Imagine a world in which DMA Design stayed in the Lemmings, the GTA phenomenon never existed to provoke the purchase of Take-Two Interactive and, ultimately, neither Rockstar nor were their games ever created. Now consider that this alternate reality is a simple bug away.
A silly mistake in the code of a game capable of changing the course of an entire industry. You imagine? Well, it is just what happened when, during the development of what would later be the first Grand Theft Auto, the game police went completely insane because of a bug.
Race N’Chase, the precursor of GTA
We are in the mid-90s and in DMA Design they come from triumphing with the mythical Lemmings and its different versions. Their next project promises to be something completely different and, for this, they are going to catch one of the most universal games of our childhood: cops and robbers.
Under the name of Race N ‘Chase, your new game will focus on creating a city in which to run street races or, if you prefer, embody the policemen who must stop these illegal competitions before they cross the finish line. An idea with potential, right?
Well, not according to part of the team, and even less according to BMG InteractiveTired of seeing the game go nowhere, she was considering canceling it. They had been working on it for several years and, in addition to stability and control problems in the vehicles, Race N ‘Chase it was in the Antipodes of what could be considered as fun.
However, out of the blue and without the programmers knowing how it happened, the game’s testing team stumbles upon something they had not witnessed so far. Police behavior is no longer limited to following you closely. Something is causing them to become completely crazy.
A saving mistake
Crashing their cars into yours, knocking you off the road and causing some brutal accidents, it’s clear that something is wrong with the code under which tracking of the vehicles is controlled. police vehicles. They no longer chase you keeping at a safe distance, now it seems that they want to go through you.
And yes, that was precisely what they were doing, since far from following a path that goes from their position to a point close to the center of the player, the error is causing them to go to the very center. Since they cannot reach it because they collide with the body of the vehicle, what they do is push you violently in a failed attempt to achieve it.
Any such error would be more than enough to fix the bug and forget about it because, in essence, it is making the game work differently from what was planned, but it will not be this time. To the team’s surprise, the testers are having a great time trying dodge the police.
That little mistake was adjusted to balance it out and the rest of the game began to build around that police aggressiveness. Doing the goat to piss off the police and try to give them a slip became the lifeblood of a new game and, from the ashes of Race N ‘Chase, was born GTA that we all know today.