•The panelled cover art style that has defined the Grand Theft Auto series since GTA 3 in 2001 nearly never came into being. The distinctive design—featuring a collection of images showing characters and locations from each game’s open world, appearing on every box from GTA 3 through the upcoming GTA 6—was created in just two evenings after it had to replace an original that was scrapped at the last minute.
The change is attributed by Dan Houser, former VP at Rockstar and writer of almost all of the studio’s games from 1999 until Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Speaking as part of IGN’s IGN30 Icons Series, Houser explained that artist Stephen Bliss produced the now-iconic look because the original cover art was deemed too offensive to release after 9/11.
“What’s funny is 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.”
“GTA has become part of the wider cultural fabric,” he said. “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. When you go to any big tourist resort, you’ll have a sort of GTA cover art-inspired T-shirt available.”
Dan Houser
The changes to the cover art, along with edits to some in-game content, pushed back GTA 3’s release from its originally planned date of October 3, 2001 to October 22. Though only a few weeks’ delay, it added pressure on Rockstar and Houser at a time when they were not certain the game would become the landmark success it eventually achieved.
“So I remember in early 2001, Take-Two was on the point of economic failure at the time,” Houser recalled. “We were struggling to get the game done, but we thought the game was going to be amazing and took it to E3 on the show floor and nobody cared about it. So that was dispiriting up to a point. And then the game came out six, seven months later. And that was just after 9/11.”
GTA 3 is set in Liberty City, a fictionalised version of New York City, which Houser said made a change in approach necessary. “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,” he explained. “So we had to take those out, and the team will rally round and remove those and edit a couple of lines of dialogue.”
The game sold steadily through late 2001 into early 2002. “It kind of was a gradual all the way through till Christmas 2001 into early 2002, and it just didn’t stop selling,” Houser said. “It’s not like any single week was that massive. It was that every week it just rumbled on.”
Houser detailed some of these content tweaks in a 2011 interview with Edge magazine: “As far as I recall, we changed the colour of the cop cars so they weren’t identical to NYPD, we altered the flight path of a plane so that it didn’t look like it was flying into or behind a skyscraper, and we removed one mission as it made a reference to terrorists.”
GTA 3 was not alone among games forced to make changes after the attacks. EA’s Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 had to redesign its packaging, while Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty saw sections involving the destruction of parts of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty removed.
In film, the trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was recut to remove a helicopter caught in a giant web between the World Trade Center towers. Men in Black 2 underwent extensive reshoots for similar reasons, while planned sequels to both True Lies and Forrest Gump were cancelled.
The GTA cover art template remains in use today. Readers can find all of the details we picked out from GTA 6’s art reveal here. For more on GTA 6, IGN has published a full interview with Rockstar co-studio head Rob Nelson, coverage of how the game will tackle the current political climate, and an explanation of why Dan Houser says he won’t be playing it.
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