Grand Theft Auto’s iconic cover design only existed because of 9/11 and was created at the last minute

One of Grand Theft Auto The series’ most famous features are its enduring use of segmented covers featuring cartoon drawings of characters and vehicles from that particular episode. It all started with Grand Theft Auto 3but this was not actually the intended cover art for the game. Instead, the events of September 11 led to its rapid, last-minute creation.

In a new IGN interview with former Rockstar VP and lead writer Dan Houser, the RGT the boss explained that GTA 3The iconic cover of was born following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With GTA 3 Come the following month, 9/11 was extremely fresh in people’s minds, and the original coverage just didn’t seem right.

“The cover that became the icon RGT pouches; Stephen Bliss did it in about two evenings because the old cover was probably too offensive to release after 9/11 because they were burning buildings down,” Houser explained. “So it would have been nice if it hadn’t just been 9/11. So this aspect of the shards, these squares which have become very emblematic, only appeared because of September 11.

“There were a few pieces of content that would have been OK, but in the aftermath of 9/11, maybe there were a little too many of them. So we had to remove them, and the team came together and removed them, changed a few lines of dialogue and did a quick analysis of the content and thought it was okay.” Some of these changes included the recoloring of police cars, as Houser explained in 2011.

Houser has previously mentioned that the 9/11 attacks led to the need to create new graphics for the game, but in this new interview he describes in more detail how strange and ironic it is that this last-minute cover change for GTA 3 eventually led to something that became extremely popular and a famous piece of pop culture.

“GTA has become part of the wider cultural fabric. I mean, you’ve kind of seen that on YouTube clips and everything that had the HUD on it, and people using the logo and things like that,” Houser said. “When you go to a big tourist resort, you’ll kind of have RGT Sleeve inspired t-shirt available. So you started seeing this trend about 10 years ago, I guess.

Grand Theft Auto 3 would become a huge success for Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive, essentially saving the publisher and turning Rockstar Games into a household name overnight.

“So I remember in early 2001, Take-Two was on the verge of economic failure at the time,” Houser said.

“We were struggling to finish the game, but we thought the game was going to be amazing and we showed it at E3 at the show and no one cared. So it was discouraging to a certain point. And then the game came out six, seven months later… in October 2001. It was gradual until Christmas 2001 and early 2002, and it just didn’t stop selling. It’s not like only one week was this massive is that every week it rumbled.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will continue to use the franchise’s famous cover design when it arrives on November 19 for Xbox and PlayStation.