Grand Theft Auto insights from former developer removed after complaints from Rockstar

A former Rockstar North developer, Obbe Vermeij, who worked as a technical director on the iconic Grand Theft Auto III, among other early GTA titles up to and including Grand Theft Auto IV, has removed several posts from his blog at the request of Rockstar North.

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The posts offered candid insights into the development studio, including the fact that the GTA 3 was prototyped on the Sega Dreamcast and little nuggets like how the team toyed with developing a zombie action game set in Scottland following the release of Grand Theft Auto Vice City called "Z." According to Obbe Vermeij, these posts were removed to protect the "Rockstar mystique."

"This blog isn't important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh, so I'm winding it down," he writes. Adding, "I would love for Rockstar to open up about the development of the trilogy themselves, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon."

Rockstar North, the team responsible for Grand Theft Auto, is notorious for being tight-lipped about its development process - with very little behind-the-scenes info or even interviews for people to look into. Case in point, the team at Rockstar North has been developing the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 for several years now, and apart from that unprecedented data breach from last year, there hasn't been a single bit of official info leak.

Obbe even removed posts relating to the original top-down Grand Theft Auto from 1997, where he outlined the steps the team took to get the PC game ported to the original PlayStation, including downgrading texture/sprite color palettes to 16. It was a move that upset artists at Rockstar.

GTA 3 wasn't the very first 3D game from Rockstar North (who at the time were called DMA Design), with the studio's first forays into full 3D graphics being Space Station Silicon Valley and Body Harvest for the Nintendo 64. According to Obbe, the Space Station Silicon Valley team developed Grand Theft Auto 3, while the Body Harvest team developed Manhunt.

Of course, once something pops up online, it's a part of history, and you can still read the original posts over on the Internet Archive.