Rockstar North cut roughly 20% of missions from classic Grand Theft Auto titles, confirmed by former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, and the same culling almost certainly shaped Grand Theft Auto over its decade-plus in development.
What if we told you that roughly a quarter of the content found in classic Grand Theft Auto games eventually found themselves on the cutting room floor?
As massive as the older GTA titles felt like, Rockstar North apparently had more planned.
Between dozens of missions, sprawling open worlds, and side activities buried under side activities, the version that shipped is what every player remembers. However, the version that didn't see the light of day is arguably the more interesting story.
Obbe Vermeij, former Rockstar North technical director, worked on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto IV once lent us his time in an exclusive interview and told us something very interesting:
About 20% of missions were cut for one reason or another. Either they didn't feel like fun or we couldn't get them to work.
Most studios can't afford that kind of waste. Rockstar could because the studio had the time and the budget to keep iterating until the missions that survived were the ones worth keeping. The shipped version we all got to play and enjoy feels packed, and as much as we'd love to imagine how much bigger the version where they kept everything they built could've been, it's the part that didn't ship that's the reason the rest of the content still holds up.
Bloated, uneven, half-broken in more places than we can count. Rockstar's perfectionist attitude is built into its DNA and is ultimately why the games we love to play are what they are.
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Think about it. Grand Theft Auto V spent more than half a decade in development. Red Dead Redemption 2 took even longer. Grand Theft Auto 6, launching on November 19, has spent over a decade in the lab, and a lot of that time wasn't building new things. It was throwing old stuff out and rebuilding it better.
The 20% rule also reframes how to read leaks and cut-content rumors. Every time a dataminer pulls something out of the files, and the internet decides Rockstar must have meant to ship it, the more likely explanation is the one Vermeij just laid out.
Yes, it's probably true that the team built it. It's also true that there's a reason why it didn't make the cut. The team didn't like what they saw, and they moved on. The 20% rule explains more than anyone outside the studio realized.
Of course, just because it explains plenty of leaks, this doesn't mean it's the reason why some rumors never materialized. Some are just simply what they are, rumors. Like, for example, Bigfoot being Carl Johnson's stomach rumbling.
The question now is what 20% of GTA 6 hit the cutting room floor. We'll find out in November. The version that didn't ship is the version we'll never see, and based on Vermeij's number, it's a lot bigger than people think.
