By Digital-preservation specialist Andrew Borman keeps turning up buried treasure inside The Strong National Museum’s newly acquired Volition papers, yet every fresh scrap still startles him. Case in point: in 2007 the now-closed Saints Row studio was apparently shadowing Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar with unusual intensity.
“I didn’t anticipate running across an October 2007 conference-room clip on MiniDV,” Borman said on Bluesky, pairing the remark with a snapshot of a slide that asks, “if GTA slips, will we nudge the SR2 launch?”
“Kinda fascinating to learn that Volition was tracking GTA this closely,” he adds.
The team—which ceased operations after three decades in 2023—harbored a long-running fixation. Back in 2003, it hoped to build an open-world caper project named Underground, only to have marketing shrug it off after concluding its promise didn’t hold a candle to GTA 3.
Borman tells me that although he hasn’t screened every minute of the company-wide Saints Row 2 session, “it looks like their fear was that GTA 4 might slide past its April 2008 [window] and crash into the fall period, wrapping around Saints Row 2.” (Grand Theft Auto IV shipped that October after all.)
“They weren’t convinced the slip would actually occur,” Borman adds, “yet huddled with THQ just in case and sat tight until Rockstar revealed its next move, ready to reschedule Saints Row 2 if necessary.
“The other worry was that if Grand Theft Auto drifted past Saint Row 2’s launch, the mere anticipation of GTA 4 would overpower their own launch window. The group also monitored any downloadable add-ons, fretting that those packs might collide with their marketing beat.”
“I suspect a comparable hunt is on for GTA 6 right now,” Borman finishes, “not just the race to get ahead of its release, but also gauging the chaos it will unleash on the market once it finally drops.”