Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij marked the 25-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3 with a lengthy retrospective examining its difficult development.

GTA 3 was a pioneering open-world game and a landmark release for Rockstar, but in a recent Twitter post, Vermeij says, "For most of development, GTA 3 was in a sorry state."

Vermeij says "it crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes. Only in the last six months did everything come together. For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30."

This sort of late assembly is pretty common in game development, particularly among large teams who may have siloed disciplines handling projects of larger scope. In the messy intersection of art and technology, the heart of a game may be hard to see until it's relatively close to release. For example, Bethesda boss Todd Howard said in 2023 that it took seven years for Starfield to become something that's actually fun to play.

Vermeij notes that the beginning of GTA 3 was messy, too. Rockstar North, then operating as DMA Design, had just been snapped up by Take-Two Interactive, "and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh. Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA 3. Unprompted.

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