Twenty years ago, on a drizzly October night in Edinburgh, Obbe Vermeij witnessed something extraordinary. Standing outside HMV on Princess Street, he watched as a line of eager gamers snaked through the store and spilled onto the wet pavement. They were all there for one thing: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a game that would go on to define a generation of gaming.
Today marks exactly two decades since GTA: San Andreas first landed on store shelves on October 26, 2004. To celebrate this milestone, Vermeij, who served as technical lead at Rockstar Games, has shared fascinating insights about a dramatically different version of San Andreas that almost was.
"The original plan was for the three cities to be on separate maps," Vermeij revealed in a tweet. "The player would travel between the cities using trains and planes." This approach wasn't unprecedented, as the first two GTA games had used similar separated city designs, albeit from a top-down perspective.
The technical reasoning behind this initial design was well-informed. Given the PlayStation 2's memory constraints, which proved challenging for the development team, splitting the map would have eliminated the need to keep multiple cities' skyline models in memory simultaneously. It would have also allowed for more distinctive elements in each city, from unique police cars and emergency vehicles to city-specific pickups and weather patterns.
