Obbe Vermeij, the former technical director at Rockstar North, who worked on GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas and GTA IV has downplayed the chances that GTA VI will be the first $100 game in an exclusive interview with GamesHub.
Now an independent developer working on his own projects, Vermeij also explained how his new game, Plentiful, is an effort to bring back the classic god game genre to modern audiences after years spent bringing Grand Theft Auto to life in 3D.
In a wide-ranging interview, Vermeij also gave his perspective on what it was like to be part of the Rockstar North team and the discussions that took place internally on where GTA could go in the future if they wanted to find a new location outside of the USA.
Read the full interview below.
Plentiful is a beautiful game that takes you back to the god game genre. What was your design philosophy behind its creation?
It started with Populous, which is my favourite game of all time.
God games were quite popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It then got pushed out by real-time strategy games but Populous is my favourite. You could just modify the landscape and you’d have all your little guys and you really come to relate to those guys. That was my initial inspiration and I just added more stuff to it.
In the old Populous, you just pulled the landscape up and down, which is fine, but it’s not really great in today’s game, so I changed it. In Plentiful, you can move blocks around. There’s also a system of trees and food and everything but Populous was the original inspiration.
What drew you into the god game genre?
It was seeing all these little guys just living their own lives and you can only manipulate them tangentially. I love that about the god game genre because in my mind it draws you in. You need to understand the guys and that if you do this and this then what is it going to do to them?
There’s also tons of puzzle elements that can flow from that whereas if you just select your units as in a real-time strategy game and tell them to go somewhere you don’t have that. You know exactly what it’s going to do.
I was always a bit frustrated because the thing that was good about god games got pushed aside. Even in Populous 3, which is still a pretty cool game in its own right, it moved away from the god game element of your little guys living their own life.
With Plentiful I thought that’s going to be my marketing angle, to be the spiritual successor to the god games, but it turns out that the kids these days have no idea what you’re talking about, so I had to completely change my angle on that.
Plentiful has a great atmosphere to it. Is the hope that players may find it and embrace that vibe given how trendy it is for people to seek out chillout playlists and chillout TV shows to find some relaxing downtime?
Maybe that’s a good angle. So far I’ve marketed it as a human terrarium. I think there’s room for improvement but people may understand it a little better. You’ve got your tank and there’s little guys in it and you manipulate the terrarium, basically.
I’ve actually just started doing YouTube Shorts in the last two weeks and they’re doing fairly well so I think the visuals work quite well to bring people in. It definitely looks different. There’s no game like it, which is always a pro.
Have you found it quite liberating to step back from working in the AAA space with your recent projects?
After GTA IV, I decided that I prefer smaller games. It doesn’t have to be just me but working in a small team because then you can actually come up with ideas and get them into a game, and that was just less and less the case with Rockstar.
GTA III was a small team and everybody had their input but by the time we were working on GTA IV our team was so big and most of the ideas came from New York so really it felt like we were just implementing it with and less freedom.
I’ve loved working on small projects after I left GTA IV. It wasn’t just because of it. My wife also wanted to move to Canada and I’d had enough of it because of the team size and because it’s really hard work to make AAA games. After that I did a small strategy game called War The Game which did ok but not great.
Then I thought I’ll do something else for a while and I created Learnia because my kids were small at the time and educational software just wasn’t very good but I then figured out that I’m actually pretty good at software development but I’m terrible at selling it. It didn’t go anywhere. It just wasn’t a consideration for me. I would just put it on the app store and obviously didn’t do well.
The project after that was GuideApp which is an app for museums to make their own guides. I’m working with two other people on that and the project is still running but I’m done with the software development and they’re sorting the marketing now.
For the last two years, I felt like I wanted to get back into games and I’ve been really enjoying it. Indie games today remind me of what games were like in the 80s and 90s when a single person could just go and make something that changed the world.
Even if that’s not me, I just enjoy seeing other people coming up with original ideas and throwing things out there. It really feels like that creative spark is there. It’s not quite dead in AAA it’s just that you have to plan so long in advance and projects run for five, six, seven years. There is no spark in that so yes, I prefer small games.
Are you still close with the old team that were DMA Digital and become Rockstar North?
I’m still friendly with Leslie Benzies. He left Rockstar after GTA V and set up his own company, Build A Rocket Boy. They just released MindsEye, which completely bombed. I played it and it’s actually quite a good game but the release wasn’t good. They charged too much money, I think, and it was too buggy. But I think it’s basically a sound game.
I don’t talk to Aaron Garbutt too much anymore because it’s a little weird. They can’t really talk about their work at Rockstar because of the company culture but I still consider him a friend. In fact, I haven’t seen him in a decade.
