December 19th, 2012

From the Archives: Behind the Scenes of Vice City and Rockstar North's website

Published at 3:28 AM PST

As part of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's 10th Anniversary celebrations, Rockstar is digging into the archives to show some rare Behind the Scenes footage from the games development. The footage comes from exclusive interactive kiosks which were installed at London's Design Museum when the game was honored as an annual design award nominee for ‘biggest contribution to design in 2002’. The kiosks focused on Animation, Sound, and City Design architecture.

Animation has been revealed today, with Sound and City Design to follow:

Included in the embedded display above:

  • “Motion Capture” - a rare video showing a cutscene between Kent Paul and Tommy Vercetti going from motion-capture through to 3D model wireframe to finished product.
  • “Sketch Book” - a progression of original character sketches through to final models and now-iconic illustrations of such folks as Lance Vance, Avery Carrington, Ken Rosenberg and more.
  • “Tommy Moves” - a set of clips showing the genesis of Tommy’s animations whether jumping into a Comet sports car, dive kicking a biker off his chopper or running with a chainsaw...

Most of this footage and content was once housed on Rockstar North's homepage; up until around March this year when it underwent an update which removed the interactive component - and we luckily have an archived copy:

In fact, we uploaded the majority of the video footage to our YouTube account in the early days of RockstarWatch:

The 10th Anniversary celebrations are doing a good job of showing just how much Rockstar, their games and the community has changed over time.
Can you believe it's been 10 years?