"For most of development, GTA 3 was in a sorry state": Rockstar veteran reflects ahead of GTA 6

Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij marked the 25-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3 with a lengthy retrospective examining its difficult development.

GTA 3 was a pioneering open-world game and a landmark release for Rockstar, but in a recent Twitter post, Vermeij says, "For most of development, GTA 3 was in a sorry state."

Vermeij says "it crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes. Only in the last six months did everything come together. For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30."

This sort of late assembly is pretty common in game development, particularly among large teams who may have siloed disciplines handling projects of larger scope. In the messy intersection of art and technology, the heart of a game may be hard to see until it's relatively close to release. For example, Bethesda boss Todd Howard said in 2023 that it took seven years for Starfield to become something that's actually fun to play.

Vermeij notes that the beginning of GTA 3 was messy, too. Rockstar North, then operating as DMA Design, had just been snapped up by Take-Two Interactive, "and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh. Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA 3. Unprompted. Meanwhile, the original GTA 1 and GTA 2 team had started work on GTA 2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective."

What would have been GTA 2.5 was canned in 2000, that Dundee office closed, and GTA 3 was finally officially greenlit by Take-Two and Rockstar, Vermeij adds. "Everything was written from scratch," he explains. "Only two people worked on both GTA 2 and GTA 3, and no code or art from GTA 2 was reused."

"The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development."

Back when GTA teams were still pretty small (and downright tiny by today's standards), Vermeij says, "Working on GTA 3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate. Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage."

Contrast this with GTA 6, which Rockstar admits stalled during development due to conflicting, evolving, or unclear creative visions. GTA 6 hasn't actually been in full production for all of the 13 years since GTA 5, but it did eat up incomparably more labor hours than Rockstar's original breakout hits. With its new development pipeline now stress-tested, studio leadership says future games won't be as difficult or time-consuming to make as GTA 6.

Vermeij also touches on the studio's reputation for crunch – something Rockstar leadership and staff have worked to tackle out in the open in recent years. At least on GTA 3, Vermeij says, "Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening. I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office."

What did all that work get them? Pre-release anxiety. GTA wasn't always the unstoppable hit-maker it is today, and GTA 3 presented a major and risky shift in gameplay. "Although we liked the game," Vermeij says, "it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit. GTA 3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent. It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off."

"The thing I remember most is the camaraderie," he concludes. "In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together. It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together."

Nowadays, Rockstar has thousands of devs on its payroll, with a studio larger than post-DMA Rockstar North purely dedicated to NPCs in GTA 6. Edinburgh is gonna need a bigger pub.

Rockstar is "at least 10 years ahead" of other games with GTA 6's NPC crowd technology, says dev behind 007: First Light's incredible crowds