Did you realise the enormity of the achievement that was GTA III while you were working on it or did that only dawn on you later?
It really did come later. It’s funny you mentioned that because I didn’t realise at the time there were so many people who totally connected with it, especially players in their early teens. When GTA III came out it kind of blew their minds.
For us, it’s weird because when you’re in the middle of it firstly the game was crashing all the time during development and there was a slow frame rate and as a programmer you never really play from start to finish. I only saw the missions that I had to work on and that sort of thing. I couldn’t judge it.
It was only maybe five months before release that I sat down and played through it once after they added the music and sound effects in with the stories and animations and it was like, wow, this is something cool.
I don’t think Grand Theft Auto games are great because of one individual part. We always thought that everything in our games was kind of eight out of 10. Pretty decent but not special. But if you throw it all together, magic just happens. When you’re driving around and there’s cops trying to catch you, with the atmosphere of the city, everything just works together.
But even before release we had no idea that it was going to be that successful. We had the last E3 show before it came out and it was actually a really poor showing. People just didn’t look at it. They weren’t interested.
New York were freaking out saying it’s not happening, it’s not happening. Even initially the sales were good but nothing special. It just kind of kept going so it wasn’t until like maybe four or five or six months after release that we realised what we’d made.
Did your passion for god games inform your work on bringing the city to life with all those NPC pedestrians and similar simulations?
I can see why you’d make the comparison but that wasn’t really my input. I’d love to claim credit for that but I really can’t.
We already had GTA 1 and GTA 2 which were made by completely separate teams to us and they obviously already had NPCs running around so it wasn’t really our idea but it does have a similar vibe to the god games in some ways.
Who came up with the vision for what GTA III would become?
So the company got bought and sold three times in very quick succession and then there was a period when we were actually owned by Take-Two Interactive. They had too many other things on their plate. They had other studios and everything else.
We had just finished our game, Space Station Silicon Valley, so me and Leslie and Aaron and Adam Fowler had no direction. We weren’t told what to do so everybody started to do their own thing.
I did a little sailing racing game because I thought that was cool. That went nowhere. Aaron Garbutt and Leslie Benzies actually tried to make a Godzilla game first because they thought we could get the license to do it. That didn’t really work.
Then we said why don’t we just do GTA III? It makes so much sense. GTA but in 3D. So they initiated it and it was only like maybe four months later that we got the green light from New York.
That was a hard break between GTA 2 and GTA III with completely different teams. I think there’s only two people who were on both teams. At the same time, they set up a satellite studio in Edinburgh and then quickly closed the old original studio in Dundee. That was when we became Rockstar North with the GTA team and the Manhunt team. That’s how it all started.
So there was always the plan to go for a version of GTA 1 in 3D because the style of GTA 2 is set in the future. All the components just fell into place. It was kind of a miracle. If one of those things weren’t there, it wouldn’t have been a success.
It was already a great franchise from GTA 1 and 2 which are great games. The core game concept was fantastic and totally new but the teams that made those games weren’t really able to do it in 3D. We had the 3D experience which at the time wasn’t a given but we could actually implement the idea and the publisher was in a growth phase because they had just started and they were happy for us to hire people and they were happy to support us.
They got a deal with Sony and that really helped us with promotion. Then the PS2 was on the up. It was clearly the dominant console and that happened just at the right time for us.
I’d love to say it was all us, but it really wasn’t. It was like a whole bunch of factors just happening at the same time.
What was the GTA game you enjoyed working on the most?
That would have to be Vice City, I think.
They all had a different vibe when we were working on them. GTA III was very exciting because it wasn’t a franchise yet. It was just a bunch of people trying to make something. It felt like we were on our own and it was a really good atmosphere, and also everybody was just friends. We all went out together on Friday night and we did stuff together so that was really cool. That game came out after a few months and it was clear it was going to do well.
With Vice City, it was crazy because it was just a one year development and in that year the programmers also did the PC version of GTA III so we weren’t really on it for a year. We were only working on it for maybe six or seven months.
But the way they changed it, I still remember the artist putting in some neon signs, I changed the weather to make it always sunny, because I did the weather code, and what we basically a reskin of GTA III felt completely different so quickly.
The music was a big deal as well. That was kind of magical. At the same time, it was a little crazy because in that year, Rockstar North didn’t really do much of that crazy overtime or anything but that particular year it was a little too busy.
How much content had to be cut from Vice City based on the ideas that the team had for it based on that time pressure?
There’s definitely things that we would have loved to do like winning, for instance. It was a constant source of grief for people that our characters couldn’t swim.
Bikes were going to be a big thing too. OK so we did have that for Vice City but we wanted to have bikes in GTA III.
