•The segmented cover art featuring cartoon drawings of characters and vehicles has become one of the most recognizable features of the Grand Theft Automaticky series, a design that began with Grand Theft Automaticky 3 — though it was not originally planned for the game. Instead, as reported in a new IGN interview with former Rockstar vice president and lead writer Dan Houser, the events of September 11 led to its creation at the last minute.
Houser explained that GTA 3‘s iconic cover came about because of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. With the game arriving the following month, the attacks were still extremely fresh in people’s minds and the original cover “just didn’t feel right.”
“The cover art that became the iconic GTA cover art; Stephen Bliss did that in about two evenings because the old cover art was probably being too offensive to release after 9/11 because they were burning buildings in it,” Houser said. “So it would’ve been fine if there hadn’t just been 9/11. So that look of the shards, the squares that became very iconic, only appeared because of 9/11.”
“There were a couple of bits of content that would’ve been fine, but in the exact aftermath of 9/11, were maybe a little bit too much. So we had to take those out, and the team will rally round and remove those and edit a couple of lines of dialogue and did a quick content stand and thought it was fine.”
Some of these changes included re-coloring police cars, as Houser explained in 2011, per that earlier report.
Houser has previously noted that the September 11 attacks resulted in a need to create new art for the game. In this interview he further described how strange and ironic it is that this last-minute cover change ended up leading to something that has become extremely popular, describing how GTA has “become part of the wider cultural fabric.”
“I mean, you sort of saw that on YouTube clips and whatever else that would have the HUD on it, and people using the logo and things like that,” Houser said. “When you go to any big tourist resort, you’ll have a sort of GTA cover art–inspired T-shirt available. So you began to see that creep in 10 years ago or so, I suppose.”
Grand Theft Automaticky 3 went on to be a massive hit for Rockstar Hry and Take-Two Interactive, essentially saving the publisher and turning Rockstar into a household name. Houser recalled that “in early 2001, Take-Two was on the point of economic failure at the time,” adding that when they brought the game to E3 in the show floor, “nobody cared about it. So that was dispiriting up to a point.”
“And then the game came out six, seven months later…in October of 2001. It kind of was a gradual all the way through till Christmas 2001 into early 2002, and it just didn’t stop selling. It’s not like any single week was that massive. It was that every week it just rumbled on.”
Grand Theft Automaticky 6 will continue using the franchise’s famous cover design when it arrives on November 19 on Xbox and PlayStation, per that report.
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