THE CRUNCH
The original Grand Theft Auto was open world not by grand design but because its developers did not want to build a menu system. Speaking on a Grand Theft Auto Origins panel at the Scottish Game Developers Association's Games Day 2026 in Dundee, DMA Design's creative director Gary Penn recalled that the game was once a linear experience where players chose missions from a list. Lead programmer Keith Hamilton told the audience, to laughs, that "the open world thing arose because we didn't want to have to build a front end. You just start one level and then that's you, it just keeps going from there."
The mission structure changed again when the linear list was replaced with telephones that could be answered in any order. Hamilton confirmed the inspiration was Die Hard with a Vengeance. Penn said that once the missions were "naturalised in this space" it became "a very different game, a very different experience".
The panel produced other development trivia. Radio stations began as 30-second music sketches across many genres, which the team decided to keep by splitting them into categories. Assuming publisher BMG's music library would be free, they quickly found licensing would cost a fortune and instead recorded their own music in a studio. The police radio codes read out during play were drawn from an internal list of crimes and declared in real time as the player committed them.
There was also what the developers called "unnecessary simulation": police drove from the station to the player's location, and the traffic lights ran a proper working sequence that Hamilton joked only he ever stopped for. Many features came from "feature creep", such as the ambulance arriving for a run-over pedestrian, which became stealable, then gained working lights, then made traffic get out of the way.