Edge magazine takes a look back at the torturous, tangled development process that resulted in Grand Theft Auto. At one point, all the artwork was thrown out and redone when programmer Mike Dailly figured out a new way to render the game’s pseudo-3D cityscape; it added a year to the project. Though they came up with film-inspired features and innovative workarounds for technology constraints, they didn’t really have much inkling about what would become some of GTA’s biggest draws:
Elements of the game were added as they were thought of, often as a consequence of some casual tinkering with the behaviour of the living city.
“The Gouranga bonus is a really good example of that,” he points out. “One of the programmers came up with a routine that had pedestrians following each other. This led to the idea of a line of Krishnas following each other down the street and then, once we had all experimented with ploughing through them all in one go, the Gouranga bonus became an obvious addition.”
The Making Of…Grand Theft Auto [edge-online.co.uk via rw]