GTA: Vice City's Moon Easter Egg Was Added To Settle An Argument

thegamer.com:

The Grand Theft Auto series is full of weird and wonderful Easter eggs, ranging from movie references to spooky apparitions, but you'll struggle to find one stranger or mysterious than the interchangable moon from GTA: Vice City.

Grabbing a sniper rifle and firing off a few rounds into the moon causes the celestial object to change in size, growing to absurdly large proportions before eventually shrinking and returning to its original size. It's very strange, seemed to reference absolutely nothing, and had no official explanation as to why this feature was included until now.

First shared by Kotaku, a Rockstar North developer called Obbe Vermeij lifted the lid on Vice City's weird moon Easter egg in a now-deleted blog post. Thankfully, nothing is ever truly deleted from the Internet, and a trip to the Wayback Machine has allowed us to see that th4e ability to change the size of the moon was added in order to settle an argument at Rockstar.

According to Vermeij, artists approached him with a texture for the moon, and he placed it in the sky as instructed. A few days later, several artists came back to him asking him to alter the size of the moon, though two wanted it to be smaller and two wanted it to be larger. Vermeij explains that this argument "went on a bit", and that he suggested making the size of the moon changeable in the actual game to stop all the arguments and let them come to their own conclusion in their own time.

GTA has a bunch of iconic Easter eggs, with more added in every update, but hopefully, Vice City's moon is the only one that manifested as a result of four people bickering with each other.

While working on the game, those playing could use the sniper to shoot the moon and change the size, helping