Ex-Rockstar Games developer reveals he worked on early online mode for GTA 3: 'We pushed for multiplayer again in Vice City

Rockstar Games has finally released its second trailer of Grand Theft Auto VI, a.k.a. GTA 6, in May 2025. Since the launch of the video, there has been a spike in speculations and rumours about the game. Amid this, the former Rockstar Games developer Obbe Vermeij on Wednesday, June 18, revealed that Rockstar Games had been planning for GTA to feature a true online mode since the development of GTA 3, which was released in 2001.

Vermeij dedicated his 14 years to Rockstar Games as a technical director, working on Grand Theft Auto games including Vice City, San Andreas, and IV before leaving the company in 2009. Revealing about the same on X (formerly called Twitter), ¡°For GTA 3, I developed an initial prototype of a deathmatch mode where players could kill one another, pull each other out of vehicles, and respawn at different spots around the city. It looked very promising...¡±

Credit: X | @ObbeVermeij

"¡­but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts working over the network etc. We decided to cut the effort. #ifdef GTA_NETWORK in the source code is a leftover," he added.

Obbe Vermeij, a former Rockstar developer, says he worked on the online mode for GTA 3

Following the launch of the trailer, it became the biggest video launch in history, garnering over 475 million views in its first 24 hours across all platforms.

According to Vermeij, the developers pushed for multiplayer again in Vice City, and he even hired a couple of network coders. But with tight deadlines, it was stopped once more.

GTA1 and 2 had LAN multiplayer. To save bandwidth, they only sent keypresses between machines ¡ª assuming the game state was 100% deterministic. That meant every game had to run in perfect sync, at the framerate of the slowest PC.

In practice, this wasn¡¯t always reliable. I¡­ pic.twitter.com/Oha4VQvn1q

¡ª Obbe Vermeij (@ObbeVermeij) June 18, 2025

For San Andreas, they didn¡¯t make an attempt. Since it was the last game of the PS2 era, it didn¡¯t seem worth the effort. Instead, they focused on adding local co-op. But, of course, it wasn¡¯t quite the same, he added.

Fans share mixed reactions to GTA multiplayer evolution

As soon as the post surfaced on the internet, it grabbed the attention of fans online, and one asked, "When doing local multiplayer on San Andreas with my cousin, the cops will always target player 1, CJ, and leave the second player alone. Was this intentional or an oversight?"

GTA1 and 2 had LAN multiplayer. To save bandwidth, they only sent keypresses between machines ¡ª assuming the game state was 100% deterministic. That meant every game had to run in perfect sync, at the framerate of the slowest PC.

In practice, this wasn¡¯t always reliable. I¡­ pic.twitter.com/Oha4VQvn1q

¡ª Obbe Vermeij (@ObbeVermeij) June 18, 2025

In response to this, Vermeij said, "That sounds like an oversight. The code was initially only written for one player and the coop mode bolted on halfway down the project."

it's pretty crazy to think GTA Online was an idea since basically the beginning of GTA but wasn't truly implemented until GTA 5

¡ª Synth Potato? (@SynthPotato) June 18, 2025

"Do you have any knowledge on why GTA 5 didn¡¯t have local co-op? Seems like a no brainer for a game with 3 playable protagonists who can all be used for a good number of missions and free play," another said.

I do remember playing GTA2 multiplayer on a coaxial LAN 10mbps setup and see it always go out-of-sync about 10-20 mins in... *shrugs*

¡ª Alex Fuller (@boberfly) June 18, 2025

"It's pretty crazy to think GTA Online was an idea since basically the beginning of GTA but wasn't truly implemented until GTA 5."