The boss of GTA Trilogy developer Grove Street Games has spoken out on social media to blast the removal of “primary developers from credits” following the game’s major update this week for PC and consoles.
Tuesday’s GTA Trilogy patch finally brought over fixes from the games’ better-received mobile version (worked on by another studio, Video Games Deluxe) such as a Classic Lighting mode which restores the look of the games’ original versions, plus improvements to character models and other visual tweaks.
The update also aligned the GTA Trilogy’s opening splash screen to that of the mobile version, with Rockstar simply mentioned as GTA’s developer.
It’s this change which Grove Street Games’ Thomas Williamson appears to be reacting to now on social media.
“Speaking entire hypothetically,” Williamson wrote on X, “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.”
As pointed out by fans of the GTA Trilogy, however, the games’ credits have not changed and Grove Street Games and its staff are still listed as before.
Ensuring staff who work on games receive proper accreditation has long been a thorny issue, with Rockstar itself in the past heavily criticised for leaving staff members out of credits. Here, however, Williamson’s comments – hypothetical as they are – appear to be based on misleading media reports that suggested Grove Street Games was no longer credited at all.
Williamson previously made headlines when GTA Trilogy first arrived, riddled with bugs, performance issues and code for the illicit Hot Coffee sex mini-game, to comment on the enormous wave of backlash against the game.
“It’s so fun to see players out there really enjoying what we’ve put together for them,” Williamson wrote at the time, as Rockstar itself apologised, offered a free game to PC owners, and pulled GTA Trilogy offline for days. “I’m honestly enjoying this unparalleled level of scrutiny on our studio. Today we are celebrating our monumental project launch, while we work on updates. :-)”