Grand Theft Auto V: Scottish game conquering world

The game, which features mafia bosses, prostitutes, Hollywood bosses and bank robbers, took five years and almost £170m to produce. It has already earned back the cost of development, the majority of which was done by Rockstar North in Edinburgh, and is set to become the most successful video game yet released.

Sales of the game have dwarfed in a single day the £300m in revenue which Grand Theft Auto’s fourth instalment generated in its first week nearly five years ago.

Yesterday, Strauss Zelnick, chairman and chief executive of Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar Games, said: “All of us at Take-Two are thrilled with the initial response to Grand Theft Auto V. Once again, the team at Rockstar Games have outdone themselves, setting the entertainment industry’s new standard for creativity, innovation and excellence.

“Beginning at midnight on Monday, consumers around the world gathered in anticipation to be among the first to experience the evolution of this remarkable series.”

The key in the ignition of Grand Theft Auto was first turned in Dundee. In 1997, computer games company DMA Design developed a demo called Race ‘n’ Chase. DMA was founded by a former apprentice engineer at the Timex factory, Dave Jones, with his £3,000 redundancy package.

The programmer, Mike Dailly, had designed an elaborate three-dimensional city and fast cars were chosen as the sleekest means of exploring it – a fellow programmer’s suggestion of dinosaurs was rejected.

The company pitched the idea to BMG Interactive, a gaming division of a German music conglomerate, where Sam Houser, whose mother once played a gangster’s moll in Get Carter, made two key suggestions: change the name to Grand Theft Auto and do not let the player chose to be the good guy.

Mr Jones subsequently scrapped the option to play a policeman in hot pursuit. “It was no fun. It didn’t let your imagination run wild,” he said.

Mr Houser handed Jones a publishing contract for £3.4m to develop the game. Together, Mr Houser and DMA embraced the idea of the gamer as anti-hero and instead of avoiding pedestrians, awarded points for running them down.

As Mr Jones said: “The analogy we used to use was that the player was Pacman. The ghosts were the police and the little dots that Pacman used to run around and munch were the pedestrians.”

Before the game’s release, parent company BMG Interactive sought advice on how to minimise negative publicity on account of the games antisocial violence. The publicist Max Clifford advised them to embrace the scandal as a means of generating publicity and attracting adult gamers.

Politicians and police were briefed on fictitious scenes and the Police Federation of England and Wales condemned it as “sick, deluded and beneath contempt” – and the resultant publicity ensured its immediate success.

Shortly afterwards, BMG sold off its gaming division so Houser founded Rockstar Games, took his brother Dan on board and together commissioned a sequel.

While the Houser brothers moved to New York and embraced the lifestyle of rap stars, the games were designed and coded in Scotland by DMA, which eventually became Rockstar North in 2002 and moved from Dundee to Edinburgh. The staff were encouraged to wear blue velvet Rockstar tracksuits and jokingly brandished replica rifles and shotguns – weapons purchased to allow the art department to render faultless in-game replicas.

Mr Jones left the company in 1999 and over the past 15 years Leslie Benzies, an Aberdonian who got his first computer, a Dragon 32, at age 11, has overseen the last three Grand Theft Autos. He is now president of Rockstar North.

From a cavernous fourth-floor office, with views of Arthur’s Seat, in which sits an Apple iMac, whiteboards filled with vehicle printouts and scented candles, Benzies oversees a Scottish staff of several hundred, as well as hundreds more in offices in London and America.

Together with the Houser brothers, he has pioneered the increasingly explicit and controversial content of the games such as permitting characters to have sex and kill prostitutes.