It later reappeared on the soundtrack for Grand Theft Auto III as a nod to the original game, in the radio station Lips 106. The track first appears in Grand Theft Auto, where it is credited to the fictitious band Da Shootaz, fronted by rapper Robert DeNegro (an obvious pun on actor Robert De Niro, who starred in many of the gangster films that have been cited as inspiration for the GTA games). Conner also played all of the instruments in the song. The song was written by Craig Conner, one of Rockstar's in-house musicians, and is a stereotype of 'gangsta rap', with blatant lyrics concerning (appropriately) car theft, drug use, running from the law and the possession and use of firearms. After finishing it, it was so succesful within the staff that the company was definitely convinced on making music a great element of the game and have different radios the song itself became the blueprint for the later songs produced, showcasing all what a GTA game's song should have.
![grand theft auto online song grand theft auto online song](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E4uHkK-eRMg/hqdefault.jpg)
They had one clear objective: making a hip hop track that synthesized all what a Grand Theft Auto game is. Conner, then indie music producer recently hired, started to draft the hip hop tracks, but soon began to struggle as he was more of an electronic music enthusiast and had never rapped, so he teamed up with Johnny Wilson (who adopted the alias "Robert De Negro"), who was "a tall, black guy who was a student of Chemistry at Dundee University", in the words of early GTA developer Dave Jones.
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They didn't have the resources or the support of the music industry to feature well-known mainstream hits, something they really wanted, and as such they went into recording original songs.Ĭolin Anderson dealt with rock, funk and country tracks, meanwhile Craig Conner dealt with electronic, pop and hip hop tracks. The inclusion of diferent radios with different music styles that played depending on which car the player was driving, based on stereotypical owners of such cars, was one of the first proposals, but at first this idea wasn't really accepted by all the staff and had some skeptics, owing to a drawn-out "development hell" that had been going on and on for years.
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The song "Grand Theft Auto" has a huge part in the history of the whole Grand Theft Auto series: as we know through interviews with the early Grand Theft Auto developers and staff members, it is the song that definitely convinced them to incorporate music as a central part of the game, at a time where they were still trying to figure out what things should the game have.