GTA London’s Viz Magazine Roots Explain Its Dogs’ Eggs Street Gag

Image: igrandtheftauto.com

A Canadian artist, a British comic, and one very brown skid mark

The strangest new detail in the renewed Rockstar history around GTA London is also one of the most revealing: artist Ray Larabie told Shortlist that he put “little dogs’ eggs” on the sidewalk in Grand Theft Auto: London, borrowing the phrase from Viz magazine, and made them leave a brown skid mark if the player hit them with a handbrake turn.

That is the confirmed anecdote, reported by Shortlist in Jeremy Peel’s making-of feature and highlighted by Rock Paper Shotgun. It sounds like a throwaway gag, the sort of grimy environmental joke that early GTA could afford to hide in plain sight. But it also captures the odd creative tension behind Grand Theft Auto London. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, the expansion was set in Britain and built on a Scottish-developed game, yet development work went to a newly acquired Canadian team that became Rockstar Canada. RPS notes that only a few people on that team had actually been to London before.

That distance is the hook. GTA London was chasing a city that the team knew partly through references, attitude, and exported pop culture. In Larabie’s case, one of those exports was Viz, the long-running British comic whose rude, anti-respectable sense of humor gave him what he described to Shortlist as a “twisted view of England.” The result was not a documentary London. It was a top-down crime playground where a comic-magazine phrase for pavement filth became a tiny physics-adjacent gag under the wheels.

GTA London was built from a city seen at an angle

Shortlist’s account places Rockstar Canada at a transitional moment. The studio had previously been Imagexcel, known in the source material for Quarantine, a driving action series about a hovering taxi in a post-apocalyptic city. Blair Renaud told Shortlist he entered the studio through testing Quarantine II: Road Warrior, then pushed to stay and work on the next project. Larabie said the publisher changed hands and eventually landed with Take-Two, before the team was introduced to the new Rockstar Games identity, logo, jacket and all.

That matters because GTA London was not born from a studio quietly archiving local street furniture. It came from a team being folded into a new label whose identity, according to Shortlist’s reporting, leaned into controversy, music-culture marketing, and adult edge. Larabie recalled Rockstar’s guerrilla promotion for Grand Theft Auto, including going to raves and throwing CDs of the game, and said he thought it was “super cool.”

Rock Paper Shotgun describes the development setup as almost perversely indirect: a Canadian team working on a British game engine originally used for American-set cities, now tasked with turning Grand Theft Auto toward London during the swinging sixties. That kind of production chain tends to create distortion. Some distortions are technical. Some are cultural. GTA London’s charm sits in the overlap between the two.

Viz magazine supplied the grime the map could not fully carry

The clearest cultural fingerprint in the source material is Viz magazine. Larabie told Shortlist, as quoted by Rock Paper Shotgun, “I was a real anglophile.” He said he knew about Newcastle upon Tyne, curry shops, and the Kray twins from Viz, then remembered asking people in Britain about the comic and being told by “normal people” that adults did not read it because it was for “juvenile young men.”

That exchange is funny because it exposes the channel through which one version of Britain travelled. Viz did not hand Larabie a balanced civic portrait. It handed him rude jokes, class caricature, bodily functions, criminal folklore, and a comic rhythm built around puncturing respectability. For an early Grand Theft Auto expansion, that was unusually compatible source fuel.

The phrase “dogs’ eggs” is doing a lot of work here. It is childish, euphemistic, specific, and visual. Larabie’s recalled implementation turns a background object into something a player can physically mark the street with. In a top-down GTA, where action is read through motion, collisions, sirens, and sudden turns, that small gag becomes part of the game’s street rhythm. It is not a lore entry or a cutscene joke. It happens at tire level, in the same space as getaway lines and panic turns.

The map’s American bones made the British details stand out

Rock Paper Shotgun points out that GTA London managed some London-specific behavior while still showing the limits of its tools and production context. The developers roughly recreated London’s geography, made cars drive on the left, and even had drivers enter vehicles from the correct side for right-hand drive. At the same time, RPS notes that the streets still looked “hopelessly American,” with wide lanes and right-angled corners rather than the curving road language associated with much of London.

That conflict is important to how the dogs’ eggs anecdote reads now. The game could not fully transform the original GTA grid into an authentic London street plan. The toolset carried old assumptions. The road geometry still spoke New York and Los Angeles, as RPS frames it, even while traffic logic and small details tried to pull the player across the Atlantic.

So the Britishness had to arrive in concentrated hits: the side of the car a driver used, the direction of traffic, the period setting, the criminal flavor, the slang, the gross joke on the pavement. Those details were not cosmetic trivia in a vacuum. They were doing compensatory work. When the city’s skeleton could not entirely change, the surface had to shout louder.

A juvenile joke fits early GTA’s design language better than nostalgia admits

It is easy to look back at Grand Theft Auto London through the warm filter of Rockstar history, especially now that the series is associated with sprawling 3D cities, elaborate radio satire, and expensive cinematic staging. The Shortlist and Rock Paper Shotgun material reminds us that this earlier chapter was rougher, smaller, and more immediate. Shortlist quotes Renaud describing the original GTA’s appeal in blunt terms: players reacted to the craziness of being able to run people over.

The dogs’ eggs gag belongs to that same direct design vocabulary. Early GTA did not need a long setup to make the player understand a joke. The action was already about navigating a city as a chain of bad decisions. A handbrake turn over something disgusting on the pavement fits the same compact loop as stealing a car, clipping a pedestrian, or threading traffic from above. The gag is crude, but it is mechanically legible.

There is a nostalgia trap here. Calling the detail charming should not sand away its puerile edge. Larabie himself reportedly framed it modestly to Shortlist, saying the dogs’ eggs were “my only innovation I ever made in videogames.” That line works because the idea is both ridiculous and memorable. It is the kind of minor interactive flourish that players can remember decades later because it gave the street a texture outside mission objectives.

Rockstar history often runs through outsiders’ postcards

The wider Rockstar history in the provided reporting complicates the usual idea of authenticity. Rock Paper Shotgun notes that the main GTA games have long been led by Rockstar North in Edinburgh, despite their American settings. For GTA London, even a comparatively local British subject did not mean a purely local development team. Rockstar instead used its newly acquired Canadian studio.

That does not make GTA London accurate in a simple sense. The sources suggest the opposite in several places: few team members had visited London, the roads retained American shapes, and one artist’s British cultural imagination was filtered through Viz. But it does help explain the series’ long-standing method. GTA often works as an outsider’s aggressive compression of a place, built from media, myth, street signs, jokes, and exaggeration.

In GTA London, Viz magazine appears to have helped tune that compression toward British comic vulgarity. The dogs’ eggs are funny because they are small, but they are also a clue to the whole production: a Canadian anglophile reading a rude British comic, then feeding that sensibility into a Rockstar crime game built with tools that still remembered America. The pavement gag survives as a tiny brown smear across Rockstar history, and oddly enough, it tells the truth about how this London was made.