Bugzy Malone wasn’t going to be the presenter of the new hit BBC podcast retelling the story of how GTA became one of the most popular gaming franchise in history. Writer Ciaran Tracey was thinking of using a twitch streamer, comedian or prominent gamer to host the series until he came across one of Bugzy’s most popular songs called San Andreas Mentality.
The song was an ode to the third instalment of the GTA franchise, which focuses on Carl Johnson, better known as CJ. A young man who has to return to the crime laden, gang heavy city he grew up in, called Los Santos, San Andreas.
In the song, Malone regales about his past life of crime and imprisonment that wasn’t too dissimilar to the storylines and missions on GTA San Andreas which he played as youth. “He did that in 2014, so he did not just get on this train yesterday, he’s been loving this game for a long time.," says the writer and producer of Bugzy Malone's Grandest Game, Ciaran Tracey.
“He came in about midway and when he did come in he was all up for it. He loves the game and he was really, really honest about how from growing up on Bury New Road, when he was in the gangs, it really did look like it mirrored some of the stuff he was seeing on the street day to day.
“It was great how open he was about it.
While Bugzy is a huge fan of GTA and wore it’s influence on his sleeve, Ciaran, an investigative journalist, had no idea what Grand Theft Auto was when Chris Warburton, his co-writer, told him they should produce a podcast telling the story of the game, 25 years since it’s inception. “I must have been living under a rock," he told the Manchester Evening News.
However, much like every gamer who presses start on the record breaking franchise, he was pulled into a world of drugs, crime, music and iconic characters. “I was quite sceptical at the start because I thought, I don’t know the first thing about this game. I’ve literally never played it in my life," Ciaran says.
“I don’t know what is, I don’t know what to do, I’ve never encountered it. In a way that was such blessing because I got to learn like a child about this magical, magical game and just be blown away by what I was learning as an adult and the love that people have for it. The way they live in this world just blew my mind and I thought, 'yeah, we can do this.'
“We really have to reflect this amazing piece of cultural art, as controversial as it is.”
The series on BBC Sounds features seven episodes with guest appearances from players in GTA’s success story who have never spoken before, journalists and GTA enthusiasts. With five games already released and the highly anticipated sixth on the way, GTA uses popular cities like Miami, California and New York as the sandbox for the gamer to play in.
While the developers have always changed the names of the cities in-game, Ciaran says there's a universal message to be grasped from their decision to always put their characters in an urban environment - akin to Manchester - and the circumstances that come with it.
He explained: “The link to GTA and cityscapes is really, really deep. It sort of talks about what it’s like to be a person who’s maybe down on their luck, trying to negotiate life in a city making choices they have to make, just to get through and survive.
“I think the best example of that is GTA four, set in what is pretty much a New York. But it’s a guy blowing in, an immigrant coming with nothing, all these people are making promises to him, ‘you’ll get this, you’ll get that’ but actually of course, life turns out a bit more difficult than that.
“He has to sort of deal with living in this scummy place that he can either use to his advantage or get sucked into by the criminal underworld.”
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