Seemingly irrelevant GTA 3 detail pushed devs to come up with one of Rockstar's most iconic features
A former Rockstar employee revealed how the now iconic cinematic camera was created in the GTA series. Its origins are related to boring train travel.
Obbe Vermeij is a former Rockstar employee who is very eager to share interesting facts about the Grand Theft Auto series he once co-created. Thanks to him, we learned, among other things, about the deliberate littering of streets, details of the error with exploding airplanes, and a trick to improve car traffic. Obbe has now spoken about the trains that helped create an iconic feature of Rockstar games - the cinematic camera.
Beginnings of the cinematic camera
Vermeij made a post on X, explaining that he considered the operation of trains in GTA 3 to be simply boring while programming them. He disliked it to such an extent that he even started considering quickly skipping the character to the next station, but this idea was ultimately rejected due to technological limitations.
Instead, he came up with the idea for the camera to switch between random points near the tracks while driving. Thanks to this, the entire route was supposed to become more interesting. Seeing this, a team member proposed doing something similar with cars too. So Vermeij added a camera by the wheel and a view from the perspective of chasing vehicles. The team found it amusing, which is why the feature made it into the full version.
As we can easily guess, these were the beginnings of the cinematic camera, which is still present in Rockstar games today. It can be found not only in the latest installment of the gangster series but also in Red Dead Redemption 2. It will most likely also appear in the upcoming GTA 6.
The cinematic camera remained unchanged for Vice City. One of the coders that joined us after finishing Manhunt (Derek Ward) took over the camera and revamped the cinematic camera for SA.
As an interesting fact, it's worth mentioning that one of the fans decided to recreate an old train ride before the addition of a cinematic camera. He did this by deleting one of the game files, and you can see the result below. In response, Vermeij admitted that originally a regular camera "from behind the car" was used for this.
The fan's reaction - with the appropriate screenshot included - didn't take long to come.
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