You always have a list of things that you’d like to put into a game and you start with the most important stuff, apart from when we made San Andreas where we just ignored the list entirely and just did everything that we could think of, and that was a different mistake.
There were things like that which didn’t make it into Vice City but the bits on the map that are empty, that was caused because there was maybe a contact point somewhere so we’d make that, put a lot of detail into it, and then the contact point was moved. That’s why some areas are quite dense and others are not.
It was because it was such a big game. People think that everything was well planned out but it was the opposite. Leslie had like a wall in the boardroom where he had his post-it notes and they were yellow, orange and green. One colour was missions, another colour was contact points, the other colour was locations, and we would just go in and there and move this over there and everybody would have to move it in the game as well.
In fact, for GTA III, the story of Catalina betraying you came in really late. The game was never built around that story. We passed the midway point in development and we went crap, we kind of need some kind of story.
The contact points were always there. Those characters were flashed out. But it wasn’t really a story. Something happens at the start where you get shot by Catalina and then it ties into the ending but you don’t really hear too much about it during the rest of the game and that’s not a coincidence because it wasn’t there.
Were there any missions or side activities that could have made it into Vice City but missed the cut?
That wasn’t really my business. I wasn’t evaluating the missions but it happened regularly that a mission just disappeared.
I can’t think of anything that was taken out late that would have been really good or anything in Vice City but there wasn’t much wastage. We just didn’t have the luxury of wastage basically.
I think Vice City was well-rounded. Yes, swimming would have been great, but it was fine without it as well. It all came together quite well I think.
You couldn’t get away with it these days. It was so punishing. Also, there’s no save points but I always loved that. There was a price to pay if you failed the mission. I think that made it really tense and I kind of miss that in games nowadays.
Now you’re never put back more than 10 seconds and if you need health these days, you just kind of have to wait it out and as it goes right back up. That’s just weak.
When you say San Andreas was sort of the opposite problem in that it tried to do much, could you expand on that?
For Vice City, everybody agreed it was too busy. One year was just crazy. We didn’t want to do that again. For San Andreas, right from the start, we planned for two years. Then we made a list of stuff and during development, we made another list of stuff.
I remember being in a meeting where someone said should we do this stealth thing? We really didn’t need to have stealth missions. It’s not GTA, is it? But you know, let’s just do it and see what happens. That sort of thing kept happening all the time.
We had articulated lorries, skydiving and then there was the flying back to Liberty City from GTA III and we just didn’t say no. In the end, the game was a little messy and a little janky because of it. People enjoyed it and it had a kind of charm but we probably shouldn’t have put all the things in that we could think of, and then GTA IV it was the opposite again.
We said that we didn’t want to make the same mistake as San Andreas again so we cut everything down to make a really good game and then went up to the next level of realism with the animations, engine, everything. The map for GTA IV was just four kilometers. San Andreas was six by six, and it was completely packed like a square because artists were putting something here, putting something there. For GTA IV it was way more focused.
I think that gave GTA IV a very strong, very different atmosphere to the 3D games in the franchise that came before it but I read that you weren’t so happy with that change in tone?
Yeah, I disagree on that. I actually didn’t like GTA IV that much when it was done because, yes, it does have the atmosphere and I think Nico Bellic is probably the best and most fleshed out GTA character in the universe, but I think we had to sacrifice so much in terms of gameplay.
If you’ve just played a little bit of GTA IV recently, there’s four missions, right? You could either follow that car or clear out this compound, or follow this car with a time limit, or assassinate this character, or it’s a mix of all those. But that’s it.
In the games before, there were crazy missions like following the train, taking a plane to dump flyers and you didn’t know what to expect. I felt we lost a little bit too much of that gameplay in GTA IV and actually I think Rockstar thought that too because GTA V and its characters are a bit more cartoony, a bit more extreme. I think the missions in GTA V are a bit more varied too.
GTA IV is not my favorite one but a lot of people say what you’re saying is that the atmosphere is so cool that that’s what they like about GTA IV.
A lot of people viewed Saints Row as the series that carried that more chaotic, silly energy from the early 3D GTA games while Rockstar went for something more serious and lost a bit of its magic. Did you feel something similar?
In my mind, yes. It was driven by New York. Those guys were into movies and characters and that stuff and every game they got like a little bit more involved.
I kind of liked the Saints Row thing. Maybe not quite as silly as Saints Row but I liked the variety of gameplay.
But who am I to judge? A lot of people love GTA IV and you have to move things around a bit. I would say that GTA IV, in the GTA universe, is the odd one out because it is so serious and atmospheric but you know there’s nothing wrong with that.
