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. But, even when it came to a comparatively local GTA mission pack set in London, the team chose instead to ask their newly acquired Canadian team to handle the development work. It didn’t matter that only a few people on the team had actually been to London before.

Yet, that distance, as proven across the series grants the developers a more incisive view of a place, one that focuses more on a setting’s cultural rendering than its reality.

As evidenced by Grand Theft Auto: London’s dog shit.

Ahead of the launch of GTA 6, the London culture-focused publication Shortlist has published a making of Grand Theft Auto: London by Jeremy Peel, that writer what’s often spotted hanging around RPS’s backdoor looking for a way onto our rarefied pages. It 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’s an odd game to look at. Built with the same tools as the original game, the developers managed to roughly recreate the geography of London and make it so cars drove on the left-hand side of the road, with drivers even getting in through the correct side to access a right-hand drive steering wheel, but the streets remain hopelessly American. There are no curves to the roads, instead they are wide lanes with right-angled corners like you’d see in New York and LA.

Still, despite being Canadians working on a British game engine built to make games set in America, there was a 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,” he said. “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.’”

I don’t know how the creators of the vibrating bum-faced goats, who named their 2012 annual the Cleveland Steamer, or has a long-running character called Johnny Fartpants could be called juvenile. But, then, there’s no accounting for taste.

Larabie told Shortlist he managed to get a particular detail from Viz’s pages into GTA: 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.”

I recommend reading the full making of feature, but it’s that globehopping thread of culture that I’m particularly fascinated by. There is certainly an argument that stories should be told by the people closest to them, but something the GTA games have consistently revealed isn’t the actuality of the countries they’re set in but the cultural lens through which we view them. While also true of the earlier games, from GTA 3 onwards, Rockstar’s references to the films they’re inspired by become more and more overt. Badfellas posters litter Liberty City in GTA 3, scenes in Vice City are lifted straight from Scarface, and missions in GTA 4 recreate the heists in Heat.

If I had to pick the cultural touchpoints that represent the UK, I wouldn’t know where to start and there are so many conflicting choices you could make: Fawlty Towers, Our Friends in the North, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. But an outsider likely has a narrower field to pluck from.

Which makes the fact that the field includes Viz and its long-running joke of dogs’ eggs is a real joy.