This month, Rockstar is launching remasters of three of its most beloved games: Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. Collected in a package called GTA: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, this is a chance to revisit these influential open-world games with updated visuals and modernised controls. But how do you take games that are 20, 18, and 17 years old respectively and make them play well and look good on modern consoles and PCs? I asked Rockstar producer Rich Rosado, who worked on the project, how the studio pulled it off.
"The thing that drew people to these titles early on was the very specific way that they felt," says Rosado. "So when it comes to redoing them, you hit a crossroads. You can either try and rebuild them and improve them, and in doing so that means rescripting everything and adding new physics. Or you acknowledge that these games had a very secret sauce that people fell in love with, and it would be a fool's errand to try and replicate every single element—the good bits and the frustrating bits. So one of the first choices we made for these remasters was to leave them intact."
This proved to be a significant technical challenge, because by taking the old code and carrying it over into a new renderer, the developer had two different engines running parallel with each other. "This brings a lot of technical headaches," says Rosado. "But it gave us what we wanted. Here's the game as it felt. But we also wanted to take advantage of the effects available in the new renderer, which enabled us to do far more than just add a new lighting effect here or there. You have a whole toolbox to play with. We also had plugins for current generation consoles, which made our lives a lot easier when it came to supporting those platforms."
The PS2-era GTAs were designed around the technical limitations of the day. But with these issues no longer a concern on modern consoles, I asked Rosado how the remasters benefit from this. "One of the biggest limitations of the PS2 era was draw distance," he says. "You're talking about very early, borderline HD consoles here. We could render 3D worlds at a scale and scope that wasn't possible on the Dreamcast or PlayStation, but this came at a price. You could only throw so much detail and geometry at the screen before everything started to slow down."
To combat this, the old games made heavy use of a clip plane—which meant the world was only rendered a short distance in front of you. "That impacts a bunch of things," says Rosado. "Simply being able to see to the end of a street, and see people milling about and cars moving up and down, adds a sense of scale and majesty to the world. Being able to push that draw distance back and see more of the city was something we couldn't do in the PS2 era, but we were able to do in the remasters. It's how we hoped the game would have looked back then on that hardware."
Redoing these games also presented an archival challenge. Today, game developers fastidiously back everything up, but in the '90s and early 2000s, this wasn't the case. "I've been with this company since the late '90s, and the problem is that back then you would make a game, print it on media, ship it, and that was it," says Rosado. "We never thought we'd have to revisit these projects. When we were looking for the audio, it was compressed, as it should be. But then we'd try to find the source audio and we often couldn't. Same with source textures and the reference material that was used to build the original character models."
The new games feature a mix of assets: some are reappropriated from the originals, and others (like the neon casino signs in Las Venturas) have been rebuilt from scratch. "At first we'd say, let's just do the hero buildings: CJ's house, Tommy's hideout, Rosenberg's office, and so on. But then there would be a mismatch. Something would look really nice, then you'd walk two blocks over and the quality wouldn't match up. That's when we started putting a paintbrush over everything in some way, shape, or form."
To make the new assets, Rockstar used machine learning to upscale certain textures, but also reworked some by hand. The remasters also implement graphics techniques like parallax interiors, which create the illusion of looking through windows and seeing the insides of buildings. These updates breathe new life into these old, familiar cities—but, according to Rosado, the remastering process is also a way to future-proof the games for future generations. "People still love them years later," he says. "So we want to extend that roadmap for another ten or 15 years—and make sure they work on modern displays that are 1080p, 4K, and above.
"When you're doing these geometry updates, some are easier than others. You can look at an arched bridge and see the low geometry and fix it. But when you come across a character like, say, Claude, who was built in the PS2 era and doesn't have a lot of detail in the face, it's tricky. You're adding three times the amount of triangles to the character, trying to put detail where there was no detail before. Now you have a problem, because you have to add definition to these characters that people have gotten to know over the years and have their own mental image of."
When it came to redesigning the characters, Rosado says the team consulted Rockstar North, including some of the original artists. Of all the upgraded visual elements in these new versions, the character models are perhaps the most striking and immediately different. "It's tough," says Rosado. "You're worried about what people will think. You can clean up a car and add more geometry, and it'll look like it did before, just more current. But the characters were much more difficult and involved a lot of iteration to make sure we were all comfortable with them."
As for the challenges of modernising these old games, the sheer scale of the three of them combined was a big one. "When you start bringing over the assets, the first thing you're hit with, and reminded of, is the scope," says Rosado. "You're really making three games at once, and they haven't gotten any smaller. San Andreas is still a 100-hour game, no matter what generation you're in. It's an enormous task, not just to bring the assets over into the new renderer, but to modernise everything too. Every time you finish one block, there's another one waiting, and another one after that. The art challenge alone felt insurmountable early on."
Rockstar also had to think about performance. "Now that we're throwing everything but the kitchen sink at these titles to bring something out of them, you have to make sure it runs very well on a low-end PC or a Nintendo Switch—but also looks the part on a PS5," says Rosado. "We have to balance these extremes, making sure there's parity across the board. We want a good feel and frame rate, and consistent art across the map. These were some of the biggest development challenges. It was like taking a giant jigsaw puzzle and dumping all the pieces on the floor."
When I ask Rosado if any of the games were harder to update than the others, before I've even finished my question he holds up three fingers and laughs. "Grand Theft Auto 3, man," he says. "When we got to San Andreas, the last game we made for that generation, the art team was in a good flow, they understood the hardware very well. But when you compare those assets to GTA 3's, it was night and day. Its assets are more spartan, more box-like. Pedestrians were literally built like the Michelin Man. Their body was separated into chunks, so we had to reskin and retune them in a way that makes them more consistent with San Andreas."
GTA: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition launches on November 11 for PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.