GTA Radio Appreciation Thread
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GTA commercials
LOL@ 8:21... " go Flex you can do it!!!" -
Best part of GTA
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Pa..pooose!
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*always turned on Billy Jean*
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Massive B and Tuff Gong radio go hard
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This was my ? !
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The soul station in GTA 4 is highly slept on
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Dan Houser Talks Grand Theft Auto III
Dan Houser hardly ever gives interviews. Thankfully, when he does, he's happy to do the talking. He and his brother Sam are the creative force behind Rockstar, creating some of the biggest games of the last decade. IGN visited Dan at Rockstar's offices in New York to talk about GTA III's tenth anniversary, and to hear the amazing story behind this seminal game's launch and its controversial aftermath
At what point did you realize that Grand Theft Auto III was going to be a really big deal?
I think in late 2000, when we got the map up and running and the character moving around the map. Once that was there it was like, well, if we execute the rest of this correctly this could be amazing.
You can't go in there thinking, "I want this to be the biggest game ever," which it pretty much was at the time, give or take.
We would never need to please everyone, we just needed to please a bunch of people. Our expectations were not that it had to sell 15 million copies, it was that it had to do well. Our expectations were that we would make something that was really cool.
It reviewed well, but not spectacularly. It got some great scores, but some very respectable magazines gave it six out of ten.
Was it the bad reviews that standout for you?
Of course, always. We take it very seriously. We put a lot of effort into it and we're sort of paranoid, I think, because we didn't launch many copies at all. I think Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, and we were like, "oh that's it we had a good run of three weeks at number one, but that's that.
And then Metal Gear came out and it was a great game, but GTA had this crazy momentum behind it. Metal Gear was number one for a week and then GTA was back to being number one. It just kept this underground explosion where it was getting talked about more and more places. Through the end of January, February it was just constant excitement. I think at that point we realized that, okay, this game really has moved up a level.
Did we think it was too violent? No. We put it out and we were proud of it. Were we conscious that some people might [be offended]? Absolutely.
Rockstar could easily have put out GTA III as the top-down GTA people knew. Why did you decide to make the jump to 3D?
We had so many limitations in what we could do in games on PS1. There was this enormous "graphics versus gameplay" debate on any decision. Our hope with PS2 was that would be less of a key debate. It seemed like the idea of a game that embodies freedom as the previous ones had, but with an additional sense of life and cinematic quality to it, could be something amazing. I think it was the right decision but it wasn't a decision that didn't have some opponents. Plenty of people thought we should never have moved out of 2D.
Well, they were wrong.
I would agree. In the case of GTA III, the challenge was making a 3D story, making the sound sound like it's in 3D, making the radios feel like they're in a 3D world. What we've always tried to do is make the games feel totally consistent across the whole experience.
So the story and the graphics and the way people speak and what they talk about and the way the missions play, all feel like they're consistent within a game. They change between the games as we develop and get more complex between the games. But when we were moving the graphics over to 3D, everything else had to move to 3D as well.
That creates vast numbers of problems we had not really thought about. You have all these people walking about, they need to speak. You've got to design a whole system for that, and then you've got to figure out a way to do what, at the time, seemed completely crazy: recording eight thousand voices or eight thousand lines of dialogue. You're talking about one year after the end of CD era games. It seemed insane.
I mean now we're happily putting in a hundred thousand lines but in those days just the production of doing that kind of stuff...
Okay, we'll pre-render cut scenes. Well, that's going to be silly because there's going to be a big load and it will look totally different than the game, so how else can you do the cut scenes? Maybe mocap can do it, but then you've never done that before, so you figure out ways of doing the motion capture cut scenes...what can we do? We've got to stream in the data off the disc. Can that work? Things like that that now are pretty standard. GTA III was the first, or one of the very first to ever do this. So many things about the game technically and design-wise had never been done before.
When you made the jump to 3D, was there a discussion of "is this too real?" There were rampages and then there were these prostitutes...
Did we think it was too violent? No. We put it out and we were proud of it. Were we conscious that some people might [be offended]? Absolutely. We were very careful to make sure we never marketed it in a way that exploited that. There was no violence or content in it that you wouldn't see in a TV show and see in a movie.
To us, it was like "well, this debate doesn't make sense," but we could sniff that it would probably come. We obviously never could have predicted that it would become as overblown as it did over the next four or five years.
