GTA 3's litter proved so divisive among devs that San Andreas' streets were cleaned up after a tiff about trash, but the code for it still snuck into Manhunt

Apparently the bits of litter you can find blowing down streets and being pulled along by cars in GTA 3 were a bit of a controversial topic back in the day. Like, to the point where the developer that added these rogue newspapers and leaves to Liberty City ended up having to take them out of GTA San Andreas after losing a detritus debate within the Rockstar team.

This is according to ex-Rockstar Technical Director Obbe Vermeij, who served in that role on both of those entries in the series before eventually leaving the studio in 2009 following GTA 4’s release, and says he was the very developer responsible for the litter’s code coming to be.

“The streets of GTA 3 looked too clean, so I added litter,” Vermeij explained in a tweet revealing the truth about the trash, “It is a single rectangle that occasionally moves with the wind. It can also be dragged along by passing cars. The artists created four textures for it. Two newspapers and two leaves.”

After adding that the same litter made it into Vice City with one tweak in order to add-in flyers related to, er, a certain mission, once you’ve completed it, the developer revealed that it didn’t pop up in the series’ next entry because it apparently caused a minor rift between members of the development.

“Not everyone on the team liked the litter,” he recalled, “I removed it for San Andreas because I eventually lost the argument.” However, it seems Vermeij got the last laugh, revealing that some GTA developers helped out in the final months of development on another Rockstar project, 2003’s Manhunt, and that he “added the same litter code” to that game.

Hey, if you’re going to put effort into making a thing that adds to people’s immersion, good on you for sticking to your guns. Even if, as Vermeij also pointed out in the post, his litter could “can go through the map in some cases”, due to it “only [detecting] the height of the ground at the landing location”.

In addition to having now told us all about trash, Vermeij also recently gave his thoughts on GTA 6, saying that he reckons Rockstar will have had a tough time making as big a step forward for the series moving from GTA 5 to 6 as it did between older entries.