Grand Theft Auto games have long been made by developers who live far from their source material. The original game and its main sequels were all helmed by Rockstar North, housed in a decidedly non-US-based Edinburgh. But even when it was a relatively local GTA mission pack set in London, the team instead opted to have its newly acquired Canadian team handle the development work. It doesn’t matter that only a few people on the team have ever been to London.
However, this distance, as the series proves, gives developers a more incisive vision of a place, which focuses more on the cultural rendering of a setting than on its reality.
As evidenced by Grand Theft Auto: Dog Shit London.
Ahead of GTA 6’s launch, London-based culture-focused publication Shortlist published a making-of of Grand Theft Auto: London by Jeremy Peel, that writer often seen hanging around the RPS backdoor looking for access to our rarefied pages. It tells the unlikely story of how a newly acquired Canadian studio was renamed Rockstar Canada and put to work turning Rockstar’s open-world crime ’em up into a game set in London in the sixties.
It’s a strange game to watch. Built with the same tools as the original game, the developers managed to roughly recreate the geography of London and have cars drive on the left side of the road, with drivers even entering from the right side to access a right-hand drive, but the streets remain hopelessly American. There are no curves on the roads, but rather wide lanes with right-angle turns, as seen in New York and Los Angeles.
Yet even though the Canadians were working on a British game engine designed to create games set in America, there was one cultural export that left its mark on the team: Viz magazine. The long-running parody of The Beano had managed to make its way to Canada and into the hands of artist Ray Larabie. “I was a real Anglophile,” he says. “I knew all about Newcastle upon Tyne, curry shops and the Kray twins from Viz magazine. I had this twisted view of England. I remember going there and asking normal people about Viz magazine. And they were like, ‘We’re adults, we don’t read that.’ It’s for young men.”
I don’t know how the creators of goats with vibrant faceswho named his 2012 edition the Cleveland Steamer, or who has a long-running character called Johnny Fartpants, could be called juvenile. But then, there is no consideration of taste.
Larabie told Shortlist that he managed to incorporate a particular detail from the pages of Viz into GTA: London: “London was famous for having dog shit everywhere in the ’60s. So I put little dog eggs, as they’re called in Viz, on the sidewalk. And I set it so that if you see a poop on the sidewalk, you can hand brake on it and leave a big brown skid mark. That’s my only innovation I’ve ever done in video games.”
I recommend reading the full making-of of the feature film, but it’s this cultural thread that particularly fascinates me. There’s certainly an argument that stories should be told by the people closest to them, but what the GTA games have consistently revealed is not the reality of the countries they’re set in but the cultural lens through which we view them. While this is also true for previous games, starting with GTA 3, Rockstar’s references to the films they are inspired by become more and more evident. Badfellas posters litter Liberty City in GTA 3, Vice City scenes are taken straight from Scarface, and GTA 4 missions recreate Heat heists.
If I had to choose the cultural touchpoints that represent the UK, I wouldn’t know where to start and there are so many contradictory choices you could make: Fawlty Towers, Our Friends in the North, Mr Bates versus the Post Office. But a foreigner probably has a narrower scope.
Which makes the fact that the domain includes Viz and his long-running dog egg joke a real joy.
