A GTA 3 developer talks about the nasty gameplay feature that was removed in GTA San Andreas

Rockstar Games and the development process of its games tends to be a mystery to many of its fans, so many years later any kind of information is surprising. This is the case of what has shared Obbe Vermeij, technical director of Rockstar North from 1995 to 2009 and with experience in a large number of projects related to Grand Theft Auto, who has talked about one of the features of the third installment of the saga that stopped appearing in GTA San Andreas and that many fans of the game missed so much that there are even mods for this to appear.

What is it about? The garbage, yes, literally the garbage that appeared in the streets of GTA 3 and gave Liberty City that much needed aspect of dirt. Vermeij talked about it on X (Twitter) and commented, “The streets of gta3 looked too clean so I added litter. It is a single rectangle that occasionally moves with the wind. It can also be dragged along by passing cars. The artists created 4 textures for it. 2 newspapers and 2 leaves. In Vice City there is a mission (Dildo Dodo) where the player drops flyers for Candy Suxx’s show.”

The litter in Grand Theft Auto

The former Rockstar North CTO went on to talk about this feature of the game and how they worked with it, noting that “Movement up and down along a sinus function. Rotation of the rectangle. More hops occur when it’s windy. Because line-scans were slow, it only detects the height of the ground at the landing location. (not in between) This is why it can go through the map in some cases.” The Dutch-born developer revealed that “not everyone on the team liked the litter. I removed it for San Andreas because I eventually lost the argument. In the last months of Manhunt development, some gta-ers helped out. I added the same litter code to Manhunt.”