Ten years on, society may be in a bit of a mess right now but it definitely isn't video games' fault. The one thing you cannot argue empirically now is: In the last ten years there hasn't been a massive societal collapse based on these games. You know -- you spend tons of time not doing anything violent. There's far less violence in the game than in an average first-person shooter. -
Do you think that reaction was amplified by the fact September 11th had just happened? You guys delayed the game because of it, right?
It was not just the content, it was also practical. We were working flatout, trying to finish that and Smuggler's Run II. Both were in submission and we were working around the clock here and around the clock [at DMA Design] in Scotland.
Obviously, the guys in Scotland could continue working but we couldn't come into the office for five days because there were roadblocks up. It was a practical issue, we couldn't do any work.
It was a very strange time, but we were very close to 9/11, far closer than the vast majority of people, and therefore I believe we were capable of making sensitive judgments about what was appropriate and what wasn't appropriate.
I think one mission got removed. There was a non-interactive jumbo jet, just to give some life to the sky, that looked like it could pass through a building. That got adjusted, and a few lines of radio dialogue in the talk show. We were really very sensitive to stuff though because we'd watched on our doorstep, you know?
The only other thing that changed that not really many people in the U.S are aware of, is the box. So there was an old box that you can still see online because it was the packaging in Europe. It was the same drawing style but done like an old movie poster with a blown up bridge and some police firing in the air and some helicopters and a bunch of the characters are different sizes. We thought, "that's a bit heavy, actually, it doesn't really gel." And so the artist came up with a couple things, and he just came up with a new one overnight. What's become the very staple of our marketing and presentation was done in an evening as a response to 9/11.
Rockstar's always had a very hands-off approach as far as the media is concerned. At the time, did you guys think about changing this policy? Did you want to come out and respond? Was there talk of you on TV and talking about what was happening?
We felt that engaging with them, whether people liked what we were doing or not – we were clearly protected by the constitution in an overt way - vindicated their particular belief. Beyond that, we're not completely anonymous but we really like to push the idea that Rockstar is a sort of collective and the games are a collective idea and they're made by a group of us, not by one person or two people or three people, it's the whole team in Scotland and New York, and we're really very passionate about that idea.
We want to feel like location, character, story, and mechanics are all the same thing
Everyone knows how a movie's made so it makes them seem less believable, you know? Nobody knows how a game is made so you kind of believe, you stick this disc in and suddenly this world is on your TV screen. We thought we were justified and we thought what we were doing was valid or we wouldn't be doing it.
Our job is not to say what we do is. It's to make something that's as good as it can be and is as compulsive as it can be and as exciting as it can be and as entertaining and thought-provoking as it can be. If you think that's an entertainment experience, if you think that's art, or you think that's a load of rubbish but a happy diversion, it doesn't really matter as long as you have an enjoyable time and hopefully a thought-provoking time playing with it.
For games to develop into a fully fledged art form, they have to do things you can't do in movies, you can't do in books, you can't do in painting or photography or whatever, and I think those are the areas, interactivity and life and witnessing life and movement are what it can do so well.
We want to feel like location, character, story, and mechanics are all the same thing, so you won't go "well I like the story but the characters are ? ," or "I love the mechanics but the story and the driving..." We want it to all feel as cohesive possible and have as consistent a tone as possible across fairly divergent things like the story, what are you doing in the story and the missions and the mechanics and the feature set. They should all feel the same thing.
So both for practical reasons and for a more conceptual and emotional reasons, I want the game to be about, what do you want the tone of the game to be? Do we need a map first, or do we need to start thinking about a place so you can start researching that, so they can begin laying stuff out? Then you're going to put stuff into that, and also, how or what's this about? Well, is there countryside? Okay, what would you have in the countryside? Are there hills? You know things like that. You can't get that until you've got a place. Everything comes from the place. I think place is something games do very well.
Is this how GTA III started?
With GTA III we did a hybrid city that was an empty city but it wasn't meant to be New York.It was a post industrial Midwest slash east coast generic, a deliberately generic feeling, American city. But making that we realized, actually, if you base this more on a real place you have a lot of things you can say about it. So that was one thing we learned. I suppose everything we learned about making the games we make, we really learnt one way or another from GTA III.
One of the things we take very seriously and really push ourselves on is to make sure the games are distinct. To make sure they feel different from one another in as many ways as possible, while retaining some core mechanics. But you evolve, innovate everything as much as possible so they feel like very different experiences, or it will just get very stale very quickly.
We really have never released a GTA that we weren't very proud of and we'll do our best never to do that.
What's Rockstar's future?
