LogIn"This blog isn't important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I'm winding it down."
Image cfedit: Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Learning more about the behind-the-scenes moments of your favorite games is always exciting. What the development process was like, what parts of the game made it to the final release, what didn't, what was cut out, and the list can go on and on. Obbe Vermeij, the former Technical Director at Rockstar North who was part of early games of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, had the same thoughts. On November 12, Vermeij made a post on Twitter saying that he "just started a blog about my time at Rockstar North."
Speaking of which, one interesting thing Vermeij shared was that Rockstar thought about making a zombie game set on a spooky island near Scotland. He explained in a now-deleted blog that this idea came up after they released Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002. The plan was to use the code from that game to start this new project. Players would drive around in vehicles on the island, gathering supplies and fighting off zombies. However, the idea was scrapped after a month because most people at the company thought it would be too sad. Fans of Red Dead Redemption might see some similarities, as the game later had a zombie-themed expansion in 2010.
Image credit: Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Vermeij's observations, ranging from humorous developer stories to genuinely intriguing facts such as the short-lived deathmatch mode in GTA 3, were quite captivating. Sadly, the majority of these insights have been lost since Rockstar Games contacted him and expressed their disapproval.
"Today 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 piss 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," read the last post from Vermeij's blog.
It was a brief opportunity to get a glimpse into the creation of your beloved games, but it has abruptly and disappointingly come to an end. As Vermeij's blog states, sorry you missed it.
Earlier on, Take-Two Interactive shut down an IRL version of GTA's Burger Shot that was featured at Smokin J's BBQ, telling the organizers to quit the whole Burger Shot idea or there'd be legal actions taken.
In August, the company also closed a project that allowed creators to set up AI-driven characters and ElevenLabs' text-to-speech software, have open-ended conversations with GTA V's non-playable characters in real-time, etc. Take-Two hit the mod creator's YouTube channel with a copyright strike, deleted the installation guide for the mod on Netlify, and issued a DMCA takedown for the mod from Nexus.
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