Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV and a few other games, has gone behind the scenes again.

Vermeij spoke highly of the SilentPatch, which we recently wrote about as open source. It fixed 67 bugs in GTA III, 66 in Vice City and 165 (!) in San Andreas. He wrote on Twitter that games are buggy, and Grand Theft Auto is no exception, and that if you play the original GTAs, he recommends installing the SilentPatch. He also pointed out that the worst bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is exactly what he thinks…

Games have bugs and gta is no exception.

Over the last decade, a modder going by the name ‘Silent’ has developed patches to the original trilogy (gta3, VC, SA) on PC.

SilentPatch fixes 67 issues with gta3, 66 for Vice and 165 for SA.

If you want to play the original games I… pic.twitter.com/mUNJU5gMkC

— Obbe Vermeij (@ObbeVermeij) November 3, 2024

There’s the bug where players can drive blown up cars, or the annoying thing where the leaderboard is unreadable at 4K resolution. The mission completion text can stay on the screen for a long time, depending on the resolution. That’s nothing compared to what Vermeij says is the worst: “The front-end map that randomly changes things when the player goes outside the map.” As soon as you leave the game world, everything is going out of order… but let’s be honest, not many people manage to do that!

He then got a lot of questions about how many bugs he was associated with, but he couldn’t count them. Many models have swear words in their filenames, because everything that is not visible to players usually has them, as a way for the developers to keep their sanity. He hasn’t played the Definitive Edition remasters and thinks they were rushed by Rockstar, but at least most of the bugs have been fixed.

Vermeij could tell you more about what goes on behind the scenes at Rockstar, but he was the one who had a blog and shut it down at Rockstar’s request (we reported earlier). He may try again later… in a decade or two.

Source: PCGamer