How GTA 3 was able to fit on PS2 DVD: Ex-dev explains everything

Rockstar Games brought the Grand Theft Auto franchise into the 3D realm with GTA 3 in 2001. It was a revolutionary game for the time considering all the technological limitations and one of its developers has explained how this was made possible on a PlayStation 2 DVD. The developer in question is Rockstar's former Technical Director, Obbe Vermeij, who recently shed some light on the title's development process on his official X account.

He also briefly revealed how the studio was able to improve upon this during the development of other popular 3D Universe titles like GTA Vice City and San Andreas. With that said, let's take a closer look at how Rockstar Games was able to fit GTA 3 on a PS2 DVD as explained by an ex-dev.

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Former Rockstar Technical Director Obbe Vermeij explains how GTA 3 was able to fit on a PS2 DVD

Obbe Vermeij stated that there was no way to fit the entire map of GTA 3, that is Liberty City, on PS2 memory. Data is streamed from the DVD at a certain rate based on how fast players move around. Since models that are closer on a DVD load faster, former Rockstar dev, Adam Fowler, wrote the code in such a way that models that were close in the map were close on the disk too.

That said, this didn't solve the problem completely due to which player movement had to be slowed down. This was done by changing road layouts as well as by increasing vehicle drag. Notably, these streaming issues were also responsible for players not being allowed to fly in GTA 3.

Adam Fowler's code constantly moved around fragmented memory blocks that would form due to models getting loaded and then removed. However, Obbe Vermeij describes this as "tricky" since models occasionally had to be moved while they could be rendered.

Interestingly, the former Rockstar dev revealed that these issues were tackled during the development of GTA Vice City by implementing code improvements that loaded detailed versions of buildings only when players were not flying, and via better model and texture compression.

Responding to one of the comments on his X post (by user @RipeYoutube), Obbe Vermeij also disclosed how such issues were tackled in the case of GTA San Andreas, a title that is significantly more advanced than GTA 3.

Obbe Vermeij sheds light on GTA San Andreas' development (Image via X)

He explained that similar workarounds were utilized but with "incremental improvements". What also helped was the GTA San Andreas' map having low-detail countryside between its three major cities which helped a lot with the streaming.

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Luckily, the technology has evolved by leaps and bounds since the days of PS2 DVDs which has made games like GTA 6 possible. The gaming community is eagerly awaiting more details on it after the first trailer's launch a few months back. Until then, they can keep themselves busy with new content added with regular GTA Online updates.