17 years ago, on April 29th 2008 we released Grand Theft Auto IV.
To focus on making the game truly next-gen, we dropped many game features from San Andreas.
Stats (fitness, weight), Multiple cities, Stealth, Underwater swimming, Jet packs, Tanks, Bicycles, Monster trucks, Car modding, Planes…
The missions were designed to suit the story. Previously it had mostly been the other way around.
The ps3 was difficult to work with so the 360 became the lead platform.
R*San Diego produced their Rage engine to replace the discontinued RenderWare engine.
We finally realized a 32 player network game which later evolved into gta-online.
I left R*North 9 months later. With the project and team getting bigger I didn’t enjoy work as much as I used to. I also thought the game would continue to get darker and more serious. gta5 proved me wrong there.
The original release date was October 16th 2007, in time for Christmas. We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007.
Only at that time did it become clear we were going to miss the deadline. I’m guessing decision-day for VI will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take2’s August earnings report.
(Before you ask; I have no inside info)