The first GTA's moral panic was a PR job, and the man behind it was Max Clifford

Grand Theft Auto has been outraging people for nearly thirty years. The first round of it, back in 1997, wasn't an accident. The people making the game paid a publicist to start it.

That publicist was Max Clifford, the most famous tabloid fixer in Britain at the time. He's the man behind the 1986 "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" front page. In early 1997, the team behind the top-down GTA got in touch with him.

"He designed all the outcry"

This isn't a fan theory. The developers said it themselves in a Sunday Times interview in 2012. Mike Dailly, who worked on the original game, put it bluntly: "Max Clifford made it all happen." He also said Clifford "designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved."

Dave Jones, who founded DMA Design, said the game was never meant to be that controversial, and that Clifford "told us how he would play it, who he would target, what those people targeted would say."

The approach, according to MEL Magazine's account, was to lean into it. Talk up the hit-and-run missions and the crime sprees, feed it to the papers, and let the people who'd hate it do the advertising.

It worked frighteningly well

The Daily Mail ran a story about a "criminal computer game that glorifies hit-and-run thugs". The game came up in the House of Lords on 20 May 1997, months before anyone could buy it.

Then came the best (or worst) bit. A programmer on the team, Brian Baglow, crashed his car and lost his licence. Clifford passed it to his press contacts, and the News of the World ran it under the headline "Sick Car Game Boss Was Banned From Driving". He wasn't the boss, but that wasn't going to stop a tabloid.

What it bought them

GTA got an 18 certificate from the BBFC and sold around three million copies in its first three years. That's a huge number for a top-down game from a studio in Dundee, one that nearly got cancelled halfway through development.

Clifford's own story ended badly. He was convicted of indecent assault in 2014, jailed, and died in 2017. It's an uncomfortable name to have at the start of the series, and it's probably why the developers didn't talk about it for fifteen years.

The pattern stuck

Whether Rockstar likes it or not, the template was set in 1997. Every GTA since has come with a news cycle about how terrible it is, from Hot Coffee to the lawsuits over GTA 5. The difference is the first one was booked in advance.

GTA 6 won't need Max Clifford. Its first trailer broke YouTube's 24-hour record for a non-music video, and the game's not even out until 19 November. But it's worth knowing the series' reputation started in a PR office, before most of the people now playing it were born.