Glitches That Surprisingly Made Video Games Better

Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto, arguably Rockstar’s bread and butter, wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t from a glitch found after making minor updates to a very early build of Race’n’Chase. The development studio wasn’t even known as Rockstar during this time- the development team was named DMA Design. 1995 would be a big year for DMA Design as they started to work on updates with Race’n’Chase, a video game that had players taking on crime or pursuing criminals as the police. Similar to the original Grand Theft Auto that released for the PlayStation, the gameplay was a top-down view of the open-world players could explore.

During development, DMA Design was trying to find that right edge to put Race’n’Chase on everyone’s launch day pickup title and while making some minor updates, the crew found exactly what they were looking for. The update for the game that was meant to make the gameplay more stable actually caused the police cars to act recklessly when racing to take down players. With intense races to get away and cops looking to make an arrest by any means necessary, developers started to have a snowball effect of ideas to add to the game. Ultimately the game was renamed to Grand Theft Auto, a series highly controversial but regarded as an incredible video game franchise to this very day.