GTA artist talks about creating iconic cover — it had to be made in a couple of evenings
Translated with AI from the Russian original.
The signature art style is still used to this day.
Recently, lead artist Stephen Bliss, who worked at Rockstar Games from 2001 to 2016, gave an interview to IGN. During the conversation, he shared memories of how the iconic cover for Grand Theft Auto III with “lines” dividing the image was created.
The original version of the cover looked different: it featured burning buildings, but following the September 11 attacks, Rockstar Games decided to change the art. Bliss was tasked with coming up with something new:
Making a GTA cover without violence is no easy task. But I understood why they were asking for it, because I was thinking myself: ‘Is all entertainment now going to come down to musicals, comedies, and Disney? How are we going to sell anything that has any violence in it at all?’ And nobody knew what was going to happen next. I was certain there would only be musicals from now on.
Stephen Bliss said he was able to make the new cover very quickly. The final result reminded him of his childhood drawings:
I kept thinking about the grid: ‘How do I cut the images up, remove the violent scenes, and what do I do with the remaining fragments afterwards?’. In the end, I arranged them in a grid because I grew up on Marvel and DC comics. The other day I found a drawing I made when I was ten — it reminded me a lot of the final GTA cover. In all, the whole thing took literally a couple of evenings. I don't think I even had to work through the night. Sometimes I'm pleased with myself: ideas come to me very quickly. I might not be great at finance and investments, but I can come up with abstract ideas pretty fast. And this was one of the best ones.
Even the cover of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI preserves Bliss's creative solutions — the art is still divided by a “grid”, and a helicopter is also placed in the top left corner.
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