Rockstar Games has revealed that it was so eager to capture the genuine sounds of the streets for Grand Theft Auto V that it recruited real-life gang members to contribute voice-overs for the game. Game producer Lazlow Jones confirmed the news during an interview with Chicago radio station.
“When we record all these ambient characters that are in the world, we go towards authenticity,” Jones said. “So in the game, part of the element of the story is that there’s rival gangs.
“There’s black gangs, there’s Latino gangs, and we recruited a guy who gets gang members, like actual gang members, real gang members. I mean, El Salvadorian gang dudes with amazing tattoos and one of which literally had gotten out of prison the day before. And we brought these guys in to record the gang characters because, you know, you don’t want a goofy LA actor who went to a fancy school trying to be a hard gang member. There’s nothing worse than that.”
Faced with the prospect of delivering dialogue that gang members would never actually say, Jones said they would often shelve the script for something more organic and true.
“They look at the lines and they say, ‘I wouldn’t say that. If I was upset at another gang, I wouldn’t say that’. So…say what you would say. Authenticity, you know?
“There’s a lot of sessions that we would have where we would just throw the script on the floor and be like, this thing we wrote is irrelevant, let’s just work out something real.”
