IGN’s Craig Harris has posted an interview with Rockstar Leeds President Gordon Hall, about the development of Chinatown Wars.
Even before we wrote one line of code we had laid in stone that the game MUST run at 30 frames per second. What we did do many, many times is go over the code, hand optimising every line we could. The amount of raw machine code in this game is just unheard of nowadays. We were busy throwing away page after page of traditional code in favour of the machine’s raw assembly language.