The CEO of Grove Street Games – the studio behind the 2021 GTA Trilogy collection that was heavily criticized by fans at launch – is clearly very unhappy with the developer’s recent removal from the collection’s splash screen, having now blasted it as “a dick move.”
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which includes GTA 3, San Andreas, and Vice City, was full of bugs when it first released and generally wasn’t considered to live up to the ‘definitive edition’ part of its name. However, this week it got a surprise update that made some massive changes in the form of bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, and visual upgrades, including a “Classic Lighting Mode.” All in all, there’s never been a better time to try the collection, but players also noticed that, mysteriously, Grove Street Games’ name has been scrubbed from the collection’s splash screen, which studio CEO Thomas Williamson has now called out.
“Speaking [entirely] hypothetically: It’s a dick move to remove primary developers from credits in an update, especially when an update includes hundreds of fixes that were provided by those developers that stayed out of players’ hands for years,” he writes on Twitter.
Speaking entire hypothetically: It’s a dick move to remove primary developers from credits in an update, especially when an update includes hundreds of fixes that were provided by those developers that stayed out of players’ hands for years.November 14, 2024
He might not mention GTA by name, but given this week’s news, it’s obvious what he’s referring to. As has been pointed out in the tweet’s replies, Grove Street Games is still listed in the end credits for the Trilogy collection, so the studio’s efforts haven’t been left totally unacknowledged. However, it’s fair to say that it’s a strange move to erase the developer from a place it was previously credited on, especially when Williamson alleges that the team was also behind “hundreds of fixes” in the latest version. His comment also raises the question of why the fixes weren’t rolled out sooner when so many things needed fixing, and have done since 2021, but he’s not elaborated on this.
Williamson’s comment also follows GTA fans noting that Grove Street Games appears to have unfollowed Rockstar Games on Twitter, which suggested that the team behind the Definitive Edition might not be best pleased with the original GTA studio. Now, it certainly seems likely that that’s the case for Grove Street’s CEO.