Former Rockstar Dev Shuts Down Insightful Blogs About GTA, Manhunt, and More Games

This month, Rockstar fans have been getting some intriguing insights into the development of past games like the Grand Theft Auto series, Manhunt, and more like the canceled Agent game. Former Rockstar North developer Obbe Vermeij is who we can thank for that, a game developer who worked at the studio years ago as a technical director where he worked on games like Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and others. If reading about the work that went into those kinds of games sounds interesting to you, you hopefully were able to read some of the posts on Vermeij's "Inside Rockstar North" blog previously, because the whole operation has essentially been shut down now with the majority of those posts deleted.

Vermeij's blog started earlier this month and previously consisted of seven or so posts encompassing the early GTA games and other topics. In what's presumably the final post that he'll make on the site (for now), he said that he'd been contacted by Rockstar North and has since decided to wind down the blog.

Rockstar Blog Comes to an End

The "Inside Rockstar North" blog offered a look at "what life was like inside Rockstar North," according to the broad description of the site which is still up even if it's looking a bit barren now. In a post titled "Sorry you missed it" which was shared on November 22nd, Vermeij said Rockstar North had gotten in touch with him about the blog posts

"Today (22 Nov 2023) I got an email from R*North," he said. "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."

He continued by saying that while he wished Rockstar would open up more about the histories of its games, keeping the blog going wasn't worth annoying former colleagues, so he'd be winding down the posts while also deleting the existing ones save for those he considered harmless. Now, there are only two posts up: the message about the blog shutting down, and one about the moon size in GTA: San Andreas.

"This blog isn't important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I'm winding it down," he said. "I'll maybe just leave a few articles with anecdotes that don't affect anyone but me. I would love for Rockstar to open up about development of the trilogy themselves, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon."

The Kotaku article is not accurate. I took the blog down because it seemed to annoy my old colleagues at Rockstar North.
There was no contact with R* New York. No legal threat. No silencing.

Everybody please calm down.

— Obbe Vermeij (@ObbeVermeij) November 23, 2023

In a tweet shared shortly after the blog posts concluded and news circulated, Vermeij clarified that he had not been contacted by Rockstar's New York-based studio, only by Rockstar North. He said there were no threats of legal action or anything of the sort and that he'd elected to wrap up the blog himself.

For those still eager to learn more from Vermeij's insights into Rockstar North, people responded to the developer and others on socials to indicate the now-deleted blog posts have already been archived and are readable with a bit of digging.