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Grove Street Games’ CEO made a tweet that is leading to some fan speculation… and consternation.
Thomas Williamson, CEO of Grove Street Games, made this quizzical tweet yesterday:
We’re working on something BIG.
This may seem to be a nothingburger since it barely says or reveals anything. But in context, this is kind of a big deal.
Williamson rarely uses his Twitter account. Whatever this project is, it was big enough that he wanted to tell the world about it.
What’s The Deal With Grove Street Games?
In fact, you don’t have to scroll down his timeline that long to see another Williamson tweet that’s gone down in infamy:
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.
What is Williamson talking about? This was unmistakably a subliminal tweet about Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition.
When those remasters came out, they were critically panned and subsequently received terrible sales. The lion’s share of the blame for that went to Grove Street Games.
The studio was listed as the main developer behind these ports. They got blamed for the poor recreation of Rockstar’s seminal trilogy.
But what Williamson alleges here is that that criticism is not entirely fair. What he implies is that Grove Street prepared an update to fix the issues in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, but Take-Two chose not to publish the update for years.
When Take-Two finally pushed an update, it came with other updates made by Grove Street’s partner studio Video Games Deluxe. Video Games Deluxe received credit for the overall update, as Grove Street’s name was removed from the opening credits.
We must clarify that Grove Street’s name and credits still appear in the end credits sequence. Williamson may not have known this at the time of the tweet, or he was just caught up with what Take-Two did that he misspoke.
What Does This All Mean Now?
Grove Street Games was originally known as War Drum Studios. Both Grove Street and Video Games Deluxe, now known as Rockstar Australia, have been porting Rockstar’s games to mobile and various other platforms since the late 2000s.
While it seems like there was rancor between Grove Street Games and Take-Two, they could still be working together to this day. In fact, Grove Street and Rockstar Australia could be working on the same project now.
Rockstar Australia is currently looking for a Senior Graphics Programmer with experience in Unreal. If this is the same ‘something big’ project Grove Street is working on, we might actually have something to look forward to.
