Obbe Vermeij Describes Building the Classic GTAs As Far More Ordinary Than You'd Think

Obbe Vermeij just keeps on quietly dismantling the myth of how Grand Theft Auto got made. Rockstar North's former technical director, credited on Grand Theft Auto III through Grand Theft Auto IV, posted a new thread on X describing the day-to-day of building those games, and it is a lot less rock-and-roll than what you'd expect for a franchise that made a name for itself due to its controversial nature. In his words, it was "more like a regular job than people imagine." This is far from his first behind-the-scenes drop, either. He recently recalled GTA 3's uncertain E3 debut as well.

The picture he paints is almost cozy. Most of the team worked with headphones on, heads down in their own discipline, art, code, or music, for eight-hour days with very few meetings. A small group made the big calls on gameplay and story, and everyone else built their slice of it, especially near the finish line, a huge chunk of the job was fixing an endless stream of bugs.

Vermeij added that the team would stop adding content roughly two weeks before a game went gold, then play through the entire thing to hunt for the last bugs. It was this play through that, as he describes, often was the first time he experienced the story in order, start to finish, and he would occasionally play through missions he had never even seen.

Can you imagine that? One of the people who built Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas discovering the story more or less the way players would, weeks before it shipped.

He paired the thread with a photo of the old Rockstar North office in Calton Square, Edinburgh, around 2010, which looks oddly normal and is precisely the entire point.

Of course, the Rockstar Games of today is no longer the Rockstar of the past. Vermeij worked in an era when teams started around 30 people and you could build something and watch it turn up in the game. He left in 2009, partly because, as the studio ballooned, everyone's slice of the work kept shrinking, meetings multiplied, and the games took longer to make. These days, Grand Theft Auto VI pretty much has the green light to do everything it wants, including turn Miami into Vice City.

Over the years, the growth has caught up to Rockstar, resulting in a rough patch for the company in the mid 2010s. Rockstar says it has cleaned up its development process since the Red Dead Redemption 2 crunch backlash, adding producers, comp time, and limits on mandatory overtime. Unfortunately, the recent reports from UK staff and a Rockstar workers' union tell a story of overtime baked into contracts, opaque bonuses, a return-to-office push, and firings the union has called union-busting. The reality probably sits in the middle between what Rockstar refuses to say and what the aggrieved parties are saying, with the company now a more professional outfit with nearly unlimited resources.

These days, instead of just pulling in the developers to play through the game, Rockstar has flown in content creators for a first-hand look at GTA 6 that wasn't shown as part of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look. It's rumored that the plan is to do the same thing for reviewers closer to the game's release.

Perhaps this was the cost of success. As GTA grew, the teams behind it got bigger, tensions, well, got tenser, and the resulting product had become less and less impacted by any single person's fingerprints.

With that said, the low-meeting, small-team craft he describes is exactly how the games that made GTA a phenomenon came together, and it is exactly what that phenomenon then outgrew.