It's difficult to imagine a Grand Theft Auto game being made by just a couple of dozen people today, especially with the sheer scale of GTA 6. But when Rockstar was developing GTA 3, that was more or less the size of its core team. According to former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij, there were some real advantages to having so few people working together.
Speaking to iGrandTheftAuto for GTA 3's 25th anniversary on October 22, Vermeij recalled how the developers could simply walk over to one another whenever they needed help or wanted to discuss an idea. There weren't several layers of people to go through, and everyone had a pretty good idea of what their colleagues were working on.
The core team at DMA Design, which would later become Rockstar North, consisted of around 23 people. Vermeij's original group was smaller still at just 10 developers, all of whom started on the same day. That sounds almost unbelievable when you consider what Grand Theft Auto eventually grew into, but he remembers that period fondly.
Everyone Knew Who Was Working On What
One of the biggest advantages of having such a small team was how easy it...
