmosphere that led to the team being kicked out of their original space. “We terrorised our last office and the town sheriff came and crossed his arms and made us get the hell out,” Larabie says. After a couple of months working from home, the team wound up making GTA: London beneath a fruit market, while fending off cockroaches and spiders.

“I have fond memories of interactions with some people and really terrible memories of interactions with other people,” Renaud says. “Back then there was no HR or anything, and we were just a bunch of dudes. If somebody had a problem with somebody else, you might end up rolling around on the floor and having people pull you up.” Nonetheless, development proceeded surprisingly smoothly. “We did have a lot of help from London,” Renaud says.

Tiffany Memorandum

Over the pond, Paul Bennun worked on GTA: London as director of sound production, at an agency named Somethin’ Else. He had previously directed a game called You Don’t Know Jack for Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser. “We had a really good relationship,” he says. “They asked me to create the interactive audio for GTA: London and all the radio stations.”

Where the original GTA relied on music that Rockstar North’s audio team composed themselves, GTA: London leaned into licensed songs. Rockstar tasked Bennun with stringing together a diverse mix - from the buoyant reggae sounds of The Upsetters to orchestral numbers from Italian crime and spy movies - and linking the songs with smatterings of DJ chatter.

“The games industry wasn’t as big, the teams were smaller, we were all a lot younger,” Bennun says. “We were all really clued into what was cool, or what we thought was cool, whether or not it actually was cool. And just ended up coming out with this really broad range of eclectic stuff.”

Standout instrumentals included The Liquidator, a 1969 UK chart hit for the Jamaican group Harry J All Stars. Its Hammond organ pips contributed a deliciously inappropriate ice-cream-truck jollity to player crime sprees. Then there was Blow Upradio’s Beat Fuga Shake, which was lifted from a Bond-adjacent Berlin spy thriller named Tiffany Memorandum.

That gelled particularly nicely with the more outlandish missions, in which you took on the identity of secret agent Endeavour Chambers. There, you thwarted the plans of Austrian supervillain Hans Nemesis while at the wheel of a union-jack-emblazoned Jaguar E-Type (or ‘Jug Swinger’, if you’ll indulge GTA’s puerile take on car brands). “The way the whole thing came together, it just sounded right, and plugged in, in a really interesting way,” Bennun says. “It was genuinely quite countercultural and edgy.”

Somethin’ Else’s connections with the London art scene lent still more eccentricity to GTA: London via its level-ending cutscenes. Among the voice actors were Simon McBurney, the respected playwright and opera director, and John Berger, the Booker Prize-winning novelist and art critic. The latter played Albert Crisp with an offhand menace.

“This 70-something year old, quite posh English voice with long, flowing white hair and this massive presence, this high-end cultural institution of a man, ended up playing one of the mob bosses in the game because he was around,” Bennun says. “He was taking these words that were written in cockney and doing them in this super eloquent style, and that’s in the game. If we’d gone through a proper casting process to work out who would be playing these characters in 2026, the chance of Simon McBurney and John Berger being in a Grand Theft Auto game is zero. There is absolutely no way in hell.”

Bennun attributes GTA: London’s particular charm to a certain scrappiness, one incompatible with the large-scale, professionalised environment of AAA game development today. “It just felt like we were sticking things together, and making each other laugh.”

Mashed together, these ideas gave GTA: London a sensibility of its own - one that transcended the limited scope of an expansion pack, even if it didn’t necessarily reflect the reality of the 1960s. “We really didn’t have a sense of historical accuracy,” Bennun says. “We just took ideas from the things that we were seeing on the streets.” The first Austin Powers movie had arrived in 1997, but Bennun says the team weren’t influenced by “this joke version of what Swinging London was like that has become more prevalent. We were making up our own version of it. Honestly, we were just having fun.”

Absolute BAFTA

Of course, from today’s perspective, GTA: London is a historical artefact in itself. Its mechanics are anachronistic in the extreme - rooted in the coin-op standards of the arcades. Reaching a level’s target score requires you to efficiently dodge police, since every arrest reduces your multiplier. Losing too many lives results in level failure - and even messing up a single objective can cut you off from a whole chain of subsequent missions. Add to this the fact that mission timers can be punishing to the point of cruelty, and you’ll understand how GTA: London might quickly kill a modern player’s enthusiasm for its setting.

Nonetheless, GTA: London pointed the way forward in important ways. It was the first game in the series to incorporate drive-by shooting, albeit briefly and crudely. And it was also the first to use licensed music to evoke a time and place - a formula that was followed to astonishing success with 2002’s Vice City, and has remained a signature element of the series ever since.

GTA: London won the BAFTA for best sound at the 1999 Interactive Game Awards. But the award was accepted by a member of the marketing team on the night, and Renaud didn’t get his gong until much later. “It took me 25 years to get a hold of the damn thing,” he says. In the end, this injustice was rectified with the help of Time Extension journalist Jack Yarwood. “It’s classic corporate politics,” Bennun says, “You’re always going to get people who are going to try and steal the glory.”

For all its firsts, GTA: London was the last of its kind too. It was the final game in the series to explicitly name a real-world city as its setting, and the only one to take place outside of the US. Speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast last year, Dan Houser suggested that GTA will forever remain rooted in the States.

“GTA: London was pretty cute and fun, as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1,” he said. “I think for a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective. But it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.”

It’s an assertion that makes the existence of GTA: London all the more remarkable. This oddity was a product of a time when the identity of gaming’s biggest series was yet to be locked down - leaving just enough wiggle room that a bunch of Canadians could make a game in which you can hear the bongs of Big Ben, and train your rocket launcher on Buckingham Palace.

“I feel like I know London now,” Renaud says. “If you dropped me off somewhere, I’d at least know what neighbourhood I’m in.”

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