Former Rockstar Employee Details GTA Development's Final Weeks

Obbe Vermeij, former Technical Director at Rockstar North, has shed light on the development process of the Grand Theft Auto series in the weeks leading up to release. According to Vermeij, Rockstar dedicated the last two weeks before a game's launch to playing through the title from start to finish in an effort to identify any remaining bugs.

Vermeij, who joined Rockstar in 1995 and worked on titles such as GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and GTA IV, described the development process as akin to a regular job. Most employees spent eight hours a day at their workstations, focusing on their respective fields like art, code, or music. Major decisions regarding gameplay or story were infrequent, and the latter stages of development primarily involved fixing a continuous stream of bugs.

He highlighted a specific practice: a two-week "freeze" period before the game's completion where all staff were required to play through the entire game. This was done to catch any final, undiscovered bugs. Vermeij noted that this was often his first experience playing the game in mission order and encountering the full narrative, sometimes discovering missions he had never heard of during development.

Vermeij departed from Rockstar North in 2009, making it unclear whether this development tradition continued for subsequent titles like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2. He also shared that the codebase for most GTA games is written in C++, with level designers using Rockstar's proprietary scripting language for mission logic.