Through the eyes of a retro lover, Grand Theft Auto must be such a curious franchise. For those truly devoted retroists, the original pair of PlayStation games that started life as Race ‘N’ Chase feel a world away from the massive blockbusters that dominate the gaming industry for a few months each time a new one is released. Gone is the gouranga and the dedicated fart button and in its place are narrative-driven crime operas with complicated characters, high-stakes missions and cover-based shooting.
You could argue that Grand Theft Auto 3 was the turning point, given the fact that the runaway success of this technical showcase of what the PS2 could do for gaming essentially caused an entire industry to pivot. But ask anyone what their favourite PS2 GTA game is and you perhaps won't get GTA 3 as the answer. Vice City, with its unique mix of aesthetics, audio and cinematic feel to the story built on top of the technical achievement of its forebear, and in many cases it's the one that gamers around the world will remember the most fondly.
But interestingly, Vice City wasn't even planned as a full-blown release at all. At some point in 2000, the original Dundee office of Rockstar closed, and with it the teams merged into the Edinburgh studio to form Rockstar North. Essentially this was two teams, one that had made Body Harvest for the Nintendo 64 and another that had created Space Station: Silicon Valley.
"There was no direction from anyone," says Obbe Vermeij, who was the technical director on all the Grand Theft Auto games from GTA 3 right through to the final GTA 4 expansion pack. "So we started doing our own little prototypes. I worked on a fun little racing game with spheres, and there was a team of a couple of guys that worked on a Godzilla game. Basically, there was no direction. And at some point, Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbutt decided, 'Well, you know, maybe we'll start working on GTA 3, because we sort of have that licence.'"
What ensued was two-and-a-half years of intense development and hard work to ship a game that would go on, not only to be a new technical barometer of what could be done with 3D worlds in gaming, but was a massive success for the company having sold 6 million copies in its first year and grew to over 15 million in its lifetime. It thrust the newly coined Rockstar North (having ditched the DMA Design moniker) into a household name, not only for the popularity of the game but also for the headlines of hate that shone a spotlight on the violent, killing- spree-infused PS2 shooter.
"Obviously it did really well," says Obbe, "sort of better than we expected. So at that point, Rockstar New York asked us to do what was going to be essentially an add-on to GTA 3, like a mission pack basically." Initially the idea wasn’t going to be a completely new game at all, but rather a quick turnaround of extra missions and weapons to capitalise on the sudden wave of success that the then comparatively unknown Rockstar Games was just starting to ride.
The plan for the add-on was for a year of development, but as the team worked on it, the game became much bigger, big enough to be a standalone product. "That year on Vice was kind of crazy," recalls Obbe, "particularly for the programmers, because we also had the PC version of GTA 3. Rockstar wasn't famous like it is now, that was like the first game that made it big."
A lot of the work had already been done thanks to the existing engine used for GTA 3, so the artists started shortly after the end of development on GTA 3 with the programmers coming in later and having only six months to wrap up everything. A large part of what it is that many love about Vice City, and arguably the thing that truly makes it iconic, is its unique setting. Games set in the Eighties even to this day aren’t especially common, but the Miami-in-the-Eighties setting was just a perfect lay-up for the amalgamation of classic gangster movies that broadly tied the story together.
"Well, that was the only thing that was sort of decided firmly at the start," says Obbe. "That sort of came from New York. They sort of said, 'OK, well we think Miami in the Eighties would be a good setting.' So the rest of it was quite kind of organic at the time. The level designers would go and do experiments and they would maybe code like little missions to see if it was fun." Obbe adds that aside from that there wasn’t actually that much that was designed from day one of development, and highlighted the more organic approach to development of the game than was the case in GTA 3.
"I remember halfway through development, one of the level designers came up with the idea to have these locations that you could buy, so you can buy the club and you could buy the movie studio and things like that. And I thought that was a great idea because back in GTA 3, it was just like you worked your way through the story, but it never felt like you owned the city. Whereas in Vice City, you would have enough money and then you would buy the club, and then you'd get missions from there."
This became one of the major gameplay changes for Vice City, with the game's story unfolding more naturally through the player's decision to purchase businesses throughout the city and interacting with those hired to work in those locations, rather than having a mute protagonist numbly trot along from mobster to mobster.
"Actually, anyone in the company could have an idea and suggest it," says Obbe. "And then the good missions would just survive. Then the script writers, which was half in New York and half with us, they would then find a way to fit that mission into the story. Whereas in the later games, it was more the other way around where the story was written first, and then the missions were sort of fitted into the story.”
Naturally it stands to reason that a design process this "chaotic" (Obbe's choice of word) and a deadline this tight called for a very strict system of tracking and planning, something high-tech that would be able to match the ever-shifting mix of missions, characters and locations. "So, the producer, Leslie Bensies, would have these Post-It notes," says Obbe.
"I can't remember his system, but like, yellow Post-It notes would be characters and green ones would be missions and pink ones would be locations or whatever. And then he had a wall in the design room, and he would constantly be moving them around like, 'OK, so that mission, that has to go a little bit further down. So then we'll stick it to this contact point and then, oh yeah, this, this can move to that location.' He was still moving things around quite late on."
Luckily the team didn't have to worry too much about that tight deadline, since a large portion of the game – at least from a code perspective – was already made. The engine that powered GTA 3 was of course bundled with a few additional extras, but everything worked the same way just with a neon-infused aesthetic. “There's a lot of systems that got tweaked under the hood," recalls Obbe, "like the streaming was always a problem. Adam Fowler, the other technical director, was constantly tweaking that and trying to improve it. But yeah, from a technology point of view, there weren’t that many changes."
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