GTA 3’s trash was so divisive among developers that the streets of San Andreas were cleared after a row over the trash, but its code still crept into Manhunt

Apparently, the trash that blew in the wind and followed cars on the streets was a controversial topic at the time in GTA 3. For example, the developers who added these rogue newspapers and leaves in Liberty City eventually had to remove them from GTA San Andreas after a debate with the Rockstar team about the trash issue.

This was revealed by Obbe Vermeij, the former technical director of Rockstar, who held this position for two games in the series and eventually left the studio after the release of GTA 4 in 2009. He said that he was the developer of the code of the series of games.

“GTA 3’s streets looked too clean, so I added trash,” Vermeij revealed in a tweet. “It’s a single rectangle that occasionally blows in the wind. It also gets dragged around by passing cars. The artist created four textures for it. Two newspapers and two leaves.”

After adding the same, Vice City was tweaked to add flyers tied to a certain mission once you completed it, and the developers revealed that it wasn’t making it to the next game in the series as it apparently caused a minor disagreement between the developers.

“Not everyone on the team liked the crap code,” he recalls, “and I cut it from San Andreas because I ended up losing the argument.” However, Vermeij appears to have had the last laugh, revealing that some GTA developers helped out during the final months of development on another Rockstar project (2003’s Manhunt), and that he “added the same crap code to that game.”

Hey, if you’re going to work on making something that increases people’s immersion, it’s good to stick to your guns. Even though, as Vermeij points out in the post, his junk “can pass through the map in some cases” because it “only [detecting] The ground height of the landing point”.

In addition to telling us all about the rubbish right now, Vermeij recently gave his thoughts on GTA 6, saying that he thinks it will be hard for Rockstar to make as much progress in the series from GTA 5 to 6 as they did between older entries.