Rockstar quietly drops Grove Street Games' name from GTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition
All you had to do etc.
- The latest slew of updates to GTA Definitive edition seems to have fixed major issues with the release
- However, it also sees port developer Grove Street Games excised from opening screens
- The developer has also disappeared from storefront listings, replaced by its original name, War Drum
The original Grand Theft Auto trilogy is arguably one of the most formative series in gaming. Whether it's kickstarting moral panics or pushing the boundaries of what was possible on PC or console, these were landmark releases. So, small wonder that the widely panned remasters by Grove Street Games and Rockstar are still reverberating with aftershocks to this day.
In particular, as noted by perennial Twitter (still not calling it X) creator SynthPotato, the reaction seems to have spurred a bit of a course correction a few years down the line. While recent updates have overhauled aspects such as graphics, character models and controls, more pertinently, it's also seen the removal of Grove Street Games' branding from the opening splash screens.
Grove Street is, of course, the developer behind the fairly average ports of the original trilogy to mobile, which, while not exactly stellar, were still a fairly impressive technical achievement. High hopes for their take on the original trilogy were seemingly dashed, and a few years down the line Rockstar seem content to begin minimising Grove Street's name on the most up-to-date versions of the Definitive Trilogy.
Speaking personally, I don't necessarily think that this is because Rockstar is necessarily looking to cut out Grove Street Games fully - there were after all a lot of cooks in the kitchen for the disastrous Definitive Trilogy. But I do think it indicates that development has long since gone all ship of Theseus, especially with Grove Street moving onto other projects in the meantime.
A shame as well given how high hopes were for this release initially and the pedigree of the GTA series as a whole, and that these are currently the most widely available versions on platforms like Netflix.
In contrast, another longtime port developer, Feral Interactive, recently announced the long-awaited mobile version of Total War: Empire. Feral, while they did receive some flak for their own remastered debut with Total War: Rome, are still closely linked to Creative Assembly for whom they've ported numerous releases to iOS and Android.
