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How the mission menu gave way to the city
Grand Theft Auto began as a project called Race ’n’ Chase, built around the ambition of creating a living, interactive city. The design evolved through collaborative experimentation rather than one clearly documented decision point. In GamesRadar+’s retrospective, DMA Design team members describe an early stage in which players chose the next mission from a sub-menu. Returning to a separate front end felt like a break from the game, and the team considered that menu boring. (GamesRadar+, “The making of Grand Theft Auto”)
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The alternative was to make mission selection part of moving through the city. Missions could begin through payphones and other elements encountered in the game world, turning the city from a setting players left between missions into the place where they found their next objective.
Phoneboxes made the structure feel more open
Designer Paul Farley recalled the shift from an early, rough 2D driving-game concept: “Then we had the idea of allowing the player to pick up missions by visiting phoneboxes, and it became much more free and open.” His account connects the phonebox idea directly to the game’s more open structure, while the GamesRadar retrospective describes the broader move away from menu-based mission selection. (The Guardian, “How we made … Grand Theft Auto”; GamesRadar+)
#1 Best Overall
- STUNNING VISUALS — Enhanced levels of fidelity and performance with new graphics modes featuring up to 4K resolution, up to 60 frames per second, HDR options, ray tracing, improved texture quality, and more
- FASTER LOADING — Quicker access to the action as the world of Los Santos and Blaine County load in faster than ever before.
- ADAPTIVE TRIGGERS AND HAPTIC FEEDBACK — Feel every moment through the DualSense controller, from directional damage to weather effects, rough road surfaces to explosions, and more.
- TEMPEST 3D AUDIO — Hear the sounds of the world with pinpoint precision: the throttle of a stolen supercar, the rattle of neighbouring gunfire, the roar of a helicopter overhead, and more.
- Please note that although this game is Region Free or Region Unlocked and will work on all systems, this is the European version and may differ from the local version in age rating, labeling or instructions.
What the change meant for play
| Design question | Sub-menu approach | In-world approach |
|---|---|---|
| Where a mission begins | In a separate menu outside the city | At a phonebox or another element in the city |
| Effect on immersion | Players leave the game world to choose what happens next | Players remain in the city while discovering a mission |
| Expected play pattern | The programming team had not initially anticipated players exploring for hours | The city structure enabled more extended exploration than the team first expected |
Farley also recalled that the programmers had not expected players to spend hours exploring, and that the engine had not originally been designed to run indefinitely. That recollection helps explain why the eventual structure was more open-ended than the team’s initial technical expectations; it does not mean that the game had no limits or that exploration was unlimited. (GamesRadar+, retrospective on the team’s response to GTA’s reception)
The open city emerged from a wider design experiment
The mission change was one part of a larger shift in what the game was trying to be. GamesRadar’s account describes a project that moved from a cops-and-robbers driving game toward a car-based crime simulation and sandbox. Team members emphasized a responsive environment: Brian Baglow recalled that the original idea was “to create a game based in a living city,” while project leader Keith Hamilton said, “Everything had to be interactive.” Mike Dailly characterized the result as a team-designed game, rather than the product of a single isolated insight. (GamesRadar+)
Rank #2
- Grand Theft Auto III: It all starts in Liberty City. With the revolutionary freedom to go anywhere and jack anyone, Grand Theft Auto III puts the center of the criminal underworld at your fingertips, if you have enough guts to take it.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Welcome to the 1980s. From the decade of big hair and pastel suits comes the story of one man's rise to the top of the criminal pile.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Five years ago, Carl 'CJ' Johnson escaped the haze of Los Santos, San Andreas...a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs, and corruption.
The ability to leave one vehicle and take another also helped the team recognize the potential of a criminal theme, according to the retrospective. These examples show how the game’s identity grew through connected design decisions, but they do not establish one feature as the sole cause of its open-world direction.
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What the “front end” quotation gets wrong
The headline wording “we didn’t want to have to build a front end” should be read as a paraphrase of the design rationale, not as a verified quotation from a named developer. The consulted retrospective supports the nearby explanation: designers found the menu boring and thought switching to a sub-menu weakened immersion. Farley’s documented quotation is about phoneboxes making the game “much more free and open.” Neither account confirms the exact headline sentence or attributes it to a specific developer.
Rank #3
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Why the cities were recognizable without being literal maps
Farley said the designers drew on the essence of Manhattan, San Francisco, and Miami when creating Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City. These were fictionalized interpretations of American cities, not claims that the game reproduced the real places exactly. The recognizable urban inspirations gave the open setting a legible identity while leaving room for the game’s own design. (The Guardian)
Quick Recap
Rank #4
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