Former R Star employees reveal the development process of the GTA series: Everyone played the game through once two weeks before release, just to find the last loophole.
Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Rockstar North, revealed that before the release of games such as `GTA3` and `GTA4`, all team members would play through the game once to identify bugs. Vermeij joined Rockstar in 1995 and was responsible for the development of `GTA3`, `GTA: San Andreas`, and `GTA4`. He said that the development process was similar to ordinary work, with everyone working together using headphones, and the later stage mainly involved fixing bugs. Two weeks before the official release, development was suspended to allow all team members to fully play through the game and find the final bugs. Vermeij left Rockstar North in 2009, so it’s unclear whether this tradition continued for `GTA V`, `GTA: Red Dead Redemption 2`, and `GTA6`. Additionally, he mentioned that most of the code for `GTA` games was written in C++, and level designers used Rockstar’s internal scripting language to implement task logic.