Electronic Gaming Monthly: Afterthoughts: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

If San Andreas—the faux-California setting for the latest Grand Theft Auto—had a state motto, it would be “Vincio tuus foris, stultus.”* But here’s a close second: “Land of opportunity.” And that’s not just because you take star thug Carl “CJ” Johnson from the ghetto to the good life. The state also packs a nearly limitless number of diversions, from high-stakes gambling to small-business ownership. One tour through the territory just isn’t enough to see everything, so we asked Rockstar Games CEO Terry Donovan, President Sam Houser, and Creative Director Dan Houser what you might have missed.

EGM: So how did a bunch of guys from Scotland research all of San Andreas’ inner-city content?

Terry Donovan: Research is a really important part of development. It is vital to get the style and feel of the time and the place right. The team from Rockstar North went on a long research trip to the West Coast and traveled around photographing everything and absorbing everything. We also have a really meticulous team of researchers based in New York who obsess over every detail, and this combined with working closely with people like [tattoo artist] Mister Cartoon, [rap photographer] Estevan Oriol, and [screenwriter] DJ Pooh to draw on their knowledge and experience of the West Coast at that time helped to really put as much detail and feeling for the era into the game.

EGM: So if we looked in your development offices, would we see a lot of empty 40s and half-smoked joints?

TD: Maybe, but that’s not research!

EGM: What’s the one thing you’re most proud of in a game this huge?

Dan Houser: I think the stuff that we worked the hardest on was the stuff that you don’t necessarily notice. It’s not just the size of the world. It’s not just that it takes so long to get from one side to the other. It’s also that you can walk up to a soda machine and get a drink out of it, no matter where you see one. We worked really hard on things like the pedestrians speaking to one another. In the previous games, you could run around and there would be all these people around, but there wasn’t much going on. This time you can just sit back and watch all the freaks interact with each other. Occasionally, you’ll see that they just don’t like each other and they’ll even start to fight. We’re still scratching the surface of every pedestrian having a life in a virtual world, rather than just having them cruise around a gameplay environment.

EGM: Some of those cross-country missions get pretty long. Were you worried that so much trekking from point A to B would turn gamers off?

TD: Not really. The cross-country trips are there by design, and I think Rockstar North did an incredible job balancing the game. The trips are there to help players learn their way around the very large state of San Andreas. Any time they didn’t want a player to have to repeat a long trip, they implemented a Trip Skip [a feature that lets you skip long road trips in later attempts at failed missions].

EGM: Anything you discovered by accident you could do, a tester did, or that happened in the world that you didn’t plan for?

TD: Let’s just say the versatility of the parachute never ceases to amaze us.

EGM: Why the jump to three cities instead of a larger version of the kind of thing you’d done before?

Sam Houser: We love L.A., and the whole gangbanging vibe, and the street culture. That time [early ’90s] in L.A. is so important and we knew a long time ago that the franchise needed to end up there. We’d done the East Coast in GTA3, and then ’80s Miami with Vice City, so going to L.A. in the early ’90s just seemed like an obvious place for us to go. We’ve explored lots of possibilities for the franchise, and we’ve looked at going back in time and playing with the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, but it just doesn’t feel like GTA, y’know? That’s not to say that we won’t explore something like that in future, but for now this is it.

EGM: So why the other two cities?

SH: We were drawn to doing a city based on San Francisco because of the hills and all the beautiful scenery with the bridges and the Victorian architecture. Once we’d decided to do that, it became clear that if you’re doing L.A. and San Francisco, you can’t not do Vegas. Again there’s a very different look and feel, and you have the whole Mafia vibe, and the gambling and the bright lights. Once we put together the three cities, things started to naturally evolve. We realized that we needed the wilderness with the farms and desert, etc.

EGM: Was there anything the team wanted to do with the game but couldn’t?

DH: Not really. If I had my way, we’d have 1,000 missions and 100 different story lines, but the team is already big, and if I’m honest, I don’t really want to have to make it any bigger. We’ve achieved a sort of natural scale for a development team on a game like this because we had the luxury of sorting out a lot of our problems [in the prequels]. That’s why we were able to do as much as we did for San Andreas in just two years.

EGM: We’ve seen some crazy San Andreas rumors on the Net, like that it packs 30 specific Easter eggs.

TD: This is another rumor started on the [message] boards that is not true.

EGM: You can tell from his show that Dave Chappelle is a huge GTA fan. Ever approach him to voice the main guy?

TD: We felt that [up-and-coming rapper] Young Maylay was right for the role; he blew us away with his audition and his performance. He did a really great job of being CJ, and to us that is the most important thing—much more important than attaching a big name to the role.

EGM: You guys didn’t back down on the series’ controversial aspects. Not only are prostitutes back, but you can be a pimp. Once again you have ethnic gangs. Did you back off anywhere?

TD: We don’t really think in those terms. We genuinely believe this is an incredible piece of entertainment that challenges the limits of what a game is and where gaming belongs in the spheres of media and art. Due to the enormity of the world and the story line, it has and will continue to be possible to extract content from San Andreas that misrepresents the game when taken out of context. We also strongly encourage anyone critical of the game to play through the entire game before making judgments about the content. Criticizing a game that can literally take over 100 hours to play when one hasn’t actually experienced it is the equivalent of a person judging a piece of literature by reading a page of it or watching a scene of a movie and basing their opinion of the entire production off of a tiny portion of the entire work. It always seems that the people criticizing the game tend to have watched someone else play it rather than play it themselves.

EGM: So how can you top this?

SH: Well, if we didn’t have to top it, what would be the point? The beauty of working in games is that you’re not held back by a fixed medium. If you look at TV, or movies, or music, it’s completely static, but with games we get to see the medium evolve. Every five years the nice people at Sony give us new toys to play with, and we get to reinvent the wheel again. With that in mind though, we don’t want to abuse the franchise, and we only want to make stuff when there’s a reason for it. This is the trilogy for now, and we’re not in a rush to do the next one. We’re looking at the next generation of hardware for sure, and if you think about the enormous difference between PS1 and PS2 and then do the calculations on how much more we’ll be able to do if the leap is to the same degree for PS3, well...it’s very exciting.