In a bid to seemingly maintain the mystique around its game development process and culture, Rockstar North appears to have forced an ex-employee to shut down his dev blog.
The blog, titled ‘Development of the trilogy & IV’, was started earlier this month by Obbe Vermeij to share stories about “what life was like inside Rockstar North”. Obbe worked at Rockstar North (originally DMA Design) from 1995 to 2009 as a technical director on projects like GTA 3, San Andreas, Vice City, and more.
In his latest and supposedly last post on the blog, Obbe Vermeij talked about an email he received from Rockstar North. He revealed:
“Apparently some of the OG’s there are upset by my blog. I genuinely didn’t think anyone would mind me talking about 20 year old games but I was wrong. Something about ruining the Rockstar mystique or something.”
Why Obbe Vermeij Is Shutting Down His Dev Blog
On his blog, Obbe shared several insider stories about the development of GTA games. Most of his blogs offered technical reasoning behind several decisions taken by the team on these games. His recent posts revealed how cheat codes and weather systems worked, and he also spoke about how the infamous moon-size-changing trick/mechanic ended up in some of the GTA titles.
But his dev diary doesn’t seem to have gone down well with Obbe’s ex-employer and former colleagues. After receiving the email that triggered the blog’s shutdown, Obbe posted:
“This blog isn’t important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I’m winding it down.”
He further added that a few anecdotes that don’t affect anyone but him would remain on the blog. Obbe also expressed his wish for Rockstar to “open up about development of the trilogy themselves”, but he doesn’t see it happening anytime soon. He ended the post by saying he might try posting these development stories again in a decade or two.
I have reached out to Rockstar North for comments.
UPDATE (November 23, 2023): Obbe’s blog now has only one post, which he has updated to convey,
“No pressure from R*. My own choice.”
After his story caught everybody’s attention, Obbe took to Twitter to clarify that there was no contact or legal threat by Rockstar New York.