We’re going back to Vice City for GTA VI. Given that setting, does that give Rockstar the perfect opportunity to bring even more fun and variety back into the series? We’ve all seen the ‘Florida Man’ memes, of course!
Yes, exactly. I think so. I think it’s a perfect match for GTA.
It’s so over the top, the violence, the behavior, the wildlife. Everything about it just shouts GTA.
It’s been so long since Vice City that it’s exciting to revisit it and the trailers look absolutely amazing. I think it’s a good setting for that kind of GTA game. I’m looking forward to it and I think it’s going to be great.
We’ve seen the potential maps for GTA VI. How can Rockstar this time create that feel of playing within a whole region or state without falling into the mistakes you picked out around what happened with San Andreas?
I like the map. I think the map is a city and then a little bit of countryside around it like we had in GTA V and I think that’s absolutely perfect.
In fact, in GTA IV, we had a plan to have some countryside around Liberty City too, some of upstate New York and things like that, but then very early on, we decided to just stick to New York City because of the philosophy to cut it down.
I think GTA V was great. The idea of three cities in San Andreas was a bit silly. It wasn’t really needed and it was a lot of extra work. It’s best to have one city and make it really good so you have one vibe rather than three cities with stuff in between.
I think that games have gone too big now and a lot of players can feel intimated. It’s not really fun anymore. It feels like you have to cover too much ground. There’s too much stuff and it’s too spread out. I think keeping it relatively focused is probably a good idea.
Obviously it looks like they are going to have some of the Everglades in GTA VI and stuff like that but if it’s just Vice City and then maybe a couple of kilometers of countryside, that would be amazing.
It may be fan fiction but there’s hopes and rumours that the bottom of the map for GTA VI may expand as the game goes on to include some of the Caribbean or even a version of Colombia to have you smuggling drugs across the ocean. Could you see that being a big reveal like the flight back to Liberty City that surprised fans in San Andreas?
I would love that. I think drug running is a good match. I was actually constantly trying to push to get that into the earlier games but it never happened.
I’d have done it in a similar style to Elite where you buy stuff and then go somewhere else and sell it. They did that for one of the mobile games but that would be great.
But is that what Rockstar are doing? I don’t think so. It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a lot of extra work for what it would be.
I’m not really trying to research it all that much. There’s people that map out the whole city based on the trailers. Good for them. It’s a bit of fun. But actually, I think it frustrates me a little bit when games are announced too early.
Obviously, this is not intentional with GTA VI. They didn’t really expect the delays. But when games like Elder Scrolls 6 or whatever, when they start talking about it years and years before it comes out, I think it’s frustrating because by the time it does come out, you’re tired of it.
It’s much better if they announce a game and then six months later it comes out. So I’m trying not to spend any time on this thinking about GTA VI. I’m just looking forward to the day it comes out.
Were there any other ideas or concepts that you wanted to try in a GTA game that you never quite got round to doing?
We had this constant struggle where we wanted to have a network game like way earlier than actually ended up happening. That was frustrating because that was the thing that always got caught.
I actually did it on GTA III because GTA 1 and 2 have a network game, a LAN game. So on GTA III I implemented one as well. It maybe took three weeks and I got it to the point where you had a death match mode and you could kill each other and you got a point and you could spawn somewhere else on the map and it was kind of fun.
But then we realized it’s still way too much work to put that in and have lobbies and make sure to have a couple of scripts and some missions. So we cut that and then we tried it again and tried it again and it just never really quite happened until GTA IV. That was frustrating but there wasn’t really anything that was missing.
It’s a trend in gaming now. When we made GTA III, a game was a shooting game or a driving game or a first-person shooter or whatever. But now games are basically everything. It’s like a whole world simulation. You have the city, the characters, you can customise your character, you can do pretty much anything. You can decorate your apartments. It’s not like anything is left out.
You worked on a zombie game set on a remote Scottish island using the GTA engine at Rockstar but the project was abandoned. Given the popularity of The Last Of Us and games like Project Zomboid, was that perhaps a missed opportunity?
Yes and no. Basically, if you’re working on a game, you kind of get a little tired of it after two or three games, so there’s always people trying to pitch new ideas. How about we do Agent or how about we do the zombie game or whatever.
But the reality is if you have a studio that has one mega successful game, it just doesn’t make sense to do any wild changes. Whatever weird ideas you have, we really should put them into GTA rather than just launching an entirely new game.
In retrospect, I don’t think there’s a missed opportunity at all, either with that zombie game or with other experiments like Agent. They wouldn’t have been as good as GTA. They would have been a waste of time and a distraction.
