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Bully shares a significant amount of its code with GTA: Vice City, but its devs ran into some difficulties when it came to making its combat animations.
Because of the fact that Rockstar Games makes roughly one game every five-to-eight years now, it's easy to forget just how many games were coming from the company in the 2000s. In just over five years from October 22, 2001 to October 31, 2006 we had five GTA games, Manhunt, The Warriors, Red Dead Revolver, two Midnight Club games, Bully, and the classic Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis all from Rockstar studios.
Of course, this was before Rockstar had every one of its studios working on a single game like with Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 6, but another reason this was possible was from shared DNA. While it's a bit more obvious with the likes of the five GTA games on PS2, a lot of these titles actually share things.
Speaking to Retro Gamer (issue 277) Bully environment artist Andrew Wood recalls that "A good 80% of the RenderWare engine and code was from Vice City." However, due to Bully being more focused on fisticuffs as opposed to the shooting-heavy GTA gameplay, Wood explains, "Where we differed was our brawler-style gameplay that [lead designer] Mike Skupa, the animators and [animation coder] Liberty Walker really focused on to make the combat fun and visceral."
However, even though Bully was already subject to major controversy from its name alone (according to Wood, Rockstar "laughed at all the controversy"), given that the game is filled with teenagers, it wasn't quite as simple as bringing over Vice City's attacks. According to Wood, "the choreography was hard for animators because you're getting into fistfights with other kids," as he explains, and "if you took it too far" even a touch with the combat animations, "it would immediately get too violent and inappropriate."
