The CEO of Grove Street Games, the studio which developed The GTA Trilogy’s Definitive Edition – yes, the version that came out in a pretty shocking state – has tweeted a thinly veiled response to Rockstar’s latest update to the trilogy removing some mentions of the studio from the three remastered games.
Following the release of the update – which brings a heap of fixes, including lighting tweaks that at least one of our lovely regular contributors is a big fan of – players have noticed that some mentions of Grove Street Games are now absent. The main references removed are in the start-up splashes for the collection’s GTA 3, San Andreas, and Vice City remasters, as well as copyright blurbs.
Seemigly responding to the online chatter this inevitably spawned, GSG CEO Thomas Williamson posted: “Speaking entire hypothetically: It’s a dick move to remove primary developers from credits in an update, especially when an update includes hundreds of fixes that were provided by those developers that stayed out of players’ hands for years.”
While the Trilogy update hasn’t removed Grove Street Games from the end credits of the games, as GTANet points out, you can understand why a developer might be unhappy at evcen some mentions of their studio being taken out of a game it helped develop, and faced plenty of criticism for the launch state of after being being given the project by Rockstar.
The second half of Williamson’s tweet is also interesting, given that it appears like it could suggest that fixes for the game weren’t deployed right away, instead allegedly being held back in some fashion. While this would seem a strange thing to have happened with any game, depending on the factors at play, the developer didn’t elaborate on it any further.
We’ll have to see if anything else comes of this, but for now it’s a strange end to what was an altogether pretty weird release of remasters for three widely beloved games that it doesn’t exactly take much to persuade most GTA fans to replay.