11 ms·

Sorry You Missed It – Inside Rockstar North Blog Shut Down

158 points by tentacleuno 3y ago

DanAtC 3y ago
Toxic. Thankfully archive.org doesn't forget: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insideroc...
- progbits 3y ago
  > Later we developed a bug database but during gta3, the testers would simply print out every bug. Every programmer, level designer and artist had a physical pile of sheets on their desk. If you felt the bug was more easily fixed by someone else you would simply put it on that persons pile. Is this kanban? :D
  - baz00 3y ago
    Could be. If it's not JIRA it's good though!
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Despite the obvious downsides, it's kinda beautiful in its simplicity.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
      As someone who writes copious little todo lists on post-it notes with little check boxes I can X out when they're done... I kinda love this. Not really remote-work friendly, though.
      - hit_to_key 3y ago
        I guess you could achieve the same (or a similar) workflow remotely by using fax machines.
        sdenton4 3y ago
        The uniqueness of the physical object being moved around plays a real role, though. I can also imagine the print out accumulating notes as it gets passed around.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      It's why, when we were full time in the office, I preferred the use of sticky notes. Physical task and progress tracking is great.
      - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
        Make sure to get the extra sticky ones though. We once lost track of quite some bugs because the glue let go and the post-its fell into the air-vents below.
- Tohhou 3y ago
  archive.org does forget, they will take this down as soon as Rockstar tells them to.
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    They show an IIS "404" page for part of one of my sites. It was always served under linux / apache. They have the rest of the site still; i dunno why they wouldn't archive the "Annotated Constitution"
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    IIRC, if even the robots.txt on a site gets changed, it's applied retroactively to the wayback machine. So older versions won't get shown. I'm quite concerned about this for some domains I no longer control.
- quantumwoke 3y ago
  Archive.org can memorialise websites, but if nobody knows the website exists it is lost to memory. I have personally seen this happen when websites disappear from collective consciousness.
  - RunningDroid 3y ago
    Note that the Wayback Machine browser extension and it's auto-archive feature can help with that to some degree: https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-webextension https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-webextens...
Lammy 3y ago
Mirror as of 16:49 PST today https://archive.org/details/insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com https://archive.org/details/insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com
- avipars 3y ago
  How does one do the whole site mirror on the Wayback machine, rather than just saving individual URLS? or just download everything and then upload?
  - Lammy 3y ago
    I do my own local mirrors because I suspect we will wake up one day and find something has happened to Wayback, so I just zipped that up and uploaded it as a "text collection" item. Here's my wget mirror shell function: wget-mirror () { wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent --content-disposition --header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:119.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0" --restrict-file-names="windows,nocontrol" -e robots=off --no-check-certificate "$1" } (Linebreaks added to avoid yuge horizontal scrollbar) I suppose the new hotness would be to stuff the entire thing into a WARC/WACZ, but I haven't looked into that yet since I do my mirrors to a compression-enabled ZFS filesystem already anyway.
alternatetwo 3y ago
I can't even put into words how ridiculous this is. Rockstar truly is a shell of its former self.
flotwig 3y ago
I'm glad someone archived this. I had a feeling this was going to happen when I saw how new the posts were.
- progbits 3y ago
  I have a habit of making sure potentially controversial articles are on archive.org whenever I come across them, just for this exact reason. (It's on my to-do list to automatically mirror all HN submissions as well)
  - theolivenbaum 3y ago
    Is there an API for that? I could only find one to check if a page is available (https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php)
    - theolivenbaum 3y ago
      Nevermind, found it: https://foxrow.com/til-api-for-saving-webpages-in-the-wayback-machine https://foxrow.com/til-api-for-saving-webpages-in-the-waybac... I'll add this to our hn.curiosity.ai server asap, should be pretty easy to automate as we already have post sync implemented there
      - jeffrallen 3y ago
        If you do that, can you also throw $1000 a year to the Archive so they can buy a few hard drives for the stuff you are asking them to store? Thanks!
        avipars 3y ago
        Do they store on film or spinning rust?
        jeffrallen 3y ago
tokai 3y ago
He decides what to spend his energy on. But I would have told them to go pound sand. Nobody should care about burning a bridge to a place like that.
- voidfunc 3y ago
  Depends if you think the people threatening you have connections that could get you blackballed in industry.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    Or if someone of the people the blog could impact are those he considers his friends.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  >> This blog isn't important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I'm winding it down. Sounds voluntary and that he made a judgment call, so apparently the author does care not to burn bridges. We make cost/benefit decisions like this all the time. Don't project your personal calculation onto the author.
  - tokai 3y ago
    I wrote what I would do and acknowledged that the author made his choice. Don't chide others for what they didn't do, while missing the point.
    - zlg_codes 3y ago
      Didn't you know? You're just supposed to magically know what others want and follow it! Don't stray from the collective narrative or echo chamber!
jsiepkes 3y ago
Seems not everyone can appreciate Dutch candidness ;-)
- zoover2020 3y ago
