Almost all versions of classic GTA have made it to various platforms, including PC and smartphones. Even Liberty City Stories escaped from Sony’s clutches and made it to iOS and Android, despite the fact that the original San Andreas was already running on phones with much more gameplay possibilities. The release of the portable game on PSP was a real event, as one of the best classic games in the GTA series — Vice City Stories was supposed to be ported next… but, alas, it didn’t work out.
In this material, we will tell you how the prequel to Vice City was created: how engineers managed to squeeze all the juices out of the weak PSP, what tricks the developers resorted to, why fans still demand a remaster of VCS from Rockstar, and also figure out whether the designers from Leeds managed to outdo the original adventures of Tommy and Lance.
Sony requires exclusive
Outside the window was the winter of 2005 — a special time for game studios. The release of the brand new Xbox 360, which could create incredible things without strict technical limitations, had just thundered. There was a lot of hustle and bustle in Sony’s head office, as their flagship PlayStation 3 was in development, and the main competitors in the face of Microsoft and Nintendo were decisively winning back a share of the market. Sales of PS2 and PSP were falling, and the gaming division of the Japanese corporation needed to somehow stay afloat.
Large projects from third-party publishers looked lackluster on the outdated PS2, causing the main gaming audience to switch more actively to Xbox. In the portable entertainment market, Nintendo was crushing PSP with its exclusives and gameplay breakthrough projects. The owners of Mario were not bothered by the early release of the new generation console from Microsoft, they had special trump cards up their sleeve that would help Wii become a real bestseller in the future.
Sony needed another year to polish PS3. The corporation had to squeeze all the juices out of its previous consoles in order not to lose the established audience and earn additional funds on PS2 and PSP owners to support the gaming division. At that time, Japanese consoles still led the market in sales, but Sony earned mainly from the sale of video games. Yes, the cost of hardware has dropped, and yes, with the release of new Slim revisions, the corporation saved on production, but even with these features, the Japanese did not dare to take a year of calm.
In general, only on the final life cycles of the PS2 and PSP did game studios learn to use all the potential in the console and produce incredibly beautiful and technologically advanced projects. On the second PlayStation in 2005-2007, such hits as Black, Metal Gear Solid 3, Persona 3, Final Fantasy XII, God of War 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Ace Combat Zero, Fahrenheit and many other technological games were released. Despite the frankly weak hardware for those years, these projects demonstrated unreal beauty and decent performance. PSP also released small technological wonders: Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Daxter, Gangs of London, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, Manhunt 2, Silent Hill: Origins.
Rockstar Games’ games were arguably the main flagship of Sony console sales, so the Japanese turned to the Scots again to help keep life in the fading consoles. Take-Two Interactive was not against releasing some projects on the old PS2 and PSP, but there could be no question of a new GTA coming out on frail hardware. In general, if you believe the rumors and columns in gaming magazines, Rockstar really tried to launch the RAGE engine on last generation consoles, but lacked all the necessary resources. The minimum threshold for RAGE’s performance was the Wii, which ported Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis.
The rescue plan for Sony by Take-Two was as follows: Rockstar London’s London office had to quickly develop and release a sequel to Manhunt on PS2 and PSP and port Midnight Club to the handheld. The Canadians from Rockstar Vancouver were tasked with making Canis Canem Edit, better known as Bully. The other Canadians from Rockstar Toronto were asked to port The Warriors to PSP. And Rockstar Leeds got another challenging order… to develop another GTA from scratch for PlayStation Portable. The authors hadn’t had time to rest from Liberty City Stories when the bosses of Take-Two threw a more complex task at them: to make something almost like San Andreas, but for a portable console. The developers from Rockstar Leeds understood that repeating the technological miracle on weak hardware, and in a way that it didn’t eat up the battery charge, would be more difficult than in the case with Liberty City Stories. And they were right.
Portable hell in Sunny Miami
While the guys from Rockstar North are working day and night on the development of Grand Theft Auto 4, their sister studio in Leeds is returning to the office to start planning a new portable Grand Theft Auto. There was very little time allocated for development, and the ambitions and tasks set by senior management were sky-high.
Within Rockstar Games, it was decided that all GTA games released on PSP would be unique prequels, meaning the setting of the next game should be Vice City. Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall said in an interview how Grand Theft Auto: Vice City defined the term «cool game» for the entire gaming industry. It was important for him to bring back those warm memories to players and give them the opportunity to visit the bright places of the sunny city.
