One of the Grand Theft Auto series’ most famous features is its enduring use of segmented covers featuring cartoon drawings of characters and vehicles from that particular installment. This all started with Grand Theft Auto 3, but that wasn’t actually the planned cover art for the game. Instead, the events of 9/11 led to it being created quickly at the last minute.
In a new IGN interview with former Rockstar vice president and lead writer Dan Houser, the GTA boss explained that GTA 3‘s iconic cover came about because of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. With GTA 3 arriving the very next month, 9/11 was 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,” explained Houser. “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.
Houser has previously mentioned that the September 11 attacks resulted in a need to create new art for the game, but in this new interview he further describes how strange and ironic it is that this last-minute cover change for GTA 3 ended up leading to something that has become extremely popular and a famous piece of pop culture.
“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,” said Houser. “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 Auto 3 would go on to be a massive hit for Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive, essentially saving the publisher and turning Rockstar Games into a household name overnight.
“So I remember in early 2001, Take-Two was on the point of economic failure at the time,” said Houser.
“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…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 Auto 6 will continue using the franchise’s famous cover design when it arrives on November 19 on Xbox and PlayStation.