GTA 3 Didn’t Have Working Planes Due To The PS2’s Memory Limitations

A former Rockstar games developer has revealed that one of the “hardest technical challenges” during the development of GTA 3 was due to the PS2’s memory, which is why the player wasn’t able to fly planes outside of a brief trip in the Dodo.

It’s not often that we get to look at how big triple-A games are created (shout-out to Naughty Dog and Double Fine for providing some of the best looks at game development), but one of the most infamously secretive studios is, without a doubt, Rockstar games. Despite making some of the most well-known titles in the world, Rockstar is incredibly private and tends to do things in its own way.

As a consequence of that, there are a lot of secrets and mysteries surrounding the development of most of its games (just look at how we reacted to a single audio blooper being found in Red Dead Redemption 2). That’s been somewhat changed over the past few months thanks to ex-Rockstar games developer Obbe Vermeij (who worked as Rockstar North’s technical director).

There was no way we could fit the whole map of gta3 in PS2 memory. Streaming involves loading models from the DVD as the player moves around. This was the hardest technical challenge during the development of gta3 and was coded by Adam Fowler.

The closer models physically are on… pic.twitter.com/EWBb5tyygn

— Obbe Vermeij (@ObbeVermeij) April 25, 2024

Ever since last year, Vermeij has slowly been revealing more about the development of the PS2 GTA trilogy, including explaining why the moon changes sizes when shot and shining a light on the suicidal planes in GTA San Andreas. Vermeij recently took to Twitter to go into detail about how the team got over the “hardest technical challenge” during GTA 3’s development.

That challenge was the PS2’s limited memory, which meant that GTA 3’s map had to stream models from the disk as the payer moved around. Although Vermeij and Adam Fowler managed to place models on the disk closely to try and get over the limitation, eventually there was nothing else to be done other than slowing the player down so that models could be loaded faster.

“Portland initially had a big drag running all along the island. This was a worst case scenario. The player could go fast and there were loads of buildings to load. The artists changed the road layout to slow the player down. In other problem areas, we increased the drag (air resistance) on the vehicles five percent or so.”

Although it’s interesting to know that the player was purposefully slowed down in GTA 3, the most interesting tidbit to come from the tweet is that these streaming issues were why the player was unable to fly anything but the Dodo in GTA 3. For those that don’t remember, the Dodo was a plane with its wings cut off that could technically be flown around, but was a total pain to control and barely let anyone get airborne.

If you’re wondering what changed between GTA 3 and Vice City to allow for air travel, Vermeij said that various code improvements were made that allowed for better compression of models and textures, and therefore allowed for faster loading and streaming (except when the player was flying).

Posted: 7 hours, 56 minutes ago
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