"Games have bugs and GTA is no exception": Former Rockstar tech chief calls out mud behind hundreds of fixes for the original GTA trilogy on PC

Renowned Grand Theft Auto mud Quiet has been revamping the PC ports of the original trilogy of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas for years, and recently got a tip of the hat from former Rockstar techie Obbe Vermeij after open source versions of his corrective mods were released to the public.

“Games have bugs and GTA is no exception,” Vermeij said in a November 3 post tweet. Earlier this year, Vermeij responded to the infamous plane crash bugs from GTA: San Andreasoutlining the ‘QA nightmare’ behind it.

“For the past decade, a modder named ‘Silent’ has been developing patches for the original trilogy on PC,” Vermeij continued. “SilentPatch fixes 67 issues with GTA3, 66 for Vice, and 165 for SA. If you want to play the original games, I recommend installing SilentPatch.” That’s possible download the mods here.

About how many of those bugs can be traced back to Vermeij’s code, he said in one answer: “I’m not going to count but um… quite a few.” When asked if he could go back and fix one bug in San Andreas, Vermeij cited “the one with the front-end map that makes random things change when the player goes outside the map” as “probably the worst bug we have missed.”

“(Silent) recently made its GTA patches Open Source,” Vermeij added. “This means others can add their own solutions. Not for the faint of heart, as it involves analyzing the game code in assembly language format.”

We’re talking about the original GTA trilogy here, but Vermeij was also asked for his opinion on the Rockstar-official, downright disastrous GTA Trilogy – The Definitive Edition that was essentially fired out of a cannon in 2021. Rockstar apologized for the state of the trilogy and has updated it repeatedly, but it remains substandard by many fans’ standards. For his part, Vermeij said: “I haven’t really tried them yet. I hear most of the bugs are fixed now. Yeah, they were rushed.”

Silent shared Vermeij’s message and responded with a classic modding anecdote: a user points out that an in-game weapon sprite is off by a single pixel in GTA 3. “It never ends,” Silent wrote.

This caught the attention of Mike Dailly, known as the creator of Lemmings and the core design of the original GTA. “It’s an incredible piece of work,” Dailly said about Silent’s mods. “Fixing bugs at the best of times, resolving them in a final optimized binary can be tricky… wow. Real work.” In a follow-up comment, Dailly added: “Glad to see you’re already a game developer, because it would be a waste of those skills if you weren’t!”

Former GTA 6 designer says the open-world sequel will “blow people’s minds” and “people will be talking about it for ages” because Rockstar has “raised the bar again.”