(Image: Brian Waterson) Tonado player loading. Stewart Waterson, an artist at DMA in the 1990s, is sharing his story behind-the-scenes at Gamerhub. The first in the series tells how he was promoted to a job (where an art director saw his work in an exhibition and asked a ton of people who did the “shit” a lot), and how he and a coder pushed for something that was originally called Race’n’Chase to be about crime. Waterson explained that the addition of tanks left many turning points in GTA’s focus shifting to sandbox rampages. She says that was so rude. It didn’t exist for them. During lunch break, Waterson and Johnson had something started to joke and decided to work in a game that was never meant to support it. “The premise was that there was a vehicle code we could use,” he says. “There was also a ballistics code that allowed a rotating pedestrian to shoot a bullet in eight directions. We thought that if you put a pedestrian on top of your car, and that vehicle went slower and enormously increased the damage of the bullets, then you should have a basic version of a tank.” This is a classic ingenious dev trick, reminiscent of the way a moving train was kludged into Fallout 3 by making it an armor piece that sits above the head of an NPC invisibly traveling under the level. The turret was like a player character sat on the roof of a car that could move independently,” waterson says, “allowing the player to drive the vehicle, to strike the turret, and fire.” Waterson and Johnson returned after everyone else had left to sneak in the tanks. With that hope we’d get the soses kicked for this tomorrow. The next day, he arrived at work to hear a ruckus on the other side of the office. “A couple of testers and teammates who had gotten early played with the tanks. And they were literally having a blast.” They loved the tank so much they stayed, and became a central part of the series’ appeal into the 3D-era. The tanks were all the best items never planned to be considered part of Grand Theft Auto. This was one of the first steps which allowed it to become an “aircraft” game that is still around the clock. As Waterson said, “although we have to follow accepted rules in game design, the core kernel of absolute mayhem desireon destruction was strewn into the game by the teams who controled those key parts. We’d fight to try and have a chance to make it happen. If it were turned down, we would only fuck it to do that anyway.” The BBC interview came from 1996 while GTA was working. In 1996, Rory Cellan-Jones was busy distracting the developers of the new game called Grand Theft Auto. GTA hasn’t been shipling in 1996. Thanks Rory. pic.twitter.com/SihuPGhKgK May 16th, 2019! See more