G'day everyone! I hope you all thoroughly enjoyed the first set of content for 2023 with the classic GTA games coverage. This has not only been one of the most fun series I've covered to date but also THE MOST IMMEDIATELY SUCCESSFUL!!! Holy shit, let's go over it!
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How did these videos come to be?
The past 3 years, I've replayed an old GTA game in my spare time over the Christmas period starting with San Andreas in 2020, GTA 3 in 2021 and Vice City last year. I do eventually want to cover those games but I still found myself with an itch for GTA chaos and so decided now would be the perfect time to try out the classic games and get the series review underway. I've wanted to cover these games and properly give them a chance for so many years now, that I wanted it to feel special.
The original plan was to cover ALL 3 titles in a single epic video, like an over an hour or so. However writing for the first game and adding London in, I come to the realization that it was going to be WAY too much for a single video. So I simply broke the script up into individual episodes and at that point as I was finishing playing GTA 2, the first 2 episodes were ready to be filmed!
Here you can see the size of the GTA 1 script compared to the London episode. I'm always looking for ways to sneakily replicate the Hawktober formula of regular uploads in a row, so turning it into a 3 week special made a lot of sense.
Playing the games:
If anyone can recall watching the channel back in 2015, there isn't many of you out there. I had attempted a shitty let's play of the OG Grand Theft Auto on PS1. Learning my lesson and wanting to be as impartial as possible, I opted for the DOS versions and thankfully was able to find them all in a complete pack. London Part Two (1961) was a bit harder to get a hold of and get setup working but I was really happy to be able to include it as well, given most forget about it's existence only discussing the first mission pack!
There were some technical differences that I wasn't really sure how to fix, such as the games being slightly overclocked, meaning they run a lot faster on modern machines than they would have done back in the day. But I feel like the question "are the games worth playing today?" allows for the authentic experience to shine through of what it's genuinely like just trying to set these up today.
The first game was a massive effort to get through. Aside from Chapter 4 in San Andreas, EVEY OTHER STAGE required me starting, trying my best and ultimately failing losing hours of attempts. It's brutal working on videos when you simply can't progress through the game as it really becomes a game of time to get the video out as quickly as possible and while you're still in the mood to play. London was thankfully a lot better and GTA 2 with less maps and saving was no issue until the glitch I ran into late into the middle of the game.
Production Time!
The actual work flow of these episodes was super efficient! Going into it with the plan of a single big video, once broken up directs my focus a lot more and keeps the process streamlined.
My personal favorite victory by breaking the videos up was being able to distinctly identify each of them with their own style which I love doing. Special lighting to look like police sirens or the grungy city streets of 2. The Union Jack flag idea was just something I thought would be a bit silly so I spent like $5 Patreon Bucks to get that (and then accidently hung it upside down like a fucking moron)! 😅 But it really does a lot to keep things fresh I think. And thankfully there were no great dramas during the filming or editing process.
Logo work... (I've been waiting to do these since BEFORE I covered the Crash Bandicoot games!)
Long before I made custom logos for each video, long before I was making regular content at all, I had always imagined how I'd want to present and cover the Grand Theft Auto franchise at large, theming each episode after the style and themes within each game. Thankfully I sat on it long enough to where I'm actually half decent at that kind of stuff. So I was able to have a lot of fun with these logos, in similar fashion to my Destruction Derby retrospective!
This first logo is literally ICONIC. FIRE!!! 🔥 Once I got a hold of the typeface, it was super easy to get it looking good and instead of the cartoon fire from the cover, I went with an animated chroma key fire just to give it a little flair! While looking up cheats to get me through the final level of the first game, I saw a CAMERA ZOOM cheat code and used it to my advantage to get a wider view of the streets to use in the background which looks really cool. Capped off perfectly with police sirens and that killer song! Def one of my favorite ever logos I've made, not just for how good it looks but that this video has been so successful for the channel. Really means a lot (I'll go over that a little more below)!
The London logo was VERY simple but I really like it with the wanky (sorry) national anthem "God Saves the King" in the background and then I transitioned into the retro TV set playing the game as the music from '69 really fit the aesthetic as a way to setup the tone of the episode.
GTA 2's logo was a little more involved than I had initially anticipated. The first step was to simply create the logo but I ultimately made 2 of them: one with my channel name and another shorted to 'SEJ2' which seemed weird, still I could decide on them. So then I had the idea to animate the logo spinning like you might see on a loading screen or something like that. And that allowed me to use both of them on each side. Using Photoshop's 3D tools, I made a simple object from my layers and animated it to loop seamlessly with a keyable background. PS does let you render video with a transparent background, like a PNG image but it wasn't working for some weird reason.
As usual, my brain always jumps to the most complicated concept first. Inspired by the GTA 2 movie from the intro and marketing, I wanted to go into Melbourne city dressed up as a bit of a thug and film some shots of me running down alley ways and looking sus. In the end this was scrapped to make things a bit easier as I've had a lot going on in life around the time I've been working on the videos. Thankfully I needed to go into the city multiple times anyway so I simply used my phone out the window of the train to get some rough looking industrial and city shots to cut together into a background for my new logo. I even walked past a car garage working on some vehicles so I just HAD to stop and film inside, imagining it as a Pay and Spray or something like that!
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That's a WRAP!
Dude I am so fucking stoked on this trilogy of videos. I'm so fucking proud of the work put in and the end result is exactly what I was looking to achieve. On top of all that, I'm just so proud to see especially the first video do so incredibly well for the channel. Better than ANYTHING BEFORE IT... even Every Level Ranked!
The first part of this set is the fastest video of mine EVER to reach 100,000 views (within 11 days, previous record would be some of the ELR videos which took 5 weeks generally)! But it's also the first video I've had surpass 100k views since the Spyro Every Level Ranked in 2021 which is quite the drought. My stuff tends to underperform so I simply can't contain my excitement when YouTube actually WORKS and shows my stuff to people. London and GTA 2 haven't been nearly as monumental as of writing this, but they're still above average next to everything else from the past year so... Jak is a happy boy right now!
My first 4 figure earning month without an Every Level Ranked OR Hawktober, all thanks to a single episode! 😊
Closing thoughts:
Thank you all so much for an incredible start to the year, I'm feeling very motivated to pump out some videos and try to keep this momentum going. I love and appreciate everyone here on Patreon so much, thank you for the continued support of the channel. Let's kill it this year!
Have a great fucking day everyone, cheers! 👍