The script was handled by staff writer David Bland. He wanted to reveal already familiar characters from a less sophisticated side. Therefore, the events of the game were moved to 1984, that is, two years before Tommy Vercetti arrived. The main character this time is not a hardened bandit and mafioso, but a law-abiding citizen who was destined to step on a slippery path. David was assisted by Dan Houser, who chose the main character and sewed the events of Stories with the main game with white threads. The main plot is focused around Victor Vance, Lance Vance’s brother. Both characters previously appeared in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
While the scriptwriters were figuring out the plot twists, game designers were analyzing all the feedback regarding Liberty City Stories. The developers couldn’t simply copy all the functionality of San Andreas, as the PSP just wouldn’t be able to handle that much information. The missions for the new game had to be more diverse, dynamic, and action-packed than before, with multiple ways to complete them: on land, sea, or air. The main problem for implementing all these ideas was the power of the portable console. Back in the days of developing Liberty City Stories, the authors faced hundreds of problems in implementing the classic GTA gameplay. Here we have the small capacity of the UMD disc, weak hardware, the lack of additional triggers with an analog stick, and a whole heap of other troubles they had to fight with.
The engineering department sat down to upgrade the Leeds Engine, the engine of Liberty City Stories. Programmers wrote a new way of interaction between the central and graphics processors from scratch, to make it easier for game designers to add new features. Thanks to reducing the load on the processor, the developers managed to increase the draw distance and liven up the atmosphere of Vice City, without obscuring the players’ view with purple fog, as it was in the previous game.
Also, a new process was added for streaming information and animations from the disc to the console. This allowed loading more data into the game at once, without the need to pause the process for additional downloads. This algorithm allowed programmers to compress and optimize data in a special way, which allowed displaying crowds of people with detailed animations on the screen, as well as not limiting the amount of transport around the player. Also, the new engine could now calmly display models with a large number of polygons, and the new model of light emission could literally blind the player, as if he was directly in Vice City.
The achievements of the engineering department freed the hands of the game designers. The first thing the developers did was to give the main character the ability to swim. According to Rockstar Leeds, this was the main feature that fans of the original Vice City dreamed of. Unfortunately, there was not enough space on the UMD disc to detail the sea depths, so diving was not possible. Long-distance swims were also limited due to the inability to hold the animation of the water space, the model of the main character, and cityscapes in the graphics processor. Game designers explained this by the limited lung volume of Vic Vance. But even in such a truncated form, the ability to swim in the blue waters, and even on the PSP, sounds like an achievement.
But it’s one thing to teach a hero to swim, another is how he will interact with the water? Vice City itself is surrounded by water, and if in the original game it was just decoration, then with the ability to swim and frequent use of water transport, the developers had to completely rewrite the buoyancy model, which is needed for the use of jet skis. The appearance of the water was also improved thanks to new transparency, splash, and wave effects. Rockstar Leeds was so obsessed with water detailing that they added several sea states in different weather conditions. And this, I emphasize, on the technically weak PSP.
Years after its release, Vice City Stories has not made it past the PSP and PS2. The game could not be ported to iOS and Android due to an ongoing exclusivity agreement. The developers would have had no problem with the porting itself, as Vice City Stories was faster and smoother than Liberty City Stories in terms of performance. It would have run smoothly on any smartphone.
After the release of the PS2 version of Vice City Stories, publisher Take-Two naturally suggested Rockstar Leeds implement San Andreas Stories on the already prepared engine. The programmers understood that it would be impossible to fit an entire state on a tiny UMD disc, which raised the question for game designers — in which city would the events take place? But the developers did not have time to make the right decision: Electronic Arts announced that the RenderWare engine was no longer for sale, it could only be used by the publisher’s studios.
Rockstar Leeds did not want to develop a new engine for another GTA for a half-dead console. And Rockstar Games decided to leave the 3D universe of GTA alone and focus on the new HD universe. By that time, Nintendo, seeing high sales of the Stories duology for PSP, approached Take-Two with a request to develop some GTA for their portable console. Rockstar Leeds understood that they would have to make the game for an even weaker console than the PSP. So they were preparing for another feat.
*** Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories surpassed its predecessor on all fronts, becoming the most technologically advanced game for the portable PSP. Rockstar Leeds proved that they are capable of any, seemingly impossible, tasks. The Leeds studio has become an important part of the Rockstar Games ecosystem, capable of delivering games that meet company standards in a tight timeframe.