10 Video Games That Were SAVED From Destruction
1. Grand Theft Auto
As the entire entertainment industry marks May 26, 2026 as "GTA Day" (475 million trailer views will do that), it's tempting to imagine what the world would look like without Rockstar's megalithic crime franchise. What would moral crusaders have targeted in the noughties? What other game would have inspired its own urban legends? And how else would Take-Two's head honcho Strauss Zelnick seek perfection? (Shoutout to PC Gamer's Harvey Randall for spotting this particular quirk of gaming's best-named CEO).
If the original Grand Theft Auto's publishers had got their way, we'd know the answers to all those questions as Rockstar's boundary-breaking series would never have existed. In an interview with The Guardian (via Eurogamer), GTA 1's creative director Gary Penn revealed that the chaotic nature of the game reflected the conditions in which it was built. The writers and designers were at loggerheads, game-breaking bugs were the norm rather than the exception, and publishers BGM Interactive (who diplomatically go un-named by Penn) held weekly conference calls with the developers to convince the latter to cut their losses and move on.
Fortunately, the harried director was able to fend off the wolves from the door and release Grand Theft Auto in a just-about-workable condition (quote of the interview: "Eventually there were enough hands to hold this thing together, but please nobody move, because this thing is going to fall apart").
Yeah, those developers definitely weren't working with a billion-dollar budget...