Something else that needed working out was a control system. Modern GTA is very much a game that requires the opportunities afforded by analogue control, something that has been refined again and again in iterative outings, but in the DS hardware Rockstar faced having to start again from scratch. “We were nervous about it at first,” concedes Houser, “but you’re using a D-pad, and occasionally a stylus, and pretty quickly you forget about the interface being different. You’re not going: ‘Oh god, isn’t there a better way to do this?’ It’s because Leeds did a lot of work making the car handling feel nice and responsive, without being so twitchy that you’re thrown everywhere.”

This work has involved incorporating a driving system that automatically assists the player in staying on the road, helping to avoid collisions at high speed – especially the type that usually follow fierce left-hand turns when you have cops hugging your rear bumper. “There’s a little bit of auto-alignment,” Houser continues, “but it’s subtle and it’s to make the driving a little forgiving, without it feeling like you’re wearing armbands or something. It some ways it’s no different to an auto-aim, really.”

As Rockstar’s first DS game, Chinatown Wars has to make accomplished use of the platform’s technologies, and it’s little surprise to see that Rockstar Leeds has engineered a series of minigames that incorporate its touchscreen interface. Such a consideration didn’t get immediate buy-in from the likes of Houser, however. “For a while we were nervous because I think one of the other things that’s very important to GTA is the seamlessness – it’s a very flowing experience,” he recalls. “A core element of GTA is that there’s no line between shooting and driving, which were traditionally very segmented aspects within games. So we were very nervous about the minigames until we played them, and then we realized that the guys at Leeds had nailed them – they worked really well with what the hardware can do.”



How about pulling up at a filling station and using the stylus to carefully aim a petrol-pump nozzle so that it dispenses fuel into bottles which, once they’ve had rags stuffed down their necks, are turned into Molotov cocktails? Or fiddling with a car’s ignition system in order to hotwire it? Punching out the rear window of a car that is rapidly sinking in a harbour having been launched from a jetty by the bad guys? All of these things feed in to the minigame experiences and, importantly, they seem to stack up logically rather than being divorced from what the core of GTA is supposed to be all about.