Sorry You Missed It – Inside Rockstar North Blog Shut Down | Hacker News Reader

Sorry You Missed It – Inside Rockstar North Blog Shut Down

insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com

158 pointstentacleuno131 comments

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

> 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

Could be. If it's not JIRA it's good though!

Despite the obvious downsides, it's kinda beautiful in its simplicity.

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.

I guess you could achieve the same (or a similar) workflow remotely by using fax machines.

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.

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.

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.

archive.org does forget, they will take this down as soon as Rockstar tells them to.

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"

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.

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.

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-webextens...

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.

I totally agree, and I even think that knowing the lore behind old games helps in keeping the interest alive.

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.

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

That’s hilariously sad - if true. Got a source?

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

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

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".

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-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/rockstar-games-controversy-e...

Another part of the "rockstar mystique" is who received the billions of dollars in "internal royalties" that has been diverted from the revenue stream over the years. Wikipedia mentions a legal dispute between 3 people (2 Housers and Benzies) splitting royalties, so I assume that normal employees see little to none of it. The secretive weirdness and unfairness of the whole thing convinced me not to own their parent company stock (take-two interactive).

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

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

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.

Depends if you think the people threatening you have connections that could get you blackballed in industry.

Or if someone of the people the blog could impact are those he considers his friends.

>> 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.

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.

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!

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

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?

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.

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

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)

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)

Nevermind, found it: 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

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!

Do they store on film or spinning rust?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117298

> It's on my to-do list to automatically mirror all HN submissions as well

I recently emailed that suggestion to dang as well - both Web Archive and Archive Today (aka archive.is/ws/ph/wh/whatever), as the former is more likely to stick around and the latter is better than 12ft at bypassing paywalls. It's on their to-do list as well.

I'm a huge side project procrastinator, but if this comes after HN performance improvements on dang's to-do list I feel like I might beat them to it ;)

Keep in mind that the website author has the ability to delete content from archive.org (and I've seen a pretty significant website for a community I'm a part of do so when it shut down, ostensibly for "GDPR compliance" reasons.)

All it takes is a robot.txt file with the right entries in it.

We need something like archive.org, but which reflects the wishes of historians and preservationists, not paranoid website owners.

Do we need that? I feel like the right to be forgotten needs to be protected too. I’m already uncomfortable with the extent to which everything I write can live forever

Which is why your alias is wisely zztop44 and not JamesWilliamsPattersonChicago84.

The right to be forgotten is a very recent invention and very much not universally agreed upon.

archive.org will bend to censors very easily unfortunately.

Real shame, at least it's on the Way-Back Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231123011845/https://insideroc...

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

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

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://insideroc...

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.

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.

Seems not everyone can appreciate Dutch candidness ;-)

Wait, the author was Dutch?

Indeed he was; https://tweakers.net/geek/215866/ex-technisch-directeur-van-...

Did someone say Streisand Effect?

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.

I wonder what stories they don't want told

Too much about people shooting the moon?

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

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

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.

GTA 4 is still my favourite out of all of them.

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