GTA San Andreas veteran says Rockstar employees were pretty chill about its launch 20 years ago: “Most devs had taken a holiday”
Two decades on from GTA San Andreas’ launch, one Rockstar Games veteran has reflected on how dramatically game releases have changed in the 20 years since.
Rockstar Games’ former tech lead Obbe Vermeij, who worked on multiple Grand Theft Autos before leaving to make the polar opposite, took to social media to reminisce on the good old days of game launches and how most developers were surprisingly chill about the huge event.
“Game releases were different back then,” he tweeted. “It took six weeks for the DVDs to be produced, boxed and distributed. Patches over the internet were not yet a thing. For us, all of the stress had happened at the cut-off point, six weeks prior. No big issues had come up.”
Since the developers didn’t need to work on a day one patch leading up to launch, because such a thing was unheard of, Vermeij says that “most devs had taken a holiday and we were already thinking about our next project.”
“Digital distribution didn’t exist yet,” he continues. “Games were typically released on a Tuesday/Wednesday in the US and Fridays in the UK. The internet was crap and apart from a couple of trailers, gamers didn’t know too much about the game. For big games, stores would open at Midnight before release day so that pre-orders could be picked up. I only later found out, the publisher has to pay the stores to make these late openings happen.”
Vermeij says that he showed up to San Andreas’ rainy midnight launch at the biggest store near Rockstar North’s office – “which was a HMV on Princess Street, Edinburgh” – only to find the customer line stretched “all through the store and spilled out onto the street… It was mind-blowing to see all those people so excited, going home to play the game all through the night.”