On his 20th birthday, GTA San Andreas veteran shares that the open world was originally split into three maps: "Memory was very tight on the PS2"

Rockstar Games released its seminal crimathon Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas exactly twenty years ago – October 26, 2004, another lifetime – and one veteran developer has decided to share a little-known tidbit about the open-world game in honor of its twentieth anniversary.

The always talkative Obbe Vermeij, for many years the technical lead of the groundbreaking studio, recently jumped on social media to explain that the first concept plan for the world of San Andreas was very different.

“The original plan was for the three cities to appear on separate maps,” Vermeij tweeted earlier today, before noting that the first two GTAs were also structured similarly, albeit from a top-down angle. “The player would travel between cities using trains and planes.”

Vermeij explains that “memory on the PS2 was very tight”, so splitting the map into three different sections meant that each city’s skyline models would not have taxed the console’s already overloaded memory. “It would also make it easier to have different police/ambulance/fire trucks for each city. Different pickups, weather types, etc. It would also be easier to keep the player contained until it was time for the next city .It would also make it easier to organize the models on the DVD city by city, which would help streaming.”

20 years ago we released Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas. The original plan was for the 3 cities to appear on separate maps. The player traveled between cities using trains and planes. (Gta 1 and 2 also had three cities on separate maps) Memory was very tight on the ps2 and… pic.twitter.com/kUMxR9Kt96October 25, 2024

Just before the artists started working on the three maps, a last-minute meeting between Vermeij, producer Leslie Benzies, art director Aaron Garbut, technical director Adam Fowler and programmer Alexander Roger scrapped that original plan. GTA San Andreas later shipped with all three cities seamlessly connected in one space, although layers of fog make the game seem bigger than it actually is and probably served as a crutch for the poor old PS2.

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