  Wait, the author was Dutch?
  - rvschuilenburg 3y ago
    Indeed he was; https://tweakers.net/geek/215866/ex-technisch-directeur-van-rockstar-north-blogt-over-ontwikkeling-van-gta-games.html https://tweakers.net/geek/215866/ex-technisch-directeur-van-...
V__ 3y ago
Some of those "OGs" must be really full of themselves if they think a few superficial 20-year-old development stories are "ruining the Rockstar mystique".
- Crosseye_Jack 3y ago
  From one of the posts > The Gta team had loads of outspoken characters on it. Most teams were quietly getting on with stuff but this wasn't the way at gta. There were arguments and tempers would flare at times. Maybe colourful people were what was needed to think it was a good idea to make the player a criminal. and IIRC it was around 2018 when we started hearing about what it was like to work at Rockstar, it was basically a boys club, so the news of the OGs thinking 20-year-old development stories are "ruining the Rockstar mystique" doesn't surprise me at all. https://kotaku.com/former-rockstar-designer-says-former-top-executive-grop-1835067943 https://kotaku.com/former-rockstar-designer-says-former-top-... https://www.businessinsider.com/rockstar-games-controversy-explained-red-dead-redemption-2-crunch-culture-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/rockstar-games-controversy-e...
  - agbrrw 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Because they were boys clubs? Or survivor bias and in spite of their demographics? IME the only consistency I noticed among boys clubs is bullies rule and out groups are mocked.
      - asylteltine 3y ago
        From my personal experiences, yes because they were boys clubs. But not because they were men, because they weren’t pc or driven by diversity. It would be great if the “boys club” was 50% women, as long as it wasn’t like a modern Ubisoft dev team that looks like an HRs wet dream. The end result are sterile boring games that aren’t funny or interesting. Remember when you could make jokes?
withinboredom 3y ago
This is why you don't put your real name beside crazy stories of the past.
- nsteel 3y ago
  That surely doesn't matter if the stories are self identifying, like the fun one about the moon size that was on the front page earlier this week: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121193905/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/why-does-moon-change-size-when-you.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231121193905/https://insideroc...
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Yes, but the only people who know who that is are the people who came into his cubicle and asked him for it. Everyone else on earth probably has no clue; even other people who worked there.
    - nsteel 3y ago
      In this case, it's seemingly some co-workers that objected and not random other people on earth. More than those few cubicle visitors knew what this person was working on. And the sniper story is just one story, there are loads more stories with other details that a co-worker could likely use to identify the person. A pseudonym does nothing.
skibz 3y ago
It's disappointing to see that some individuals at Rockstar unironically believe themselves to be rockstars.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
  That’s hilariously sad - if true. Got a source?
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Couldn't be any more delusional than Magic Leap! The synthesis of imagination: Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap at TEDxSarasota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
matheusmoreira 3y ago
What a shame, I was enjoying this blog. What's so controversial about these articles that they had such a problem with it?
yodon 3y ago
Did someone say Streisand Effect?
ajdoingnothing 3y ago
I recall in some interview that Rockstar never wants to show footage of the development process or have any "behind the scenes". Even video interviews at their office is rare (I know of only one). Their reason for it is that it would ruin the "magic" when you play the game. Especially back in the day, you'd pop in the DVD in the PS2, and you'd get to see Liberty/Vice city or San Andreas quickly (— no install required). You rarely see an interview of a producer/developer as well. Honestly, for their current "modern" games, it is understandable. But almost 20 year old games? Come on.
- GTP 3y ago
  I totally agree, and I even think that knowing the lore behind old games helps in keeping the interest alive.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  What a weird position for them to take. I've A) never felt BTS stuff ruined "the magic" of a game, and B) found Rockstar's games all that "magical" (well, other than RDR). I mean, prior to GTA4, their games were a clunky mess.
splatzone 3y ago
I wonder what stories they don't want told
- avipars 3y ago
  Too much about people shooting the moon?
Obscurity4340 3y ago
What is the drug scene at RockStar like? Does work imitate life?
scrlk 3y ago
Disappointing to see R* take this course of action. Contrast this with Valve's recent Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto
avipars 3y ago
Real shame, at least it's on the Way-Back Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231123011845/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231123011845/https://insideroc...
mottosso 3y ago
Streisand effect in action, can't wait to read this now. :) https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insideroc...
fmeyer 3y ago
I understand, there's always more to a story than what a single person recalls. However, often people want to control the narrative of what transpired in projects and want to have a favorable recounting of events unfolded. I've experienced a similar situation when I wanted to write a post about a nice project. Someone who wasn't involved in the work took offense (perhaps because they weren't acknowledged?) and used politics to suppress the text. It's quite unfortunate but happens a lot.
jdubz79 3y ago
So rockstar devs are whiny entitled lil bitches, got it ;) I stopped playing their shitty online games. Everything since San Andreas has been complete shit anyways.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  GTA 4 is still my favourite out of all of them.
garaetjjte 3y ago
noclip did made interesting documentary about DMA Design, it also has segment on GTA3: https://youtu.be/Ev7FqNa5rD0?t=3284 https://youtu.be/Ev7FqNa5rD0?t=3284

