Former GTA technical director Obbe Vermeij has revealed that Rockstar was trying to get GTA online play off the ground as far back as GTA 3 in 2001.

GTA Online is a behemoth now with Rockstar making enough cash from 10-year-olds buying Shark Cards that the studio probably didn’t even need to make GTA 6. However, it took until GTA 5 for Rockstar to really nail down the online game, with GTA 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 being pretty simple in comparison.

But according to Obbe Vermeij – who worked at Rockstar from the Space Station Silicon Valley days in 1998 until the secret best GTA game, Chinatown Wars in 2009 – both Rockstar “North and NY had wanted to make this happen since the GTA 3 days.”

“For GTA3, I prototyped a simple deathmatch. Players could kill each other, drag each other from cars, and respawn around the city,” he says, adding, “It was promising, but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts working over [the] network etc. We decided to cut the effort.”

Vermeij said that the studio tried again the year following with GTA Vice City, saying that Rockstar hired network coders for the role, but it was cut once again due to deadlines.

But for the final PS2-era game, San Andreas, Vermeij says, “we didn’t even try… not worth the effort.” And then the Xbox 360 era was the one where Rockstar nailed it, with GTA 4 having an online mode in the same vein as the proposed ones for the PS2 games. Vermeij gives props to the “4 programmers and several level designers” who worked “full-time” to make it work.

Speaking of former Rockstar devs, Leslie Benzies’ new game Mindseye isn’t doing so hot.