Who knows? I think there's something really interesting in the open world experience. Obviously we've made like ten of them now and they still don't feel boring to me. It still feels that we're only scratching the surface of that potential. But who knows what we'll be doing?
We'll hopefully have done a bunch of interesting games in the next ten years. That's always the goal. I've never been that good at the futureology side of game-making. We never really care what the name is on the box, either. The name Grand Theft Auto, the name Max Payne, the name's Red Dead, the name's Table Tennis, it doesn't really matter as long as the game's cool.
I would never have believed you would have been talking about this in ten years time. We were still talking about Space Invaders [ten years ago], and that was already 20, 30 years old then. Hopefully we'll continue to do interesting stuff, that's you know, that's kind of all you can hope for.
IGN's Ten Years of GTA III
Tomorrow: More from Dan Houser AND a celebration of GTA III's radio stations -
Miltown Marauder wrote: »This was my ? !
aye real talk tho, my dad loves this song... he used to always say " put it on that station that sangs that song, and we gone give this all that wee goooooot!" lol -
^^ yea that song was hard as ? , beat go hard
"watch Rosewood go outside and slap a ? " lol -
another slept on song
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louis rich wrote: »another slept on song
this is my favorite song on the whole game.... " harsh reality is the case/ like when u spit in the wind, it might come back in ya face!/" -
Fox News..............
Looks like they are going to Las Vegas for the Next GTA... maybe Casino theme -
San Andreas
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ayo Steam had all 7 games for 12.50..
cant beat that dunnies -
So we are not gonna talk about GTA5 coming out?
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I'm typing on my phone... go to ign and post the link for me
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I'm typing on my phone... go to ign and post the link for me
im at work.. i cant get to ign here -
kanggoodie wrote: »im at work.. i cant get to ign here
No prob joshboy posted it on here -
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Seagulls, Cool Jazz, and Megadeth: 5 Favorite Tunes From Grand Theft Auto
With Rockstar about to announce the release of Grand Theft Auto V, we're all abuzz theorizing, postulating, and prognosticating about things that the game will or won't have. Totilo's looked at what systems the game might be on, Crecente guessed about possible settings. And then, Stephen got a tip that the game will indeed be set in L.A. and may even feature multiple protagonists.
I wanted to take a second to look back at the thing that has always defined GTA for me: The sweet, sweet music.
When we talk about great video game soundtracks, we're often talking about video game original scores—it's a category that GTA games don't quite sit comfortably in. But it must be said that taken as a whole, GTAoffers some of the most pleasurable musical experiences in gaming. Hell, these guys were cool enough to score a trailer with music by Philip Glass, so it's not surprising that their musical choices are always top-notch.
The way the game's soundtrack melds with the game world is something special—it's basically diegetic, in that the only music that plays is the music on the radio in vehicles. Cutscenes, too, are accompanied by music from radios in the background playing tunes from the various game's radio stations. It's remarkably organic, and as a result, a frantic car chase might be scored by Miles Davis or Guns 'n Roses… or both, if you're a channel surfer.
Given Grand Theft Auto IV's penchant for off-the-beaten-path music, I'm very much looking forward to hearing more about the radio stations, DJs, and playlists of GTA V.
In the meantime, I though I'd put together five of my favorite tracks from Grand Theft Auto games past. This list sure as hell isn't definitive—it's just five tunes that I love, and that I will always associate with my time playing Rockstar's games. Click on, and rock out. -
Fascination - David Bowie
I think it's a sax thing, but few songs conjure GTA IV for me like David Bowie's "Fascination." It always seems to come on in the evening, slinky wah-wah sax (David Sanborn, ladies and gentlemen) accompanying me as I drive across the Broker bridge into Algonquin. Bonus points to Rockstar for having Liberty Rock Radio come on every time a player hops into a helicopter. Clearly Liberty City's pilots know what they're doing.
Miles Davis - Move
I was so flippin stoked that GTA IV had a jazz station… and not just some weird approximation of 1940's b-sides or Squirrel Nut Zippers tunes, but a damned well put-together, legit playlist that focused mostly on hard-bop from the 1950's. Impossible for me to choose a favorite among them (I mean, Sonny Rollins on "St. Thomas" is one of my favorite tenor solos of all time, as of course is Trane on "Giant Steps"), but whenever Miles Davis's "Move" (from his classic "Birth of the Cool" record) comes on, I'm impressed that a tune this hip is featured in a video game. Listen for Lee Konitz's breezy alto sax solo—dude biffs the time in his first phrase. Heh.