158 points by tentacleuno 3y ago

Toxic. Thankfully archive.org doesn't forget: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insideroc...

progbits 3y ago
> Later we developed a bug database but during gta3, the testers would simply print out every bug. Every programmer, level designer and artist had a physical pile of sheets on their desk. If you felt the bug was more easily fixed by someone else you would simply put it on that persons pile. Is this kanban? :D
- baz00 3y ago
  Could be. If it's not JIRA it's good though!
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Despite the obvious downsides, it's kinda beautiful in its simplicity.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    As someone who writes copious little todo lists on post-it notes with little check boxes I can X out when they're done... I kinda love this. Not really remote-work friendly, though.
    - hit_to_key 3y ago
      I guess you could achieve the same (or a similar) workflow remotely by using fax machines.
      - sdenton4 3y ago
        The uniqueness of the physical object being moved around plays a real role, though. I can also imagine the print out accumulating notes as it gets passed around.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    It's why, when we were full time in the office, I preferred the use of sticky notes. Physical task and progress tracking is great.
    - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
      Make sure to get the extra sticky ones though. We once lost track of quite some bugs because the glue let go and the post-its fell into the air-vents below.
Tohhou 3y ago
archive.org does forget, they will take this down as soon as Rockstar tells them to.
- h2odragon 3y ago
  They show an IIS "404" page for part of one of my sites. It was always served under linux / apache. They have the rest of the site still; i dunno why they wouldn't archive the "Annotated Constitution"
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  IIRC, if even the robots.txt on a site gets changed, it's applied retroactively to the wayback machine. So older versions won't get shown. I'm quite concerned about this for some domains I no longer control.
quantumwoke 3y ago
Archive.org can memorialise websites, but if nobody knows the website exists it is lost to memory. I have personally seen this happen when websites disappear from collective consciousness.
- RunningDroid 3y ago
  Note that the Wayback Machine browser extension and it's auto-archive feature can help with that to some degree: https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-webextension https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-webextens...

