A former employee at Rockstar North has revealed that the Grand Theft Auto franchise nearly saw an entry set in Tokyo, Japan, which would have seen an external studio in Japan helm the project.
Speaking with GamesHub, Obbe Vermeiji, who served as technical director on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto IV, revealed that the game would have used Rocktar’s code, but things fell apart and the franchise returned to its US setting.
There were desires [to take the series outside of the US], but it’s like talking about alternative projects at Rockstar when you really start thinking about it. We had ideas about GTA games in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, and Istanbul. Tokyo almost actually happened. Another studio in Japan were going to do it, take our code and do GTA: Tokyo. But then that didn’t happen in the end.
It’s just not realistic. I would love it, and if games still took a year to make, then yeah sure, you can have a little fun, but you’re not going to get that when there’s a GTA every 12 years. You’re not going to set it in a new location. You don’t really need to either because the technology changes so much. Nobody is going to say that they’re not going to play GTA VI because they’ve already played Vice City. That doesn’t make sense. It’s completely different.
He concluded that GTA is likely to remain “stuck in this loop of about five American cities,” stating that we can probably expect to revisit the likes of New York and LA or Las Vegas down the line.
Rockstar Games is currently working on the next chapter in the franchise, the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI, which is pencilled in for release in November 2026. The narrative centre on criminals Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos and takes place in Leonida, a fictional US state heavily influenced by Florida, as well as the Miami-inspired Vice City, which has already been featured in the franchise.
Back in September 2022, the game was the subject of a major leak that revealed work-in-progress footage of GTA VI, posted by a hacker later identified as as 17-year-old male from Oxfordshire and member of Lapsus$, who City of London Police arrested on September 22, 2022.
Rockstar has stated previously that GTA VI will ‘set creative benchmarks‘ for the long-running franchise, and more recently, animations for the upcoming crime epic appeared on the demo reel for an employee.
[Source – GamesHub via VGC]
AloJapan.com