Take-Two CEO says interest in GTA remasters is "encouraging"

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of GTA 5 publisher Take-Two Interactive, says that interest in potential remasters for the series is "encouraging."

During last night's earnings call (transcribed via The Motley Fool) in which Take-Two discussed GTA 5's ongoing sales success, analyst Eric Handler suggested to Zelnick that "it seems like there is a huge audience of people that have probably never played GTA 4 or any of these other prior GTA games that came up before that." With that in mind, Handler asked "what's your perspective there in terms of thinking about remastering prior games."

In response, Zelnick said that the question was "great and encouraging," but that he was "kind of inclined to leave it more as a statement than a question." He went on to clarify that "any updates on our release schedule will come from Rockstar Games."

While that's definitely not an affirmative answer to the question of GTA remasters (or even remakes), it's interesting that Zelnick decided not to say that Rockstar isn't working on updated versions of its older games, and seems to have left the ball firmly in the developer's court. 

A number of rumors over the past few years, as well as the ongoing success of GTA 5, would suggest that Rockstar is hard at work on GTA 6, with a recent leak pointing to a potential 2023 release. That doesn't, however, mean that a smaller team couldn't be working on updating one of the studio's older games for release on newer hardware, but whatever the future holds for the GTA series, it's likely to be a few years before we see Rockstar's next game.

Can't wait that long? Check out some of the great new games 2021 on their way this year.