The ex-GTA lead whose blog got the kibosh from Rockstar chats San Andreas’ worst bug and why ‘anything that isn’t visible to players tends to have swearing in it’

The original GTA trilogy on PC—not the biffed-up Definitive Edition of 2021—is still the best way to play those games. Not least because of fan projects like SilentPatch, a mod that fixes a whole bunch of bugs and errors still left over in Rockstar’s PS2-era opuses (opi?), and that got a meaty ol’ update just over a week ago.

In fact, it’s such a good patch that it’s earned the endorsement of Obbe Vermeij (via GamesRadar), former Rockstar technical director who worked in that role on GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, 4, and several handheld games. “Games have bugs and GTA is no exception,” Vermeij wrote. “If you want to play the original games I would recommend installing SilentPatch.”

And you know what? He’s right. In spite of that, though, I do have to note that Vermeij’s enduring issues with his babies seem extremely dev-brained, rather than rooted in anything the average player is likely to encounter.

For instance, he says “the worst bug [Rockstar] missed” in GTA: San Andreas wasn’t the one that let players drive exploded cars (which, to be fair, is great), the unreadable 4K credits, or the one that made mission text stay on the screen for longer the higher your resolution is. Vermeij’s great regret is “The one with the front-end map that makes random things change when the player goes outside the map.” Which sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would weigh heavy on the head of Rockstar’s technical director but that means remarkably little to me, the humble player. I’m not sure I’ve ever been outside the map in a Rockstar game anyhow.

Vermeij ended up in a kind of impromptu Q&A about working on the games. How many of their bugs could be traced back to him specifically? “I’m not going to count but erm… Quite a few.” Why do so many of the game’s models have swearing in their filenames? “Anything that isn’t visible to players tends to have swearing in it. Just something devs do to keep sane.” What does he think of the remasters? He hasn’t played them, but he hears “most of the bugs are fixed now.” Nevertheless, “they were rushed.”

This is surely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Vermeij’s inside stories, but we might be waiting a long time to hear the real juicy stuff. This is the same poor guy who made a blog to chat about his experiences last year and promptly got Rockstar’s dander up, leading to its unceremonious shuttering. What did he say then? “Maybe I’ll try again in a decade or two.”