Obbe Vermeij, the former Rockstar North technical director who worked on everything from Grand Theft Auto III through Grand Theft Auto IV, told Edge magazine that Grand Theft Auto IV was meant to have a genuinely living population, an idea that's about to come to life in Grand Theft Auto V thanks to the RP server over a decade later. According to the longtime Rockstar Games developer, producer Leslie Benzies wanted NPC in Liberty City to have its own life. The idea was a city that kept running full of people with somewhere to go and stuff to do.
Unfortunately, the brilliant folks over at Rockstar were limited by the technology of their time. Vermeij says the team chipped away at it for a while before giving up, because the whole thing turned into a mess, adding that he didn't even think it mattered. In his view, players are perfectly comfortable with pedestrians that are a bit hollow and artificial, as long as the city around them feels alive, which makes sense considering he once told us that Rockstar's cities have always run on illusion rather than simulation, and that the thing which actually shatters the spell is not a shallow NPC but an NPC that walks headfirst into a wall.
Vermeij was wrong though. Aside from the aforementioned AI-powered RP server, Rockstar's own Red Dead Redemption 2 delivered a real chunk of this once-dropped feature, NPCs with routines and even a kind of memory, townsfolk who would greet you differently the second time around depending on how the first meeting went.
The living-NPC dream across three Rockstar games
Game | The living-NPC idea |
|---|---|
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) | Benzies wanted NPCs with homes, schedules, and daily commutes. Scrapped after too many bugs |
Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) | NPCs got real routines and behavioral memory, greeting you differently on a second visit |
Grand Theft Auto VI (2026) | Reportedly the most reactive NPC systems Rockstar has attempted, still unproven until launch |
The idea Vermeij shrugged off in 2008 kept resurfacing, better funded each time.
The timing of all this is genuinely funny, because the feature Vermeij waved away as not worth the trouble is now, seventeen years later, basically the headline promise of Grand Theft Auto VI.
Every leak and expectation points to the most reactive, most simulated city Rockstar has ever attempted. The dream got deferred, and it kept coming back with a bigger budget behind it. Yet, Vermeij wasn't entirely wrong. Even Red Dead Redemption 2, even whatever GTA 6 manages, is still mostly a magic trick. Those NPCs do not really have lives. They have convincing routines that exist inside the little bubble around you and switch off the moment you leave it. Rockstar got extraordinarily good at the illusion. It never actually built the simulation, because it turned out the illusion was the part that mattered.
So if you are picturing a GTA 6 where every person on the street genuinely has a home to drive back to, they really don't. Vice City and Los Santos will feel alive. The NPCs in it just won't have actual lives, and we'll find how how convincing the latest version of Rockstar's decades-long trick is on November 19.