In fact, with basically all those little experiments, pretty quickly it was obvious that people were really excited to do something else, and then a couple of weeks into it they realised that maybe they were still doing the same thing. Now we’re just doing a game that isn’t GTA and what’s the point of that?
It kind of felt the same with Agent. That was spy-based. It was really cool, had a nice vibe and was like a James Bond idea. Internally, we called it Jimmy because it was like James but Scottish.
It was more like a linear game. You started in the South of France and then you’d go to Morocco or something and then wherever. So you’d lose the whole open world thing and that’s what made GTA so good.
Even if we’d gone ahead with it and spent another year or two on it, it just wouldn’t have been that good.
Was there anything from Agent or these other projects that did end up in a GTA game?
I left shortly after that so I don’t really know but presumably they took some, they had all these weird vehicles like, the hang gliders and stuff like that, so I don’t know if they’ve used some of that code but probably not, really. I think it was just a waste of time.
It’s quite cool to see like Larian Studios who just did Baldur’s Gate 3 and they’ve said we don’t feel like Baldur’s Gate 4. We’re just gonna do another game and you know, good for them. But it’s a bold move. It’s not obvious. It’s very risky. It’s easier to just keep on doing what you’re doing.
Is it a shame that GTA: Online is where so much of the extended content is on the new games compared to how the focus was only on the single-player experience before GTA IV?
I guess so but at the end of the day, it’s a commercial company. They are going to go where the money is, and GTA: Online has made ridiculous money. Buckets of it. You can’t blame them. Of course, I would love to see a GTA every five years or something that’s just a single-player game but it is what it is.
I dunno. Everybody says things were better in the early days, and maybe they were, but it blows my mind that the games that I worked on, the trilogy and GTA IV, took about as much time as the development of GTA VI. That seems crazy, right? From four games to one. But at the same time, the quality was so shoddy then. If you go back and look at them now, there’s so many glitches. It’s so low-polygon that the quality level just isn’t there.
There’s just no other way to do it. For AAA companies, you either make really long, big projects or you’re just not competitive.
But for the question about GTA: Online, yeah, I prefer single player games. I don’t really enjoy online. For me, it’s just the way the market has gone.
Is there anything that you look now in the development and evolution of the GTA series as your fingerprints, as a big personal contribution to the franchise?
If you showed me a screenshot of GTA III I could say yes, I did all the weather effects, the clouds and the fog and the rain and the wet roads and traffic lights and a whole bunch of visual things. Shadows and stuff like that. There’s some background stuff as well, of course. But that’s not just me. It was everybody who worked on that game.
If you think of making a game as like a pie, everyone had like a big chunk of that pie for GTA III and your slice of pie has just become smaller and smaller as we had more people on the team.
In GTA IV, I’d be struggling to point at something that I actually contributed but with GTA III, everybody, myself included and the level designers, could say that mission was my idea, or artists could say, I wasn’t really asked to do this wacky building, but I just did it and it came out really well. That disappeared a little bit as the team grew.
How much could the departure of Dan Houser change the tone and writing of GTA VI and do you think players will notice the difference without him?
Probably. Dan Houser wasn’t really that involved with the earlier games but then he had more and more of an influence over GTA IV and GTA V, for sure.
Dan was important for sure but he sort of had a team of five or six writers which is presumably bigger now so maybe some other people can take GTA VI in a slightly different direction. Maybe it’d be good to have that slightly different direction, or maybe they will carry on with the same sort of humour.
Dan Houser definitely had his sense of humour in the radio stations and the writing, and that was definitely an important part of what made a GTA game. We’ll see what happens. Either way, it’s going to be great. You don’t want to be doing the same thing again and again. I don’t talk to Dan but presumably that’s kind of what he thought. He wanted to try something else in his own project.
I can’t really speak for GTA V but with GTA IV people leave but to be honest, people have the wrong impression of what it’s like at Rockstar North, like we were all doing 70 hour work weeks and all that. It was never like that. People there were there when I left, maybe half of them are still there after all those years, probably 18 years or something. It’s a good job and the company looks after you. There is crunch time but it’s not crazy. It’s actually the opposite. The company is very, very stable and there’s not many people leaving.
Was there ever any talk within the development teams about where to take Grand Theft Auto next after Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, perhaps going beyond the USA and to a more international setting?
There were desires, yeah, but it’s like talking about alternative projects at Rockstar when you really start thinking about it.
We had ideas about GTA games in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and Istanbul. Tokyo almost actually happened. Another studio in Japan were going to do it, take our code and do GTA: Tokyo. But then that didn’t happen in the end.
People love having these wild ideas but then when you’ve got billions of dollars riding on it it’s too easy to go let’s do what we know again, and also America is basically the epicenter of Western culture, so everybody knows the cities, even people who haven’t been there. They have a mental image of the cities.
