original gta was open world because they didn't want to build a front end

Caught this from a VGC piece about a retrospective GTA panel. Apparently one of the devs said the whole reason the original game was open world was because they didn't want to build a front end. No menus, no title screen with a bunch of options, just drop you straight into the city.

That's such a funny origin story for the series. The thing that made GTA what it is came from a bunch of devs trying to skip UI work. I can picture the meeting now. "Do we really need a main menu?" "Nah just put them on the street."

It also explains a lot about how that first game felt. You boot it up and you're already in Liberty City, no hand holding, no tutorial menu. The open world wasn't some grand design philosophy yet, it was a shortcut. And then it accidentally became the blueprint for everything after.

Kind of wild to think about how that lazy decision snowballed into GTA 6's Leonida. A whole state with multiple cities and keys and swamps, all because someone in the 90s didn't want to code a front end.

I love hearing this kind of behind the scenes stuff from old panels. The series has always been a bit scrappy under the hood, even when the games got massive. Whatever other shortcuts they took back then, I'm glad skipping the menu stuck around.

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Source: VGC · Curated content.