As part of the 10 year anniversary celebration for GTA: Vice City, Rockstar North producer Leslie Benzies and Art Director Aaron Garbut took to the web for a series of interviews looking back at the development of the game.
While most of the interviews relate to Vice City, there were a few questions and answers relating to more recent things that we thought were interesting and worthy of sharing, including thoughts on future GTA locations and the possibility of setting a game in Vice City again!
Below are the links to the full interviews, followed by quotes we pulled out that we found interesting:
First is from Aaron, talking about modern day research trips at the company:
These days it’s a very structured affair. Our research team schedules and organizes the artists with guides and off-duty cops and we come back with hundreds of thousands of extremely hi-res GPS stamped images.
Second is where Aaron talks about how there were thoughts on doing more than just a city in GTA Vice City:
We had talked about doing the Everglades. I think we even roughed some of it in. That would have been great. Basically expanding out of the city into the surroundings would be good, you get such good contrasts, but that was something that we devoted a lot of energy to in the later games.
Next is where Les talks about future GTA locations, answering the question “Any chance that Vice City might return in a future GTA?”:
It is always a possibility. There are a few references to the city in our current-gen GTAs so it is part of that HD universe, and it is certainly somewhere we would love to revisit. However Vice City, perhaps more than any other GTA game, was as much about the era as the setting. Miami in the 1980’s is so iconic it would feel strange to revisit the city in a different time period.
Of course at some point we would like to have one big world containing all our cities and let the player fly between them and revisit their favorite areas, and in that context reimagining Vice City would be very interesting.
Lastly, is just a little fun and interesting quote from Aaron:
I unfortunately do torture myself reading every comment I can find on Twitter or forum which is never good for your headspace.