GTA III turns 25: technical director Obbe Vermeij looks back
GTA III came out on October 22, 2001. Its technical director, Obbe Vermeij, remembers a game running at 7 fps, a 23-person team and an E3 debut that left people cold.
Today, October 22, 2026, GTA III turns 25. It launched on PlayStation 2 in North America on October 22, 2001, and changed the series for good: the first 3D GTA, and the first open world as we know it now. To mark the occasion, iGrandTheftAuto spoke to Obbe Vermeij, its technical director, who went on to work on Vice City, San Andreas and GTA IV.
A debut that fell flat
Hard as it is to believe, GTA III didn't wow anyone at its first public showing, E3 2001. The response was lukewarm, and doubt crept into the team. "It was definitely a concern. We kind of all felt like, hmm, did we get this wrong?" Vermeij recalls.
The worry made sense: unlike Vice City and San Andreas, which built on what came before, GTA III was made from scratch.
A game that was almost always broken
Vermeij describes a development in which the game was "almost always broken" — missions rarely made it to the end without a crash. For much of the project the team assumed it would run at around 20 frames per second, but in practice it often sat at 7 or 8 fps. "It was only at the very end we got to 30 frames per second."
His favourite memory is that final stretch: roughly six months before release, the frame rate went up, most bugs were fixed and the music went in. He likens it to "polishing a gem" — the first moment the team thought the game might actually be good.
About 23 people in Edinburgh
The core team was around 23 people at DMA Design in Edinburgh, the studio that became Rockstar North. Vermeij's own group began with about ten people who all started on the same day — "You would never do that right now," he says. They socialised midweek, worked in an open-plan office, and "it felt like a bunch of friends doing a project together."
That scale shaped how they worked. The game wasn't locked down up front and kept changing: anyone could pitch an idea in the morning and, if it was fun, it went in. Vermeij reckons that's impossible on a modern big-budget game, where nearly everything has to be designed before production.
A hit that took months to land
Another surprise: GTA III wasn't an overnight smash. Back then, Vermeij explains, a game sold for about three months and faded; GTA III simply kept selling, carried by word of mouth. The team only realised months later, since their feedback was sales figures and written reviews. It wasn't until he joined social media a few years ago that he saw how much players love it.
Our take
The timing is perfect, less than a month before GTA VI. The contrast is huge: from 23 people trying ideas on the fly to a studio that, per Bloomberg's report, roughly doubled in size to make GTA VI — and the roughly 2,000 people Guinness World Records credits on Red Dead Redemption 2. What hasn't changed is the obsession with polishing right up to the end, just like those six months in 2001.
And Liberty City is still alive: fans keep building on it, from the unofficial Dreamcast port to the Upstate Liberty mod. Happy birthday, GTA III.
