Exclusive: GTA III Started Before It Was Approved - Inside the “20% Rule” and the Bigfoot Myth

What if we told you that the game that changed everything for Rockstar Games wasn't even supposed to exist at all? In an exclusive interview with GTA BOOM, former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij revealed that Grand Theft Auto III didn't begin as a formally greenlit project. It started as an internal experiment in Edinburgh, before anyone in New York had signed off on it. If that doesn't reshape how you think about the origins of one of gaming's most important franchises, it probably should.

According to Vermeij, who worked on GTA III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto IV, the team at what would become Rockstar North had just wrapped up Space Station Silicon Valley when they found themselves without a clear next step. No new project was lined up. No grand directive from the top. Just a studio full of eager and hungry developers with nothing to do.

So they started tinkering. Vermeij himself worked on a sailing game prototype and a ball rolling game. Others were doing the same. It was during this creative limbo that Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut quietly began working on what would eventually become GTA III. The rest of the team joined later and approval from New York came after the work had already started.

In Vermeij’s own words:

Most of us worked on a game called Space Station Silicon Valley before GTA III. When that was done there wasn’t a new project lined up. We all made little prototypes (I worked on a sailing and a ball rolling game). Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut actually started work on GTA III then. Later the rest of the team joined. This was before it was even approved by New York.

Vermeij described it matter-of-factly, like it was just how things worked back then. A small team saw an opportunity, started building, and the rest followed.

For context, Benzies went on to become one of the most influential figures in the franchise's history before leaving the company in 2016 following a lengthy sabbatical and what turned into a $150 million lawsuit. Garbut, meanwhile, stayed on and eventually took over as one of the people filling Benzies' shoes at the studio. The fact that these two were the ones who kick-started GTA III before it was officially a thing makes you wonder how different gaming would look if they'd waited for permission.

It also gives us a clearer picture of how Rockstar actually functioned during what was arguably its most prolific era. When asked about how Dan Houser and Sam Houser communicated their vision to the engineering team, Vermeij was refreshingly blunt:

GTA III was mostly driven by the team in Edinburgh. Sam was doing a bunch of business/marketing/executive producer type stuff that I wasn’t really aware of. He let us make most of the decisions ourselves. I would say Leslie Benzies (the producer at Rockstar North) was more important than Sam. Most of the day to day decisions (including gameplay) were made by us.

That’s not a knock on the Housers. It’s just how the production hierarchy worked. According to Vermeij, New York and Edinburgh had clearly defined roles, and the system worked well. New York brought the vibe. Edinburgh built the world.

Sam and Dan were really good at the vibe stuff. They picked the location/time period. Sam was involved with the music. Dan oversaw the writing. There wasn’t too much of that in GTA III but every game the writing became more important. By GTA IV the missions were all driven by the story. It worked really well as a team. New York did the vibe/setting/story/voice acting. We did the actual art/code/level design.

Dan oversaw the writing, and by Vermeij’s account, the narrative grew in importance with each successive title. Even so, the people actually building the game, the ones deciding how it played on a day-to-day basis, were in Edinburgh.

Of course, things have changed since the early 3D era, but Vermeij is careful not to suggest that Rockstar North has been completely rebuilt from scratch. In fact, he says the opposite.

Rockstar North is a great place to work so a lot of the people I worked with are still there. In fact, Aaron Garbut is still there. Aaron and Leslie Benzies took the initiative to start GTA III. He became Art Director for GTA III and is now the producer, I believe.

Garbut, who Vermeij says helped take the initiative to get GTA III moving internally in those early days, remains at Rockstar North today. While key figures like Leslie Benzies and Vermeij himself eventually moved on, the idea that the studio of that classic era was completely dismantled doesn’t reflect the reality he describes.

One of the more eye-opening details from the interview was Vermeij’s estimate of how much of each game never made it to release:

Stuff got cut all the time. Missions weren’t fun or we couldn’t get them to work properly. I’d say 20% of every game got cut along the way.

Then there’s the myth-busting. When asked about persistent fan theories, Vermeij confirmed what many suspected but nobody could prove for over two decades:

There was never a Bigfoot in San Andreas. People went into the mountain looking. They thought they could hear it but it was actually CJ’s stomach rumbling.

This is in line with Vermeij's recent trend of pulling back the curtain on classic GTA mysteries. He's previously explained why planes randomly crash in San Andreas (a spawning and collision detection issue) and why helicopters fly upside down (a garage saving glitch). These are the kinds of bugs and quirks that define the charm of classic Rockstar games, and it's refreshing to finally have someone explain them without the corporate filter.

Vermeij also shed light on why Rockstar North could never successfully run a second project alongside a mainline GTA title. The answer is depressingly simple:

It’s really difficult to do a second game alongside a big hit. We tried a couple of times but every time GTA became the priority and the side project had to be scrapped.

GTA always ate everything. Every time the studio tried to develop something on the side, the flagship project consumed all available resources. The only exception, according to Vermeij, proved the rule:

We only had Manhunt and GTA III, Vice City in parallel because they both started at the same time. The Manhunt team joined us during San Andreas and it became one big team.

Thinking about this, it would explain a lot about Rockstar's output over the past decade and a half. After GTA V launched in 2013, the studio's attention was consumed by Grand Theft Auto Online and then Red Dead Redemption 2. There was no room for side projects. No room for a GTA IV remaster, a new Bully, or anything that wasn't directly feeding the machine, such as Agent.

Dan himself recently acknowledged that part of the reason GTA games generate so much excitement is that they don't come out often, which is quite the understatement. However, you have to wonder how much of that scarcity is by design and how much of it is just a byproduct of the studio's inability to scale beyond a single project at a time.

With GTA 6 coming in November and Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick promising a "handcrafted" experience built "street by street," it's easy to romanticize Rockstar's process. But the reality, at least from the people who were actually there, is a lot messier, a lot more human, and honestly, this makes every game we’ve played and will continue to enjoy from Rockstar, a lot more interesting.