GTA 3 Vice City Development Blogs Removed After Rockstar North Complains
After Rockstar North emailed a written complaint, an ex-Rockstar North employee removed several blogs about Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and the cancelled spy game Agent.
Obbe Vermeij, a technical director at Rockstar North from 1995 to 2009, detailed his experience working on several projects in a series of posts called ‘Inside Rockstar North’ Rockstar North may have been concerned about the level of detail, with Vermeij saying it could ruin the “Rockstar mystique”.
He wrote about it recently:
“Today (22 Nov 2023) I got an email from R*North. Apparently some of the OG’s there are upset by my blog. I genuinely didn’t think anyone would mind me talking about 20 year old games but I was wrong. Something about ruining the Rockstar mystique or something.
“Anyway, this blog isn’t important enough to me to p*** off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I’m winding it down. I’ll maybe just leave a few articles with anecdotes that don’t affect anyone but me.
“I would love for Rockstar to open up about development of the trilogy themselves, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.
“Maybe I’ll try again in a decade or two.”
Given Rockstar’s strict policies on keeping its projects and inner workings private, it’s a shame the studio won’t reveal anything about decades-old projects.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition lets Switch players play GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. In 2021, we called the release “a poor port, a shoddy, stuttery, low-resolution mess full of bugs, glitches, audio problems, and more” and gave it a 4/10.
Our review of the compilation earlier this year said the games are “better than they were, but still not great”.
Categories: NEWS, Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PLaystation 5, Xbox 360, Xbox One