Lammy 3y ago

Mirror as of 16:49 PST today https://archive.org/details/insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com https://archive.org/details/insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com

avipars 3y ago
How does one do the whole site mirror on the Wayback machine, rather than just saving individual URLS? or just download everything and then upload?
- Lammy 3y ago
  I do my own local mirrors because I suspect we will wake up one day and find something has happened to Wayback, so I just zipped that up and uploaded it as a "text collection" item. Here's my wget mirror shell function: wget-mirror () { wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent --content-disposition --header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:119.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0" --restrict-file-names="windows,nocontrol" -e robots=off --no-check-certificate "$1" } (Linebreaks added to avoid yuge horizontal scrollbar) I suppose the new hotness would be to stuff the entire thing into a WARC/WACZ, but I haven't looked into that yet since I do my mirrors to a compression-enabled ZFS filesystem already anyway.

alternatetwo 3y ago

I can't even put into words how ridiculous this is. Rockstar truly is a shell of its former self.

flotwig 3y ago

I'm glad someone archived this. I had a feeling this was going to happen when I saw how new the posts were.

progbits 3y ago
I have a habit of making sure potentially controversial articles are on archive.org whenever I come across them, just for this exact reason. (It's on my to-do list to automatically mirror all HN submissions as well)
- theolivenbaum 3y ago
  Is there an API for that? I could only find one to check if a page is available (https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php)
  - theolivenbaum 3y ago
    Nevermind, found it: https://foxrow.com/til-api-for-saving-webpages-in-the-wayback-machine https://foxrow.com/til-api-for-saving-webpages-in-the-waybac... I'll add this to our hn.curiosity.ai server asap, should be pretty easy to automate as we already have post sync implemented there
    - jeffrallen 3y ago
      If you do that, can you also throw $1000 a year to the Archive so they can buy a few hard drives for the stuff you are asking them to store? Thanks!
      - avipars 3y ago
        Do they store on film or spinning rust?
        jeffrallen 3y ago

tokai 3y ago

He decides what to spend his energy on. But I would have told them to go pound sand. Nobody should care about burning a bridge to a place like that.

voidfunc 3y ago
Depends if you think the people threatening you have connections that could get you blackballed in industry.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  Or if someone of the people the blog could impact are those he considers his friends.
skeeter2020 3y ago
>> This blog isn't important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I'm winding it down. Sounds voluntary and that he made a judgment call, so apparently the author does care not to burn bridges. We make cost/benefit decisions like this all the time. Don't project your personal calculation onto the author.
- tokai 3y ago
  I wrote what I would do and acknowledged that the author made his choice. Don't chide others for what they didn't do, while missing the point.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Didn't you know? You're just supposed to magically know what others want and follow it! Don't stray from the collective narrative or echo chamber!

jsiepkes 3y ago

Seems not everyone can appreciate Dutch candidness ;-)

zoover2020 3y ago
Wait, the author was Dutch?
- rvschuilenburg 3y ago
  Indeed he was; https://tweakers.net/geek/215866/ex-technisch-directeur-van-rockstar-north-blogt-over-ontwikkeling-van-gta-games.html https://tweakers.net/geek/215866/ex-technisch-directeur-van-...

V__ 3y ago

Some of those "OGs" must be really full of themselves if they think a few superficial 20-year-old development stories are "ruining the Rockstar mystique".

Crosseye_Jack 3y ago
From one of the posts > The Gta team had loads of outspoken characters on it. Most teams were quietly getting on with stuff but this wasn't the way at gta. There were arguments and tempers would flare at times. Maybe colourful people were what was needed to think it was a good idea to make the player a criminal. and IIRC it was around 2018 when we started hearing about what it was like to work at Rockstar, it was basically a boys club, so the news of the OGs thinking 20-year-old development stories are "ruining the Rockstar mystique" doesn't surprise me at all. https://kotaku.com/former-rockstar-designer-says-former-top-executive-grop-1835067943 https://kotaku.com/former-rockstar-designer-says-former-top-... https://www.businessinsider.com/rockstar-games-controversy-explained-red-dead-redemption-2-crunch-culture-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/rockstar-games-controversy-e...
- agbrrw 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Because they were boys clubs? Or survivor bias and in spite of their demographics? IME the only consistency I noticed among boys clubs is bullies rule and out groups are mocked.
    - asylteltine 3y ago
      From my personal experiences, yes because they were boys clubs. But not because they were men, because they weren’t pc or driven by diversity. It would be great if the “boys club” was 50% women, as long as it wasn’t like a modern Ubisoft dev team that looks like an HRs wet dream. The end result are sterile boring games that aren’t funny or interesting. Remember when you could make jokes?

