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. I mean, it was definitely serious. It was the plan. But I don't know how close it got to actually happening."
According to Vermeij, Tokyo's story likely would have been set in the present day, or at the very least, a time "not too [far off] – it wasn't, like, sort of the medieval era in Japanese history, or anything. It was definitely not like that." With that said, though, "it definitely had samurai swords in it," he says. Oh, what could have been.
Tokyo wasn't the only city that Rockstar considered doing something with, according to Vermeij. Paris, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Istanbul were frequently suggested internally, he says, but he muses that perhaps a full GTA game set outside of the US might not work very well anyway.
"We always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else," he explains. "You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider's perspective. But that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really have worked in the same way elsewhere."
That's not to say he wouldn't have liked a Japanese GTA to happen, though. On the conception of the idea, Vermeij wonders if Rockstar co-founders Dan and Sam Houser "were a little annoyed that GTA wasn't as big in Japan as they thought it deserved to be," and therefore "it kind of made sense to get a local studio to do it." Regardless, though, he thinks "it would have been really cool, because you know, a GTA made by somebody else in Japanese culture – that's something I would probably play."
