As a documented remaster liker, it was a real black day for me when Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition came out, back in 2021. It was a complete mess, filled with bugs, shoddily upscaled textures, weird models, and at least one alarmingly smooth hexagon. It was shoddy treatment for a series of legendary games, and the outcry was immediate and intense—in a perhaps telling sign, the remasters’ original developer, Grove Street Games (GSG), found itself unceremoniously removed from the game’s splash screen in a 2024 patch.
Now, in a chat with Wccftech, GSG CEO Thomas Williamson has chatted a little about how he now reflects on the GTA Trilogy debacle. In short: he agrees they were busted, but says the metrics showed that many players enjoyed them anyway.
“Regarding GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition, I agreed with most of the people’s reactions,” said Williamson. “But unfortunately, I feel like we did not agree with how the game was released and the response to it from a development side, and I think that would have changed the narrative significantly.
“However, at the end of the day, looking at the behind-the-scenes metrics on those games, there were a lot of people who were playing them and really enjoying them.” I must confess, I’m a little sceptical about this. I don’t doubt that GSG and Rockstar’s metrics showed a lot of people playing the GTA Trilogy, but I’m not sure they were able to gauge their level of enjoyment or satisfaction with the work that had been done. Just because people were playing the remasters doesn’t mean they were happy with them; they may have had no alternative—the original GTA trilogy has been delisted on numerous storefronts.
But Williamson says he understands the disappointment, and reckons a truly ideal set of remasters would need to be done in-house at Rockstar, not outsourced. “There was also a lot of people who wanted more, and I don’t blame them. We all view these games as these really, really important milestones in gaming history, so I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work on them… I don’t think there’ll ever be a perfect redux of those that’s not done by Rockstar proper. If their Rockstar North team took it on and did some crazy thing, that would be awesome.”
The GTA Trilogy last got a patch—which added a very popular classic lighting system—in 2024. I maintain a forlorn hope it will some day get another one. It’s not the catastrophe it was at launch, but games as important as GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas deserve better than what we have currently. At the very least, Rockstar could plump to put the complete original soundtracks back on the in-game radio.
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