“For years, HD remakes became en vogue, and you started seeing remakes popping up for all these old games. And there was a very nervous caveat to it all, which was: don’t change the feel. “So it was dealing with the real world dilemma of digital marketplaces, and the fact that they’re slowly replacing our physical market. “It’s a way to maintain the titles for the next decade-plus without having to rip out our hair every time there’s a crash bug that we were having problems fixing because there are some terrible old tools,” Rosado explains. There was another goal, too: preservation. But that’s not the only reason Rockstar decided to remake its games. With the games reaching their 20th anniversary, now felt like the right time to be nostalgic. But with the release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, we get the rare chance to see the studio – along with co-developer Grove Street Games – in a retrospective mood. Always on the cutting edge with every new release, it continues to redefine what an open-world game can be. Rockstar has never been a studio that’s about looking back. It would take a whole console generation for the rest of the games industry to catch up, and even then the competition felt like pale imitations. GTA III put the pacing in the players’ hands, and chaos was only ever one rocket launcher blast away. It’s a testament to the believability of the world how we all have one friend (or are that one friend) who roleplayed the crime saga as an upstanding citizen, obeying traffic laws and stopping at every red light. It set the standard for what an open-world game should be – an emergent playground where you seamlessly travel by car or on foot, completing missions or creating your own fun.
“When we brought it over into Unreal Engine 4, one of the downsides was it got real clean, real fast,” he says, before telling me how the developers went in with a mud brush to make the city even grubbier than before.Īt launch, GTA III was a quantum leap for game design. A producer at Rockstar for over 20 years, he worked on the original Grand Theft Auto III, and now he’s back there again, making it dirtier than ever. The Rockstar producer knows it well – he’s been there before, among the grime and the grit, underneath the overcast skies of the crime-ridden city.
“Liberty City is a dirty place,” Rich Rosado tells me.
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