I think it’s unlikely it’s going to be in Bogota next time, especially since there’s just more and more money involved as the project gets bigger. It doesn’t make sense to set it in some left-field location for novelty. GTA: Toronto? It just wouldn’t work.
Many fans have wanted to see Rockstar bring GTA to Europe, to either base it in London or try to do a game that covers the whole of Europe and all its different criminal underworlds, but do you see a project like that ever coming to pass?
It’s just not realistic. I would love it, and if games still took a year to make then yeah sure, you can have a little fun, but you’re not going to get that when there’s a GTA every 12 years.
You’re not going to set it in a new location. You don’t really need to either because the technology changes so much. Nobody is going to say that they’re not going to play GTA VI because they’ve already played Vice City. That doesn’t make sense. It’s completely different.
They’ll revisit New York again. They’ll go back to LA or maybe Las Vegas. I’m afraid we’re stuck in this loop of about five American cities. Let’s just get used to it.
On the topic of new technology and other advancements, another big wish from fans is to see GTA VI bring back some more of the physics and other models that had a bigger influence in GTA IV rather than GTA V. Do you think that elements like the driving, the ragdoll physics and other aspects of GTA IV can come back with a vengeance in GTA VI?
I have to give some credit to Alexander Roger. He did both the driving physics for GTA IV and the ragdoll integration. Obviously, it’s using Natural Motion but he integrated it with our own AI, and still people say GTA IV was actually better for that stuff than GTA V.
He left at the same time as me so then somebody else took that over and there’s still constant discussions about the driving model. I was kind of happy that that wasn’t my issue because the work on the driving just went on forever. Make it more gamey! No, make it more realistic! Now, make it more gaming again!
It was never quite right, but I think Sandy got it right. I love GTA IV for its driving. I think the driving is just really cool because you really have to think about it. You’re not just screeching round a corner. You’re worrying if you’re going to make it or not, are you going to hit the lamppost? In GTA V, you just don’t have that. It’s more like a cartoon.
I would prefer to have something somewhere in the middle for GTA VI but it’s not a dial you can just turn between making it gamey or making it realistic. It’s a hundred different parameters on the vehicle. You have the drag, you have the drip of the wheels, how the steering responds to the user input, and a whole bunch of other variables. There was something else with the brakes, for instance. If you had less grip on the wheels, the car would spin out all the time and it was unplayable. It was a nightmare. Whenever Sandy was told to make it less gamey, then he would have to go and tweak all of these things and it took forever. How do you like it now? Does this feel right? How about now?
Personally, I prefer GTA IV but there’s a constant debate about that one.
Do we think we’ll ever go back to a city like we saw in GTA 2 that was set in the future?
No. The team who made GTA 2 hated it.
I wasn’t on those games but my team sat right next to them so I could hear all the yelling and the conversations and stuff and they didn’t like the idea to go into the future because they had to reinvent everything like how weapons work and everything else.
People didn’t connect with the game or its city as much as they did with GTA 1 so I think it could be a really big mistake to go into the future again with GTA.
GTA is just too valuable. It could be cool but you just don’t want to gamble with it like that. Plus you’ve now obviously got the cultural impact which is way more important than it was then. You know, the game generates memes and conversation and hits and clicks and views. You just have far less of that if it was set in some vision of the future, I think.
We’ve seen other titles in the open world genre like Saints Row and Watch Dogs struggle to take on GTA. Is it impossible to compete with GTA and take it on?
I would actually say there’s an opportunity because it really is just GTA and everybody else has given up.
Watch Dogs was a pretty decent game and it failed to make a profit. I think from a business point of view it is tricky now but the games are so spaced out and I don’t know if they’re going to do another Red Dead Redemption after GTA VI but there is going to be at least an eight year gap.
I would have thought if you have a city game release in the middle of it then maybe you could set it in the future or maybe it could be set in Moscow or whatever. I would say that’s an opportunity but I think everybody’s kind of terrified of going against GTA.
It’s a big investment, of course, and doing it, starting a new franchise, is so difficult. That’s what Leslie kind of bumped up against. People don’t know your game and it’s very easy for people to just walk away from it if there’s the slightest thing wrong with it.
Is it going to happen? I don’t know but I think there’s an opportunity.
If Rockstar tapped you on the shoulder and said that GTA 7 would be created based on your vision, what would you love to do with the next game in the series after GTA VI?
I don’t know. I think GTA now is more about the cultural thing. It’s become more and more important, more so than the gameplay features. I just think about gameplay.
