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

GTA 4
(Image credit: Rockstar)

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.

Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.