“The team was relatively small at the time (around 25 people of which only seven were coders) so everybody was hands-on and every programmer had a large chunk of the game,” he continues. Edinburgh did all the modeling (characters, city, vehicles), the level design (missions) and the code.

“New York would handle the voice acting, story and various style decisions.

“Together we managed the ‘Edinburgh part’ of the game,” Vermeij tells us. Speaking to TechRadar, he explained how the development team established a transatlantic collaboration with Rockstar Games, the publishing company behind the GTA franchise, which was established in 1999 when Take-Two bought BMG Interactive. Vermeij started at DMA in 1995, building Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64. As technical director, Obbe Vermeij played a key role here, working alongside Adam Fowler, producer Leslie Benzies and art director Aaron Garbut. The boundless territory and endless horizons that GTA III promised led to a freedom of movement that is, now more than ever, near impossible to replicate in normal life.Ĭentral to this eye-popping achievement was the bravura technical ambition of DMA, which would become Rockstar North in 2001, and its decision to switch from the top-down perspective that had dominated Grand Theft Auto’s acclaimed but comparatively limited predecessors and into a hyper-real 3D vantage. To be found within the approximate 8km² of the game’s virtual expanse – said by Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser to be a “hybrid of a generic American city” and, in its three islands, resembling an industrial Brooklyn and Queens, Manhattan’s commercial district and the suburbs of New Jersey – are the keys to the open world. Its influence is everywhere but, besides the most obvious factor that it encouraged players to debase themselves and those within striking distance in a riotous Molotov cocktail of high jinks, this is about much more than invisible boundaries of taste. Now marking its 20th anniversary, GTA III’s populist reputation is centered on a range of questionable themes that allowed the gaming industry to, literally, build a mature audience and bring them along for the spanked-out ride.

Gta 3 o mio babbino caro