I would just do some quirky gameplay and nobody would like it. I think the best way to go forward with GTA is the culture thing which they’re just really good at. This time it’s Miami. The main choice is where is the next one going to be set and what time period. I think the time period is probably always going to be the present day now because it’s just connecting with players so much better.
I don’t really have any wild ideas for what they should be doing here. I think they’re doing fine. Everybody’s looking forward to it. It’s going to be a great game.
Are there any features or game mechanics from previous GTA games that you’d love to see return in GTA VI?
I remember the day when we were working on Vice City and Leslie said we’re going to do these properties that you buy. I did the pickup code. That’s why he was talking to me because you need to have a pickup where it counts up as you make money.
I remember thinking that’s a really cool idea. This really opens up the world because in GTA III, you didn’t feel like you were owning the place. In Vice, you did. It was an idea that just came from a level designer who thought it up.
I like that. Personally, I don’t connect with the muscle stuff and the haircuts from San Andreas. That could have been left out as far as I’m concerned but a lot of people really liked that part of it.
I remember the first meeting we had about the girlfriends. I had heard some of the level designers talk about it. I proposed it in a meeting with Leslie, Aaron and Sandy and they all loved it. It’s cool how these features get worked out. That’s how it often went in the early days.
Everybody had their own stuff to worry about but they thought about the gameplay all the time. If they had an idea then it went round in the level design department and mostly it would just die but sometimes it would get bigger and reach Leslie and he would say let’s try it. Then we did a trial mission. It was really organic. Now, of course, the gameplay is not as important as the story.
Is there anything they should bring back in GTA VI? I love trading. I think it’s because the main thing about GTA is travelling the city. That’s inherently fun. Any excuse to go travel the city whether it’s drug running or anything else, I think that’s quite good.
The scripters would do all that stuff in San Andreas. You’re trying to keep the code nice and clean and then push as many of those gameplay ideas to the scripters so they could just go and set up little accidents and moments that happen. They set up the scene. I would just be testing and find this stuff happening and think that’s cool. It’s all smoke and mirrors, of course. It happens once and then it never happens again. But it was fun.
I remember that about GTA III. Every morning I would come in and there would be something new. Somebody had put in a new music track or a new mission or a new building or whatever. It was really exciting to see it because for us it was a living, breathing city.
Most Fridays I would take 10 minutes and I’d get all the latest updates and then just drive around and see what the artists had been up to.
What have you made of the delays to GTA VI? Is it just a case of Rockstar still making so much money from GTA V that they can afford to spend as much time as they feel they need to in order to get it right?
Yeah, I think so from their point of view. It’s obvious that not only do games now take longer to make, they also sell for much longer. GTA V is still selling now. If you’re not in a rush, and they’re not because they have income as it is, then it just makes sense to make sure GTA VI is perfect.
Well, maybe not perfect, but good. That’s the issue. Every game is different. They genuinely felt like when they put out the first trailer that it was going to be out in 2025 or whenever. That’s the release date they believed they would hit but then they realise it’s more work than they expected to get it to the quality level that they want rather than rushing it out, which would be a terrible idea.
The best way to ruin a game is to release it in a buggy state. I’m sure they’re not struggling with bugs at this point. I’m sure they’ve got all that under control. It’ll be the artwork and other stuff that’s not quite there yet.
GTA VI will sell for 10, 15, 20 years, so it’s the right thing to do, making sure they get it right. They just maybe shouldn’t have announced it when they did.
Do you think GTA VI is going to be the game that makes the $100 release a reality?
Rockstar haven’t said anything about $100. This is just something that the internet has decided.
I think that they probably won’t do that because, although they haven’t said anything about it either, they will have a GTA VI online component and they’ll be thinking we want the biggest user base we can possibly have.
Rather than trying to cash in that extra $30, I think they’re just going to make it a regular priced game and then make the money on the back-end in the years to come.
But the price of development is just kind of out of control. My theory is that GTA VI will be the most expensive game ever developed and it will remain that way because AI is going to take up a lot of the monotonous work that artists have to do.
The main component of cost is artists. That’s maybe 70% of the cost of a game. But they spend a lot of time rigging animation skeletons, fixing holes in the collision mesh, and making a low LOD version of the mesh. All these things are very repetitive, even building alleyways, which are basically the same again, and interiors.
I think more of that work will be done by AI and procedural generation, things that maybe aren’t AI, but a set of rules that creates assets. Animated cutscenes as well. Motion capture for like 40-50 people for a crowd is very expensive. There’s really no reason why AI couldn’t do that.
As AI is used in more tools, animation packages, rendering packages and compilers, individual people will become more productive and therefore you won’t need quite so many people to make a game, and I think that’s going to be great because if games are cheaper then publishers will be more likely to take risks and try different themes and maybe target niches rather than just trying to make every game suitable for every potential player.
