14 DAY TRIAL // Mike Dailly, one of the original creators of the Grand Theft Auto series, says that much of the popularity of the series was linked to the media backlash that was engineered by Max Clifford, the man who was heading the public relations effort for the game.
GamesIndustry.biz reports that the game developer tells the Sunday Times that, “Max Clifford made it all happen. He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved… He’d do anything to keep the profile high.”
Dave Jones, another of the game developers working on the first GTA, adds, “He told us how he would play it, who he would target, what those people targeted would say. Every word he said came true. We knew why every decision was made, and we were never, ever influenced by ‘let’s do something to create a bit of controversy.”
When Grand Theft Auto was first launched, a number of members of Parliament reacted angrily to it, saying that it might influence the young kids who would be playing it and turn them towards a life of crime.
The first GTA was played from a top-down perspective and, while it offered some story missions, it focused on the open-world mayhem that one man with weapons and a car could cause.
Since then, the series has evolved quite a lot and it is now an action title played from a third-person perspective, which is heavily defined by its characters and its overall story.
At the moment, the fifth core game in the franchise has been announced and developer Rockstar and publisher Take Two are planning to launch it at some point during 2013.
The game will again parody the American dream and lifestyle and will take place once again in Los Santos, offering the biggest open world that the team has created.