I don't remember why we chose not to affect driving. Yeah, it's a pill because certain drugs speed you up.

Yes it was a blast.
We probably couldn't have gotten away with it. It was a little glitchy sometimes but still very impressive for a mod.

I did hear about those but never played them. R*Leeds went and did their own thing and did it well.

GTA4 is when we finally nailed it. 4 programmers and several level designers worked full-time.

We’d always envisioned a two-game strategy:
First: Basic multiplayer
Then: Online experience

Both North and NY had wanted to make this happen since the gta3 days.

We pushed for multiplayer again in Vice City. Even hired a couple of network coders. But with tight deadlines, it was abandoned once more.

For San Andreas, we didn’t even try. It was the final PS2-era game — not worth the effort. We added local co-op instead. But yeah... not the same.

…but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts working over network etc. We decided to cut the effort.
#ifdef GTA_NETWORK in the source code is a leftover.

For GTA3, I prototyped a simple deathmatch. Players could kill each other, drag each other from cars, and respawn around the city. It was promising...

In practice, this wasn’t always reliable. I remember a test match where everyone thought they'd won. Turns out all the games had drifted out of sync. This wasn’t how multiplayer would be built in the future.

Wishlist & Demo:
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

Also:
If it was my call I wouldn’t release any additional trailers.
There is more than enough hype around VI and the element of surprise is going to make the release only bigger as an event.

I’m guessing decision-day for VI will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take2’s August earnings report.
(Before you ask; I have no inside info)

The original release date was October 16th 2007, in time for Christmas. We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007. Only at that time did it become clear we were going to miss the deadline.

We finally realized the 32 player network game which later evolved into gta-online.

I left R*North 9 months later. With the project and team getting bigger I didn’t enjoy work as much as I used to. I also thought the game would continue to get darker and more serious. gta5 proved me wrong there.

The missions were designed to suit the story. Previously it had been the other way around.

The ps3 was difficult to work with so the 360 became the lead platform.

R*San Diego produced their Rage engine to replace the discontinued RenderWare engine.

No, I just used English phrases. It's just that because of the hash key bug, random sequences also triggered the cheats.

Map artists just placed the lights, ran the game, and it all worked—no extra setup needed.

Simple, but it still worked this way in IV.

During gta3, I gave players a 1-star wanted level for running red lights. This was not popular with the team. I quickly removed it.

Not sure why that got lost. Could be a bug/oversight.

There must be a misunderstanding. The PC and Xbox version of gta3 and Vice weren't forked. The codebase moved forward as one.
(It may have been different for SA as we didn't do that pc version)