It's almost impressive that in 2021, 17 years after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out, new remasters of that, GTA 3, and Vice City proved to be perhaps the worst way to enjoy the landmark releases. Seriously, you'd be better off sourcing original hardware than playing Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. Despite the complaints, most people who booted the collection up had a good time, according to one of the lead developers.
The company behind The Definitive Edition was Grove Street Games (though you wouldn't know that now because the company's logo was removed from the menus in 2024), and the studio's CEO, Thomas Williamson agrees with the criticisms, but notes there were plenty of fans nonetheless. "I agreed with most of the people's reactions. But unfortunately, I feel like we did not agree with how the game was released and the response to it from a development side," he tells wccftech. "And I think that would have changed the narrative significantly."
He then says that data on their side suggested fans weren't discouraged from roving around as Tommy Vercetti or CJ. "However, at the end of the day, looking at the behind-the-scenes metrics on those games, there were a lot of people who were playing them and really enjoying them," Williamson adds.
I'm a little cynical here. I can easily believe there were disagreements about releasing the games in such a state. Nobody is more aware of how buggy something is than a developer who's working on it all day, with a launch date looming over them and growing ever closer. Such is the reality for many people in the industry.
Williamson himself has gone on record about contentions with Rockstar over how fixes were handled, and Grove Street being taken off the title screens. "It's a dick move to remove primary developers from credits in an update, especially when an update includes hundreds of fixes that were provided by those developers that stayed out of players' hands for years," he said on Twitter in 2024.
That Grove Street Games was getting feedback that indicated most people simply weren't that pushed is a bit of a stretch. It took years for these releases to become generally playable and more stable, following patch after patch.
I have no doubt that a certain, perhaps more casual audience was just happy with the hit of nostalgia. But "a lot of people"? I'm not convinced.
Whatever the case, Williamson's made his peace with the whole thing, and believes if we want better, it'll need to come from Rockstar. "I don't think there'll ever be a perfect redux of those that's not done by Rockstar proper," he says. "If their Rockstar North team took it on and did some crazy thing, that would be awesome."
Maybe after GTA 6, then. So, in 2030-something. I'll dig out my PS2.
