Decades before GTA 6, Rockstar Games was considering getting a Japanese studio to develop the now-abandoned GTA: Tokyo, according to a former technical director on the series, but he reckons that there's "so much Americana inherent in the IP" that it might not have worked, anyway.

It sounds like we were so close – yet so far – from getting GTA: Tokyo. A trademark for the title was filed by Rockstar owner Take-Two Interactive back in late 2003, after the release of Vice City, but was later listed as abandoned in 2008. Over the years, we've found out the occasional bits of information about it – one anonymous former Rockstar dev allegedly claimed that the scrapping of the idea ultimately "just came down to logistics," with the tasks of mapping out the city and nailing the "cultural satire in terms of what could possibly work in a fitting narrative way in that city" proving rather difficult.

Obbe Vermeij, a former technical director who left Rockstar in 2009, previously indicated that the game "almost actually happened," with another studio in Japan set to handle development, but that the idea of setting a game in "some left-field location for novelty" wouldn't work. Vermeij has now elaborated on this further in a new interview with Rock Paper Shotgun.

Vermeij admits that the information was "above my pay grade," but that "there were negotiations with studios, and I have a name, but I'm not gonna say it, because then it becomes like a bigger thing than it is, and I'll probably get it wrong, and I don't know how far the negotiations were, how serious it was.

Source link