What Former Rockstar North CTO Obbe Vermeil Said About Online Modes in GTA Games

Obbe Vermeij served as Rockstar North's technical director from 1995 to 2009. A couple of years ago, he started blogging on social media, sharing details about the development of various Grand Theft Auto titles. On June 18, the developer published a post in which he talked about the development of the multiplayer mode in the GTA series. In this article, we analyzed his words and compared them with what the games of that time actually offered.

"GTA 1 and 2 had a LAN multiplayer mode. To save bandwidth, they only sent keystrokes between machines — the game state was assumed to be 100% deterministic [known in advance — Liberty City note]. This meant that each game had to run in perfect sync with the frame rate of the slowest PC.

In practice, this did not always work — there were reliability issues. I remember a test match where each participant thought they had won. But it turned out that the games were out of sync. Multiplayer shouldn't work like that."

It's worth noting that multiplayer is only available in the PC versions of the first GTA. In the original Grand Theft Auto, as well as in the spin-offs London 1969 and 1961, it is limited to two modes — a race with checkpoints and Deathmatch (shootouts where everyone is for themselves). Moreover, players must connect to a common server manually, using IP address identification.

The second game in the series uses a convenient manager that allows you to quickly provide communication between computers for a common game. In addition to the already mentioned Deathmatch, GTA 2 has a competition called Tag, where one of the participants is considered a target for others, and after his death, the hunt for the next person begins. The winner is the one who lasts the longest. In addition, in the Points mode, you can arrange a competition for who will get the most points, which are collected through kills and various in-game actions.

“For GTA3, I created a prototype of a simple Deathmatch. Players could kill each other, pull opponents out of cars and respawn all over the city. It was promising...

...but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts that work over the network, and so on. We decided to cut back on the effort.

#ifdef GTA_NETWORK in the source code is all that remains from the work on the network mode."

In fact, it was planned that the multiplayer of the third Grand Theft Auto would be more large-scale than Deathmatch. From the leaked design document, we learned that players could upgrade parameters, participate in the war for territory, support one of the warring factions and go over to the police side. We told more about what GTA Online could have been like in 2001 in a separate article.

"We tried to make a multiplayer for Vice City. We even hired a few network coders. But due to tight deadlines, we abandoned work on the multiplayer mode."

And although the official version of the game does not have multiplayer, if you want, you can install a multiplayer mod on the PC version of Vice City. It will allow you to participate in races, shoot each other with different weapons, and also play a specific role on RP servers.

"For San Andreas, we didn't even try to make an online mode. It was the last game of the PS2 era — it wasn't worth the effort. We added local co-op. But yeah, it's definitely not the same."

The co-op that Obbe mentions is available on the PS2 and Xbox versions of San Andreas. It allows two players to play on one console. You can launch a similar mode on PC using the mod Double Trouble.

The game was released on personal computers without a multiplayer mode. However, enthusiasts took up this task. As a result, SAMP (San Andreas Multiplayer) appeared. Various servers, including those with completely new maps, are still functioning.

“GTA 4 is the game where we finally got multiplayer going. Four programmers and a few level designers worked on it full-time.

Our strategy was:

Both North (Rockstar’s Edinburgh department) and New York (headquarters) have wanted to do this since GTA 3.”

To start playing online, you need to select the appropriate option in the mobile phone menu. The fourth Grand Theft Auto offers a variety of competitions, from team deathmatchbefore the war for territory. There is also a free mode that allows you to drive around Liberty City without any restrictions.

But only in the fifth part the multiplayer mode became a full-fledged game, which has been supported for more than 10 years. However, Obbe no longer worked on it, so the story about GTA 5 is beyond the scope of our article.

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Have you spent time in the multiplayer of the early parts of Grand Theft Auto? Share your opinions in the comments!