PC version of GTA V ‘was planned from day one’

Rockstar has said that the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V was part of the plan from the beginning and that development of the SKU began early in the process.

We were always going to bring GTA 5 to PC,” a group of Rockstar North developers told PC Gamer. We planned from day one for a PC build and we made technical decisions based off the fact that we would be doing a PC version of the game.

While we started development of the PC version quite early, we decided to focus the bulk of our attention on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions first in order to push that as far as we possibly could before turning our attention to the PS4 and Xbox One versions, and then using the shared architecture underpinning the new consoles to help ourselves ramp up into the PC version and push the game as far as we possibly could knowing we would have the opportunity to make the game look and feel better than it ever has.”

GTA V was officially announced on October 25th 2011 and released on PS3 and Xbox 360 on September 17th 2013. The PC SKU, however, was not announced until June 10th 2014.

In the same interview the developer also touched upon the team that has been working on the PC release.

The team working on the PC version of the game was a large percentage of the original Grand Theft Auto team augmented by members of the Rockstar studios that specialise in PC development,” it added. These were the developers who had worked on the PC versions of GTA 4, Max Payne 3 and LA Noire. Many of them are Rockstar veterans.

Since the latest round of consoles have an architecture similar to PC, this is also the same team that worked on the PS4 and Xbox One builds of the game. Essentially, we pulled the right people from all the Rockstar studios to create a global development team with the deepest base of knowledge of both GTA and PC development. It really was a team effort to deliver something of the highest quality as possible in every area from visuals, audio to tuning gameplay feeling and features.”

Grand Theft Auto V will be released on the PC tomorrow (Tuesday April 14th).