I think it’s a positive move and I think there’s a lot of jobs that are just tedious in game development now and it just doesn’t make sense. I think there’s 1,500 people working on GTA VI but there are a hundred or two hundred who are the creative people behind it. They do the interesting work and there’s a lot of people just doing the monotonous work.
I think games in the future will be faster to make and hopefully a little cheaper and that becomes more interesting.
Given the rising cost of computer components too, and that leading to the prices for high performance PC builds and even new consoles potentially becoming too high for consumers, could that see a change in the priorities for developers to focus on gameplay over graphics?
I think so.
Because of engines like Unreal and Unity it’s much easier for an indie studio to pull off pretty cool graphics now. The gap between AAA and indie is actually quite small. Not for games like mine but Plentiful is not really about graphics. It’s more about gameplay. But there are some indie games that are pretty damn smart looking, and I think that gap is going to continue to shrink.
Maybe there will be a point where people will compete more on gameplay and a little bit less on visuals. I would love that because, I don’t know, it’s a bit like how it was with animated movies. The same thing happened where they got more and more realistic and the budgets went higher and higher but then at some point, around the time that The Incredibles came out, they realised that that’s not what people really want. People just want jokes and characters. We don’t need to spend all the money on visuals.
I’m kind of hoping that the same will happen in gaming. There will be a few games like GTA that will compete on visuals. But everything else will just go, let’s just focus on gaming. To be honest, it’s already happening because if you look at the games that people play, they aren’t really the most visually attractive ones, whether it’s Counter-Strike or Fortnite or whatever. These games don’t look spectacular but they’re just fun and the focus is on gameplay. I think that’s a trend that’s happening.
Rockstar is the one company that just nails its area of the market and it makes sense for them to go down that road but not for the rest of us, I think.
A lot of older games are so easy to get into. That’s the beauty of it. You install it and within five minutes you’re having fun. How come that’s been lost? Now if you want to play a game like Assassin’s Creed it has tutorials, introductions to tech trees, and takes forever before you’re actually playing the game. Bother me with all that later.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was the best and the worst for it. I love it when you’re riding your horse through the river and it’s night and there’s coyotes and stuff. It’s just beautiful. But then you get a ping. Don’t forget you’ve made your horse dirty! Now you have to clean it. Ping! It’s a bit cold so make sure to wear your sweater. Ping! Your guns are dirty. You need to find some oil to fix your gun.
Leave me alone, mom! I’m just trying to have fun. It’s crazy.
Are there any other AAA franchises or an IP that you’d love to work on other than GTA?
I love Minecraft. It would be great to have worked on that one.
I’m going to have my game ideas but my brain works a little differently from everyone else. I start with a really small idea and then try to build it up whereas game design these days is more about saying that we’re going to decide the setting and whatever and then work our way down from there.
I like to have all the game elements close together to make sure they work well together and not throw them in and be very mindful about what you’re going to add next. That’s how I designed Plentiful.
There’s probably ideas out there I would love to work on but I just don’t know what they are yet. I’m happy doing what I’m doing. This is what I love doing anyway, just playing the game and saying, okay, well that doesn’t work, and then just fixing it and just going through that cycle.
I must say too, I am quite excited about Plentiful, genuinely. I did another game previously, War The Game, and I didn’t feel any momentum. I put it on Steam and it didn’t go anywhere. With Plentiful, people look at it and they think that’s a bit interesting. The demo has been quite well-received too. I’m quite happy where I am, to be honest.
There’s no overlap with the fans of my work on GTA. I know this because I’ve got some followers on Twitter for all the GTA nostalgia and these people don’t like Plentiful at all, so it’s kind of useless.
For me, I don’t really mind what the game is about. I just like to work on a fun game. The setting and all that stuff doesn’t really matter to me. For the players, people who are into GTA, they are almost never going to be into Plentiful.
Was there ever any talk of bringing a god game-style mode to a GTA game as a sort of final, end game feature once you’ve conquered or own all your city?
I think it would be cool. I had this idea for GTA: Online but obviously I was just freestyling.
I thought it would be cool if you had a gang but there were certain roles in each gang. You’d have a leader, a financial guy, a planner or whatever. Then you can work your way up in that structure but there can only ever be one player in each of those top jobs. If you’re on a certain server and there’s already someone in that role, you’d have to kill them to replace them or wait for them to check out.
At the highest level, the person controlling these things could have a different view, looking down across the whole map, telling people where to go and what to do, and plotting the operations and missions. Kill those guys, rob that bank or whatever. I think that would be cool. Would it be worth the effort? I don’t know.
