The Sandbox

An Interview with Aaron Garbut – Art Director - Rockstar North, 2002 (David Kushner)

DK: What are your biggest technical challenges in developing such wide, open
games as Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?

AG: The huge amount of content involved is the big one. Vice City actually filled the DVD, I think it has to be one of the first games to do so without the aid of FMV. We were literally just squeezing it on with nothing to spare. It's HUGE. Controlling our urge to add more stuff is one of the biggest problems, we're always having new ideas, stuff that we're so desperate to get in the game that we'll risk relationships or marriages over. From my point of view the hardest thing is making everything in the world work. Most similar games use simple racing tracks to guide the player down and so the artists job is fairly easy; just modeling the sides of the roads, things only have to work from one side, and it's possible to cheat a lot. For Vice City, particularly because of the introduction of helicopters and planes, we had to make the world completely solid, and viewable from any angle and distance. We had to allow the player to walk out of a hotel (modeled down to magazines and wine glasses), get in a helicopter, fly up hundreds of feet above it, and travel miles away before looking back and seeing the same actual hotel behind them. It's this level of solidity and consistency, while still retaining the huge scale and minute detail, that practically killed the artists. It was a nightmare to manage technically.

DK: Everyone loves the non-linear aspects of the games. When developing the
titles, how do you anticipate all the possible moves a player can make?

DK: We don't. We create a world and we populate it with characters, add some things to have fun with like, well...cars and guns, give the player an end goal and leave it up to them however they want to go about this. We're going down a different path to other games. We're moving a step closer to true freedom of choice; placing someone in a truly virtual world where it's their own actions that define the experience. So all we need to do is build that world and make interacting with it fun, the people playing the game can do the rest. The exciting thing is that the more ways we open up the world and allow people to interact with it in different ways, the more it is the player that is in control.

DK: How do you think your aesthetic as game developers differs from other developers in the industry?

DK: There's a real trend in action-based games, particularly those involving driving to strive towards realism. Unfortunately this has led to a skew of games that look either brown or gray. Personally, I quite like color, and as a team this is something we all seem to agree on. When I'm playing a game, I want to be somewhere special, I want the world tailor made to make things exciting for me, not captured in 5000 gray or brown photos and pasted together in a long strip to drive past. I find these sort of games a little depressing and there seems to be quite a few still on the way...when Sony first designed "the emotion engine” I doubt they imagined depression to be one of these emotions...So we try our hardest to make things fun. We build the city to suit the game, we use photographs but they're rarely brown. Vice City is all pastel shades and neon. The lighting, which changes dynamically with the weather and time of day, has had an awful lot of time spent on it to get the balance right. It feels warm, bright, sunny, and a little twisted. Our look is cartoony in some ways, in the sense that everything is an exaggeration, a caricature. If this cartoon-like, over the top quality wasn't there the game would probably make people vomit at times. Imagine Itchy and Scratchy in live action...not a pretty thought. Humor has also always been a big part of what we do, it's something a lot of other companies miss out on a bit. We try to be subtle, but we're Scottish...Generally, I think if you hold up our game to our competitors, the most obvious difference is fun, a bit of character, some color and the knowledge that the world has been made to have a laugh in. Ours is kind of the look Walt Disney might have gone for if he was more of a psychotic substance abuser with authority issues. Although our game worlds are fun, another aspect of the aesthetic that we find just as important is creating a cinematic feel. Our cut scenes and our in game cameras elevate the game visually from a game to more of a filmic experience. The goal has to be to make the player feel like he's starring in his own f&@*$! up Scorsese directed cartoon.

DK: What do you all like to do in Edinburgh when you're not making games?

AG: We're always making games!

DK: Can you describe a typical day at your office?

AG: It's a very different place towards the end of a project. Most of the fun parts in designing the characters, world, missions and story are done and we spend all our time fixing and tweaking. Things are great at the start blocking all this in, essentially creating a living world, but then you need to make it actually work properly and the pain begins. Working hours get odd, rather than 9am to 5pm it grows into 11am to 3am. Things are always a laugh, although we have grown into such a twisted bunch of individuals that we are all now essentially unemployable. Luckily, we have a healthy supply of Grand Theft Auto 3 promotional baseball bats that we can use to hit things when the going gets tough...it's led to quite a few embarrassing and possibly worrying incidents with our cleaners. But anyway, as I said, it's a good atmosphere, and I think that comes across in the games.