Original Grand Theft Auto went open-world to dodge building a menu, developers say

The original Grand Theft Auto became an open world because its makers did not want to build a menu.

DMA Design lead programmer Keith Hamilton gave that account during a Grand Theft Auto Origins panel at the Scottish Game Developers Association's Games Day 2026 in Dundee, Scotland, Video Games Chronicle reported on 7 October 2026. His line was blunt: "we didn't want to have to build a front end."

A front end is the menu system that sits outside the action. Hamilton's point was practical. Keep players in the city and the team could skip building it.

That choice reshaped a game now taken for granted. An open world, a city players can roam freely rather than picking levels from a list, began here as a shortcut. Stay on the streets. Avoid the extra screens.

DMA Design creative director Gary Penn said the early version was far more rigid. Players chose missions from a menu, then played them in order. It was linear. It was tidy. And it kept pulling players out of the world.

The replacement was a ringing telephone. Instead of clicking back to a list, players walked to a phone box inside the city to take the next job. Penn said the idea came from Die Hard with a Vengeance, the action film in which phone calls send the heroes racing to their next location.

Music was solved with similar thrift. The team had short sketches of music, about 30 seconds each, written across different styles. They split those sketches into categories. Those categories became the in-car radio stations, the channels that play as players drive around the city.

The police chatter followed the same logic. The game kept an internal list of crimes, and the system announced them as players committed them. Steal a car or break the law and the matching radio code went out in real time. It made the city feel watched without extra cut scenes.

The first game shipped with all three of its cities, according to a retrospective Eurogamer account.

What makes this stand out is how ordinary the thinking sounds. No grand plan for freedom, just a team dodging menu work, borrowing a film trick for mission handouts, and sorting spare tunes into stations. Players ended up with a place that never pushed them out.