GTA Untold Stories: Former Rockstar North Dev's Early Ideas, Scrapped Concepts

Obbe Vermeij, a former developer at Take-Two Interactive Software Inc's TTWO Rockstar North, delighted fans with nostalgic insights about the early Grand Theft Auto (GTA) days on his blog.

Vermeij's stories revealed the technical challenges faced during game development, Kotaku reported.

He shared how the PC versions of the games had to compromise textures to run on the PlayStation 1, with artists frustrated by the limitations of a 16-color palette. His recounting of GTA III's prototype on Dreamcast shed light on the game's origins as a 3D iteration.

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Beyond technicalities, Vermeij celebrated the collaborative efforts of the development team and the minimal crunch culture during GTA III's creation.

He also spotlighted the testers' commendable work, handling a staggering 70,000 bugs in San Andreas.

Additionally, he unveiled an intriguing scrapped concept for a zombie survival game, "Z," set on a Scottish island using Vice City's code, revealing the team's shift to San Andreas due to the project's gloomy nature.

However, after a couple of weeks of sharing these stories, Rockstar North reportedly expressed discontent, leading Vermeij to take down most of the posts from his blog.

"I genuinely didn’t think anyone would mind me talking about 20-year-old games but I was wrong. Something about ruining the Rockstar mystique or something," Vermeij wrote.

He concluded: "Anyway, this blog isn’t important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I’m winding it down."

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Image credits: Malabar MB on Shutterstock.