Heart - Barracuda - KDST in San Andreas
I loved how eclectic San Andreas's soundtrack was—any game that features setting-appropriate gangster rap one minute, followed by a country music backwoods dirtbike race the next is cool by me. But I think that Heart's "Barracuda" is (maybe?) my favorite song from the entire game. The tune is such a "driving song," not in that it has a driving beat, but in that it's perfect for driving. The chuga-chuga guitar buildup, the sinister vibe, and of course, the fact that it's by Heart, and therefore is inarguably, objectively awesome.
Flock of Seagulls - I Ran (So Far Away)
Well, this one pretty much had to be in here, didn't it? Not for nothing: not only was it featured in the famous trailer for Vice City, "I Ran So Far" just about perfectly captures the neon-lit, pastel glitz of Vice City, which still stands as arguably the most iconic Grand Theft Auto of them all. (Note: This song is not to be confused with Loney Island's excellent tribute to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "Iran so Far." Hopping into a speedboat and riding into the sunset while Flock of Seagulls plays will always be a peak Grand Theft Auto moment.
Megadeth - Peace Sells
I don't listen to enough metal. It's a thing, like… there's just not enough time to amass the knowledge of some of my metal-head friends, so I wind up missing out on a lot of good stuff. Fortunately, Grand Theft Auto games are super good at metal. GTA IV's DLC chapter The Lost and The Damned put together a killer mix of ? and metal, but this Megadeth track from Vice City remains probably my favorite guitar chugger of them all. This tune just screams "blow off your next objective and go start running people over on the beach!" -
Fascination - David Bowie
I think it's a sax thing, but few songs conjure GTA IV for me like David Bowie's "Fascination." It always seems to come on in the evening, slinky wah-wah sax (David Sanborn, ladies and gentlemen) accompanying me as I drive across the Broker bridge into Algonquin. Bonus points to Rockstar for having Liberty Rock Radio come on every time a player hops into a helicopter. Clearly Liberty City's pilots know what they're doing.
Miles Davis - Move
I was so flippin stoked that GTA IV had a jazz station… and not just some weird approximation of 1940's b-sides or Squirrel Nut Zippers tunes, but a damned well put-together, legit playlist that focused mostly on hard-bop from the 1950's. Impossible for me to choose a favorite among them (I mean, Sonny Rollins on "St. Thomas" is one of my favorite tenor solos of all time, as of course is Trane on "Giant Steps"), but whenever Miles Davis's "Move" (from his classic "Birth of the Cool" record) comes on, I'm impressed that a tune this hip is featured in a video game. Listen for Lee Konitz's breezy alto sax solo—dude biffs the time in his first phrase. Heh.
Heart - Barracuda - KDST in San Andreas
I loved how eclectic San Andreas's soundtrack was—any game that features setting-appropriate gangster rap one minute, followed by a country music backwoods dirtbike race the next is cool by me. But I think that Heart's "Barracuda" is (maybe?) my favorite song from the entire game. The tune is such a "driving song," not in that it has a driving beat, but in that it's perfect for driving. The chuga-chuga guitar buildup, the sinister vibe, and of course, the fact that it's by Heart, and therefore is inarguably, objectively awesome.
Flock of Seagulls - I Ran (So Far Away)
Well, this one pretty much had to be in here, didn't it? Not for nothing: not only was it featured in the famous trailer for Vice City, "I Ran So Far" just about perfectly captures the neon-lit, pastel glitz of Vice City, which still stands as arguably the most iconic Grand Theft Auto of them all. (Note: This song is not to be confused with Loney Island's excellent tribute to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "Iran so Far." Hopping into a speedboat and riding into the sunset while Flock of Seagulls plays will always be a peak Grand Theft Auto moment.
Megadeth - Peace Sells
I don't listen to enough metal. It's a thing, like… there's just not enough time to amass the knowledge of some of my metal-head friends, so I wind up missing out on a lot of good stuff. Fortunately, Grand Theft Auto games are super good at metal. GTA IV's DLC chapter The Lost and The Damned put together a killer mix of ? and metal, but this Megadeth track from Vice City remains probably my favorite guitar chugger of them all. This tune just screams "blow off your next objective and go start running people over on the beach!"
thats a white man's list... lmao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWrwLr9Yq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhCEF9zerx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnCd7XXVuKw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdOWpWWzwWE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcf-zQ8lSFA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_0Z90NSq90
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iflwZTNcb4E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MigT-zYR0c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUNHSXSHqM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDeyqrDhANk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sID9D0QNVHw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTkIH3aAZ4