Any conversation about the history of the PlayStation has to include the work of Rockstar Games. While the publisher wasn’t nearly as successful on Sony’s first home console as they’d later be on the PlayStation 2, thanks to titles such as Grand Theft Auto 3, Max Payne, Bully, The Warriors and Red Dead Revolver, the Rockstar titles that began on the PlayStation however were the foundation for all the brand’s future success. While there were a handful of solid titles on the PlayStation from the publisher, Grand Theft Auto and the second full game in the series, Grand Theft Auto 2 (don’t forget about the GTA: London spin-off), were absolutely their heaviest hitters. To this day, Grand Theft Auto is synonymous with the Rockstar brand.
That has everything to do with GTA’s attitude. Rash, lewd, fun and care-free it embodies an entire generation’s video gaming preferences. A time when gamers began to want more than traditional platformers or Doom clones, GTA served up a huge helping of uniqueness. Continuing to build upon the fun with every subsequent release, GTA 2 was an important title in its own right, adding improved enemy AI, visuals, customizable vehicles and a much-needed save-point option to make the game more forgiving to casual players. Make no mistake, the added features were a step in the refinement of the series before its PlayStation 2 debut, Grand Theft Auto 3, considered by many to be one of the greatest games of all-time.
But way before GTA and Rockstar became iconic, both were an up and coming series and publisher looking to hit pay dirt with gamers. After initially hitting the PC, Grand Theft Auto was eventually released original PlayStation, where the game, despite a lengthy development cycle and near bouts of cancellation, earned over 2.3 million units sold on the PlayStation alone. Despite possessing dated visuals, the sandbox-styled gameplay ended up carving a niche in the industry that fueled unparalleled growth and creativity. That process absolutely continued for Grand Theft Auto 2, which sold over 3.4 million units on the PS1 and proved the series was here to stay. Regardless of the sequel’s success, the impact of its contributions to the history of the series wouldn’t be apparent until over a decade later.
A decade before the release of GTA 2 however, one of the game’s developers, Nigel Conroy was just beginning his almost sandbox journey through the industry. Known now for his work on three games in the Grand Theft Auto series, as well as programming credits on games in legendary franchises such as Raiden, Bubsy, Pitfall, Midnight Club and Little Big Planet, Conroy broke into the industry thanks to a love of programming and games.
“I started programming as a 10-year-old in the early ‘80s on a Dragon 32 using Basic,” Conroy said. “When I left school, I went to college to study Electrical Engineering where I was introduced to 6502 assembly language. I got hooked and bought myself a Commodore Amiga in 1989. I put a lot of work into honing my technical skills and got a job in the industry two years later. I’ve played games all my life. All sorts really with a slant towards fantasy/RPGs.”
Fast forward a few years and Conroy was at Gremlin. It’s here that his association with the Grand Theft Auto series begins. “I worked for Gremlin Graphics at the time, which owned DMA Design, who were the original guys behind GTA,” Conroy said. “They were mainly PC programmers I think and didn’t have much experience with console development. Gremlin drafted a few of us in to work on the PS1 version.”
At this time, Rockstar was far from the juggernaut they are now, but they saw how special Grand Theft Auto could be and invested in Conroy and the team. “Rockstar was a brand new company, which at the time, I’d never heard of,” Conroy said. “The guys were moving from the DMA offices in Dundee to set up what is now Rockstar Edinburough. This was happening right at the back end of the GTA 2 development (they were moving offices as we were finishing the game ). They seemed a fairly cool set of guys who clearly had a vision for the franchise and had incredible attention to detail. We got on so well they provided the PS1 team with work when we set up another company after GTA 2 was finished.”
Conroy remembers his duties on the game well. Anyone that’s played Grand Theft Auto 2 has been affected by his work. Away from optimization and making the game feel like more than a PC port, you might say Conroy was responsible for giving the game a shining light of sorts. “My main job was to get the game running fast enough and fitting within the constraints of the PS1. I mainly worked of getting the graphics up and running, optimizing for CPU ( fair bits of assembly language, the game was C++ ) and getting it to fit within the memory limits and fixing bugs/refactoring code,” Conroy said. “I did some prototyping of the vertex lighting used in the final game off my own back ( the graphics early-on where flat-shaded GTA style ). I remember Rockstar being fairly impressed with that and they overhauled the PC graphics engine to match it. It was a fairly simple idea, but it did liven the game up a lot.”
Putting his stamp on the game was a special one for Conroy, but the cycle was a hectic one with a team that was focused from start to finish. “Not really many hurdles,” Conroy said. “The game as still being developed on PC while our small team was squeezing in all the changes for PS1. We had a good team so it was just really a matter of squeezing the bytes into the hours. I was already seven years experienced at this point so I’d seen it all before (and most members of the team were in a similar boat ). The team was cool. We had about three months of intense development towards the end to get the game out on time (which we did ). There wasn’t really much time for anything else. It was pretty much a straight three months of 12-hour days/six-seven days a week and towards the very end all-nighters.”
Going on to out-sell the original game by over a million units, Grand Theft Auto 2 was an undeniable success. There were no near cancellation drama (read The Minds Behind Adventure Games for the development story of Grand Theft Auto from its lead programmer, Dave Cowan) or wonder as to how the market would appreciate the game. After Grand Theft Auto 2, it was clear the series and Rockstar had arrived.
For Conroy, his success on GTA 2 wouldn’t be the end of his work with the series to Rockstar. “I work for a spin-off company of Rockstar Leeds called Double Eleven which I’ve been with for a fair few years now. I worked at Rockstar Leeds for about six years working on various games,” Conroy said. “I worked on the physics/collision/optimizing on GTA Chinatown Wars, which was so much like GTA 2 in style and form. Probably the best game I’ve ever worked on.”
While Chinatown Wars remains the apex of his journey in video game development, he has special feelings towards GTA 2 as well. As far as he’s concerned, it deserves quite a bit of credit for what it was able to accomplish. “As a natural successor to Grand Theft Auto,” Conroy said. “And a nice ending to the top-down 2-and-a-half-d PS1-era style of game. I could never imagine from seeing the prototyping of GTA 2 what the whole franchise would become. The PS1 version was incredibly important to Rockstar and I’m very happy that I played some part at the beginning of it all. Pretty cool from something that started off as a Pizza Delivery game (or so the legend goes ).”
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