GTA 4 grew from years of notes and a last-minute deadline

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 41:09

   really cheap decent stuff i have to ask you about your writing process and we could break it break it up on on grand theft auto gta 4 is when it really started ramping up how much writing went into the grand theft auto series how many words are we talking about i saw some thousands of pages i mean when we printed out the scripts for gta 4 it was about this high yeah and gta 5 is about that high but that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world because you interact with each one of them but even even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long what was the writing process like on that to generate one page at a time a bit by bit by bit over several years but you start with once people are determined oh here's the here's the world we're doing one

2. 42:00

   based on a version of new york say gta4 and um i was living in new york i've been living in york for a few years wasn't sure if i was happy was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual and um and that was why i was looking at some of gta4 again recently and it's really dark and i was like oh that's why you know i was uh single and miserable and i wasn't sure i wanted to stay in america my life thought in a lot of flux as a company we'd had all that hot coffee drama so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that you know the lot of drama in the company so it felt like having had this run of success and and relative personal stability from uh gta3 by city san andreas suddenly 2005 six seven early seven life felt very unsure um Um, and that kind of bled into it, but in terms of the process, it was, uh, trying to

3. 43:05

   find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience. I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2000 and when the game came out and then tell it story from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it, made it interesting. Um, and then this sort of journey around these various New York characters. So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and, you know, wandering around New York.

4. 43:30

   And driving around and on and on, while you just go out for the morning from the office, normal stuff. But doing that through 2005, assembling little notes, here's a funny character for this, here's how figuring out the order we want to travel around the map in, characters of this, what was an interesting take on the mob for that kind of time period, what was an interesting take on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period, and assembling lots of notes.

5. 44:00

   and more and more notes and really really really running away from the work which is you know i have to admit it's part of my process if there is any kind of process which is not doing work thinking about it but not working you know a lot of time and then and then it all kind of pages and pages notes make more notes no actual work months and months of this and then um finally set myself a deadline told all the other people on the senior people on the team okay i'll have a story draft to you monday morning i can't remember what i say february the first and then the weekend before was in a in a cabin we we had upstate and just stayed up all night grab knocking these notes into shape assemble about probably a 30-page document so story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters and then hand that over and that gets

6. 44:46

   broken that would get broken down with me and the designers um and i was always clear i'm not a game designer i'm a sort of creative director uh with me and break that down into missions and then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin but then the bulk of my work's then done for a bit so i can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel be lazy for a bit and then um start to worry because then i've actually soon i've got to start writing dialogue and for gta4 in particular is that we're going to try and write you know our animation is going to be a lot better our character model is going to start look better the world is going to look amazing uh therefore we can support better you know longer scenes we can have more in-depth characters uh but we've got to find a tone that works that with the game

7. 45:31

   easy no problem and i start to worry and worry and worry and and also writing as a as a serbian immigrant and i was an immigrant but i'm not serbian and trying to capture what on earth that would feel like so start to worry start to worry again avoid work for as long as possible um and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night hammering away at a keyboard and going does that right is that and once i get one speech one turn of phrase that i would like for a character then they suddenly come alive in my head and so it's like writing writing with nico and just he's a kind of he's awkward he's out of town but he's got more self assurance in some way not the american characters and so once i kind of thought him through this he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness and he's that then he started

8. 46:21

   to come to life and then i would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more americanized energy and that felt like it was a good a good double act and then from there it starts to come to life and and but it's written in small chunks uh for the motion so then then we'd motion capture small chunks and then the other other writers write the mission dialogue for small chunks and we'd slowly assemble the game sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.