GTA 3 Developer Says This Subtle Feature Was Cut From San Andreas
The streets of GTA: San Andreas could've looked more littered once.
Rockstar Games is historically not overly interested in sharing insights into the development process for their games, which also means that scrapped features, storylines, characters, DLCs, and more are often kept as internal information, until they're either leaked, datamined from games' underlying code, or revealed by a developer who no longer works at Rockstar. The latest instance of the latter comes thanks to former Rockstar Games developer Obbe Vermeij taking to X (formerly Twtitter) to reveal a feature that was cute from Grand Theft Auto 3, a trend on Vermeij's social media this year.
In the latest reveal, Vermeij posts: "The streets of gta3 looked too clean so I added litter. It is a single rectangle that occasionally moves with the wind. It can also be dragged along by passing cars. The artists created 4 textures for it. 2 newspapers and 2 leaves. In Vice City there is a mission (Dildo Dodo) where the player drops flyers for Candy Suxx's show. From that point onwards, 1 of the 4 litter textures is replaced with the flyer. For each 'hop' the animation consist of: Movement along the ground. Further if it's windy.
"Movement up and down along a sinus function. Rotation of the rectangle. More hops occur when it's windy. Because line-scans were slow, it only detects the height of the ground at the landing location. (not in between) This is why it can go through the map in some cases. Not everyone on the team liked the litter. I removed it for San Andreas because I eventually lost the argument. In the last months of Manhunt development, some gta-ers helped out. I added the same litter code to Manhunt."
Earlier this year Vermeij also discussed the infamous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas glitch that sometimes causes small planes to crash, discussing a fact pointed out by modder Silent who noted a bug in the game's code that causes the planes to "crash more than they should due to a bug in the collision detection as planes are spawned. This can result in a false positive where the planes spawn, thinking the path in front is clear – when in reality, it's not."
As for Grand Theft Auto, Take-Two Interactive is holding consistently firm on its fall 2025 release window, and we may soon be due for another look at the in-development game by the end of the year based on Rockstar's most recent game release's marketing campaigns.
