GTA: San Andreas developer reveals new 20th anniversary secrets
Date: 2024-10-28
One of the original developers of PS2 game GTA: San Andreas has spoken about its creation and finally revealed the truth about bigfoot.
It was the 20th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on Saturday, the last of the three PlayStation 2 era GTA games and to this day one of the most popular entries in the franchise.
While you would’ve thought that everything that could be known about the game had already been put under the microscopic a hundreds times before, former Rockstar Games developer Obbe Vermeij has revealed something new about the game that was never previously known.
While the finished game is famous for having three whole cities on its map, according to Vermeij the original plan was to have them all separate – so that you could only visit them by taking a train or plane, i.e. they’d be completely separate and you couldn’t just drive from one to another.
What inspired GTA: San Andreas?
The three PlayStation 2 era games were all inspired by the maps from the original 2D Grand Theft Auto game from 1997: Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City. In those days there was no driving between the cities, they were entirely separate maps, and it seems that was the original idea for the 2004 version of San Andreas.
‘Memory was very tight on the PlayStation 2 and with separate maps the other cities’ skyline models wouldn’t have to be in memory,’ revealed Vermeij on Twitter.
‘It would also make it easier to have different police/ambulance/fire trucks for each city. Different pickups, weather types, etc. It would also be easier to contain the player until it was time for the next city.’
There were also technical considerations, as separating out the cities made it easier to organise information on the disc, which speed up the streaming of data. Nevertheless, on the PlayStation 2, San Andreas was reinterpreted as a state rather than a single city.
‘Just before the artists started working on the three maps, we had a final meeting at Rockstar North in which we changed our minds and decided to go for a big map after all,’ says Vermeij. ‘We still ended up doing city-specific pickups, police cars and weather.’
Hidden secrets of GTA: San Andreas
Thanks to the anniversary, fans took to reminiscing over San Andreas on Twitter, with one popular thread pointing out all the many tiny details of the game, many of which can’t be found even in modern games.
From giving protagonist CJ special lines when he gets overweight to paramedics that try to revive injured non-player characters, the game is filled with easily miss-able details.
One in particular, thread creator Synth Potato admitted he only found out about this month: the ability to ask Grove Street Members to take a photo of CJ once they’re recruited.
‘I’ve been playing GTA: San Andreas my whole life and only found out about this today,’ wrote Synth Potato.
What’s especially incredible is that Rockstar had very little time to make these games, with a mere one year between GTA 3 and Vice City, and just two between Vice City and San Andreas.
They were all based on the same technology but even so, that’s an incredible achievement. Especially given modern triple-A games take a minimum of five years to make and it’ll be at least 12 years between GTA 5 and 6.
Was there really a bigfoot in GTA: San Andreas?
Vermeij continued to reminisce in his thread, insisting that despite rumours, and endless supposed sightings, there never was a bigfoot in the game. He also admitted that Vice City was his favourite of the three titles.
In addition, he talked about how different the industry was in the early 2000s: ‘It took six weeks for the DVDs to be produced, boxed, and distributed. Patches over the internet were not yet a thing. For us, all of the stress had happened at the cut-off point, six weeks prior.’
‘The internet was c*** and apart from a couple of trailers, gamers didn’t know too much about the game. For big games, stores would open at midnight before release day, so that pre-orders could be picked up. I only later found out the publisher has to pay the stores to make these late openings happen,’ Vermeij recalls.
‘I went to the biggest store near the Rockstar North offices, which was HMV on Princess Street, Edinburgh. Even though it was a drizzly night, the line meandered all through the store and spilled out onto the street. It was mind-blowing to see all those people so excited, going home to play the game all through the night.’
Although Vermeij left Rockstar after working on DLC for GTA 4 he is still involved in the games industry and is currently making a god game called Plentiful, which has a free demo on Steam.
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