A viral Reddit post shows the GTA 3 dev team had only 24 people. Here's why modern multi-million dollar AAA studios with thousands of devs are getting roasted.
Looking at the recently resurfaced photo of the GTA 3 dev team from 2001 on Reddit is honestly a massive reality check. I counted 24 guys. Yep, just two dozen sweaty devs fueled by caffeine and pure spite, hard-coding a game that literally birthed the modern open-world genre. You look at today’s AAA landscape—where thousands of devs grind for a decade just to drop an unoptimized, buggy mess—and you can't help but laugh (and cry a little).
Some legend dug up a picture of the Rockstar team circa 2001. Around 24 people. Back then, they didn't have massive asset libraries or fancy ai tools to do the heavy lifting. They were bashing their keyboards, fighting with primitive engines, and squeezing every ounce of juice out of the PS2's microscopic RAM.
But here’s the most unhinged part: Exactly one year later, they dropped Vice City. One single year to roll out a massive sequel where the mute protagonist finally speaks, voiced by the absolute chad Ray Liotta. Fast forward to today, and we've been waiting over a decade just to get a trailer for GTA 6.
Naturally, the post blew up with 7.5k upvotes, and the comment section turned into a massive therapy session for nostalgic gamers.
1. The "Those Were the Days" Crowd: People were reminiscing about when sequels dropped faster than a speedrunner in any% category. One dude pointed out that even Oblivion—a massive RPG—was built by a core team of only 40-50 people.
2. The AAA Roast Session: Gamers went straight for the throat of modern megacorporations. Thousands of employees, infinite budgets, 10+ years of dev time, and they still launch games so broken that you literally need a game booster designed to reduce game ping and stabilize gaming networks for players around the world just to avoid rubberbanding into the nearest wall.
3. The Indie Defenders: Some rational folks pointed out that the 24-man dream team isn't dead; they're just called Indie devs now. Look at Vampire Survivors—made by a tiny team but addictive as hell. The issue is that the market is so flooded with asset flips and P2W gacha garbage that finding a hidden indie gem is pure RNG.
What’s the takeaway for us devs? Back in 2001, extreme hardware and headcount limitations forced developers to be smart. You couldn't just throw raw computing power at bad code; you had to optimize the hell out of it and focus on what actually mattered: the core gameplay loop.
Today, studios rely on brute force. Throw more bodies, bigger budgets, and bloated 4K textures at the problem while the actual gameplay feels hollow. Maybe the industry needs to stop treating game dev like a factory assembly line and get back to the tryhard, basement-coder mentality that made games actually fun to play.
Source: Reddit
