"I was a real anglophile": A Canadian's fascination with Viz magazine explains why the streets in Grand Theft Auto: London are covered in dogs' eggs

Background: A Crime Series Built From a Distance

The Grand Theft Auto games have a long history of being made by developers who live far from their source material. The original game and its mainline sequels have all been led by Rockstar North, housed in a decidedly not US-based Edinburgh. That distance did not stop Rockstar from building worlds shaped by American crime cinema, city life, and social satire. It also did not stop the team from handling settings outside the United States.

When Rockstar worked on a comparatively local GTA mission pack set in London, the development task was not assigned to the Scottish studio. It was given to a newly acquired Canadian team. The team did not have deep firsthand experience of London: only a few people on the team had actually been to London before.

That gap between the developers and the setting became part of the story. The distance gave the developers a more incisive view of London, one focused less on strict realism and more on cultural rendering. In Grand Theft Auto: London, that approach is visible in something as small as the city’s dog shit.

Development Process: British Traffic, American Roads, Canadian Developers

Grand Theft Auto: London was built with the same tools as the original game. The developers managed to roughly recreate the geography of London and make cars drive on the left-hand side of the road. They even handled a small but specific detail: drivers could get in through the correct side to access a right-hand drive steering wheel.

The streets, however, remained hopelessly American. There are no curves to the roads. Instead, the city is made of wide lanes with right-angled corners like those seen in New York and LA. The result is an odd game to look at: technically aware of British traffic rules, but visually shaped by the logic of an American open-world template.

A Canadian developer working on a British game built from an American engine still had access to one cultural export that left its mark on the team: Viz magazine. The long-running parody of The Beano had somehow made its way over to Canada and into the hands of artist Ray Larabie.

“I was a real anglophile,” Larabie told Shortlist. “I knew all about Newcastle upon Tyne and the curry shops and the Kray twins from Viz magazine. I had this twisted view of England. I remember going over there and asking normal people about Viz magazine. And they were like, ‘We’re adults, we don’t read that. That is for juvenile young men.’”

It is hard to call the creators of vibrating bum-faced goats, who named their 2012 annual the Cleveland Steamer and have a long-running character called Johnny Fartpants, strictly juvenile. Taste is not consistent. But the point remains: Viz gave Larabie a strange, comic version of Britain, and that version entered Grand Theft Auto: London.

Larabie told Shortlist he managed to get a particular detail from Viz’s pages into Grand Theft Auto: London: “London was famous for having dog shit everywhere in the 60s. So I put little dogs’ eggs, as they call them in Viz, on the sidewalk. And set it so that if you see a poop on the sidewalk, you can do a handbrake on it and leave a big brown skid mark. That’s my only innovation I ever made in videogames.”

Latest Progress: A Making-of Feature Ahead of GTA 6

Ahead of the launch of GTA 6, the London culture-focused publication Shortlist published a making-of feature on Grand Theft Auto: London by Jeremy Peel, a writer often spotted hanging around RPS’s backdoor looking for a way onto its rarefied pages.

The feature covers the unlikely story of how a newly acquired Canadian studio was renamed Rockstar Canada and put to work turning Rockstar’s open-world crime ‘em up into a game set in London during the swinging sixties. It is a small production story, but it opens a larger one: how a franchise built around American settings has repeatedly handled other places through borrowed culture, outside observation, and media references.

The article’s value is not only historical. It sits in the shadow of GTA 6’s upcoming launch, when attention will again turn to how Rockstar builds a world from references, caricatures, and cultural translation. Grand Theft Auto: London shows that this method is older than many players assume.

Cultural Lens: From GTA 3 to GTA 6

The full making-of feature is worth reading, but the globehopping thread of culture is the most fascinating part. There is certainly an argument that stories should be told by the people closest to them. Yet something the GTA games have consistently revealed is not the actuality of the countries they are set in, but the cultural lens through which those places are viewed.

This is also true of the earlier games, but from GTA 3 onward, Rockstar’s references to the films they are inspired by become more and more overt. Badfellas posters litter Liberty City in GTA 3. Scenes in Vice City are lifted straight from Scarface. Missions in GTA 4 recreate the heists in Heat.

If someone had to pick the cultural touchpoints that represent the UK, it would be hard to know where to start. There are so many conflicting choices: Fawlty Towers, Our Friends in the North, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. An outsider, however, likely has a narrower field to pluck from.

That makes it a real joy that the field includes Viz and its long-running joke of dogs’ eggs. A Canadian developer reading Britain through a parody magazine could place a small piece of that comic Britain inside a London made by Rockstar Canada, running on an engine built for America, and remembered years later while GTA 6 approaches.

Current Stage: Distance as a Design Method

The current stage is not the launch of a new London game, but a retrospective moment before GTA 6. Grand Theft Auto: London remains an odd artifact: British in its traffic rules, American in its road layout, Canadian in its production, and shaped by the cultural lens of Viz magazine.

For readers, the story matters because it reframes how GTA games handle places. The developers were not simply failing to recreate London accurately. They were translating a city through distance, parody, film references, and imported humor. As GTA 6 comes into focus, the older London mission pack offers a useful reminder: Rockstar’s worlds are often less about literal geography than about the culture that surrounds them.