withinboredom 3y ago

This is why you don't put your real name beside crazy stories of the past.

nsteel 3y ago
That surely doesn't matter if the stories are self identifying, like the fun one about the moon size that was on the front page earlier this week: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121193905/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/why-does-moon-change-size-when-you.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231121193905/https://insideroc...
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Yes, but the only people who know who that is are the people who came into his cubicle and asked him for it. Everyone else on earth probably has no clue; even other people who worked there.
  - nsteel 3y ago
    In this case, it's seemingly some co-workers that objected and not random other people on earth. More than those few cubicle visitors knew what this person was working on. And the sniper story is just one story, there are loads more stories with other details that a co-worker could likely use to identify the person. A pseudonym does nothing.

skibz 3y ago

It's disappointing to see that some individuals at Rockstar unironically believe themselves to be rockstars.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
That’s hilariously sad - if true. Got a source?
DonHopkins 3y ago
Couldn't be any more delusional than Magic Leap! The synthesis of imagination: Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap at TEDxSarasota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

matheusmoreira 3y ago

What a shame, I was enjoying this blog. What's so controversial about these articles that they had such a problem with it?

yodon 3y ago

Did someone say Streisand Effect?

ajdoingnothing 3y ago

I recall in some interview that Rockstar never wants to show footage of the development process or have any "behind the scenes". Even video interviews at their office is rare (I know of only one). Their reason for it is that it would ruin the "magic" when you play the game. Especially back in the day, you'd pop in the DVD in the PS2, and you'd get to see Liberty/Vice city or San Andreas quickly (— no install required). You rarely see an interview of a producer/developer as well. Honestly, for their current "modern" games, it is understandable. But almost 20 year old games? Come on.

GTP 3y ago
I totally agree, and I even think that knowing the lore behind old games helps in keeping the interest alive.
moron4hire 3y ago
What a weird position for them to take. I've A) never felt BTS stuff ruined "the magic" of a game, and B) found Rockstar's games all that "magical" (well, other than RDR). I mean, prior to GTA4, their games were a clunky mess.

splatzone 3y ago

I wonder what stories they don't want told

avipars 3y ago
Too much about people shooting the moon?

Obscurity4340 3y ago

What is the drug scene at RockStar like? Does work imitate life?

scrlk 3y ago

Disappointing to see R* take this course of action. Contrast this with Valve's recent Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto

avipars 3y ago

Real shame, at least it's on the Way-Back Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231123011845/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231123011845/https://insideroc...

mottosso 3y ago

Streisand effect in action, can't wait to read this now. :) https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231121200115/https://insideroc...

fmeyer 3y ago

I understand, there's always more to a story than what a single person recalls. However, often people want to control the narrative of what transpired in projects and want to have a favorable recounting of events unfolded. I've experienced a similar situation when I wanted to write a post about a nice project. Someone who wasn't involved in the work took offense (perhaps because they weren't acknowledged?) and used politics to suppress the text. It's quite unfortunate but happens a lot.

jdubz79 3y ago

So rockstar devs are whiny entitled lil bitches, got it ;) I stopped playing their shitty online games. Everything since San Andreas has been complete shit anyways.

tentacleuno 3y ago
GTA 4 is still my favourite out of all of them.

garaetjjte 3y ago

noclip did made interesting documentary about DMA Design, it also has segment on GTA3: https://youtu.be/Ev7FqNa5rD0?t=3284 https://youtu.be/Ev7FqNa5rD0?t=3284