Grand Theft Auto III was quietly started by Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut at Rockstar North before New York had approved it. Apparently, the franchise that defined a generation began as an unsanctioned prototype.
You know how sometimes it's best to start something and ask permission later? Well, apparently, the Grand Theft Auto franchise owes it all to a couple of folks over at Rockstar North who thought that way.
According to our exclusive interview with Obbe Vermeij, Rockstar Games had just wrapped up Space Station Silicon Valley and found itself between projects. Nothing was lined up. So people started tinkering. Vermeij himself prototyped a sailing game and a ball rolling game. Others were doing the same.
"Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut actually started work on GTA III then," Vermeij said. "Later, the rest of the team joined. This was before it was even approved by New York."
That's the part that stops you cold. The foundation of one of the biggest gaming franchises in history, Grand Theft Auto III, wasn't a top-down directive. It was two developers building something on their own time and pulling everyone else in once it started looking like a real game.
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Benzies, the long-time Rockstar North producer, eventually became one of the most powerful figures in the franchise's history. He left the company in 2016 following a lengthy sabbatical, in what later became a $150 million lawsuit against Take-Two. Garbut went the other way. He stuck around, became Art Director on GTA III, and is now the producer at Rockstar North, according to Vermeij. The same person who quietly kicked off GTA III in Edinburgh is overseeing GTA 6 today and the other tried to make his own GTA last year.
None of this is a knock on Sam Houser and Dan Houser. Vermeij was explicit about that. Sam was handling business and executive producer work, and let the Edinburgh team make most of the decisions. New York picked the location and the time period. Dan oversaw the writing. The studio split worked because nobody fought over territory.
However, the key takeaway here is this: Rockstar's most important era wasn't carefully planned from a boardroom in Manhattan. It was a small team in Edinburgh seeing an opening and running at it before anyone had a chance to say no. That's the kind of decision-making that builds an empire. It's also the kind that rarely survives once the empire exists.
With Grand Theft Auto 6 coming in November and the studio under more pressure than at any point in its history, you have to wonder how much of that original instinct is still in the building.
