According to a new report speaking with former developers of Rockstar Games, the company had several GTA titles that never saw the light of day. Locations such as Tokyo were considered. The settings of these cancelled games ranged vastly compared to what we’ve seen over the past two decades.
GTA Tokyo
The capital of Japan is hugely popular. According to sources that Time Extension spoke with, Sam Houser reportedly was “pretty caught up with the Tokyo scene”. This was because members of Rockstar such as Houser were doing a lot of travel to the city for promotion of GTA III. The game had just launched and “Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo was one of the cities being considered at the time.”
Unfortunately, the idea was short lived due to how long it would take to get there and back. Below is the full reason given by a source familiar with the plans.
“It seemed like a cool, interesting city to do it in, but at the end of the day, it just came down to logistics. Getting the research team out there long enough to map the city and just the cultural satire in terms of what could possibly work in a fitting narrative way in that city. Making those things connect was a little tough and we thought it was just cooler to stick with the cities that were introduced in Grand Theft Auto 1.”
A source
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a potential GTA Tokyo game. Take-Two Interactive trademarked 10 GTA things which included GTA Tokyo. These were done just ahead of GTA San Andreas’ launch. The world and the internet is a different place from back then and that’s one of the reasons why we know about some of these things. Time Extension go onto say that another source talked about this:
Much like domains, you would file it just to keep squatters away from it. And as we were considering what cities to do, sometimes we’d file a trademark with a different understanding of how the internet worked. You wouldn’t have the same internet sleuths who would jump in and say ‘Hey, look what they just did. Look what they just did.’ So they’re a lot more careful about that these days. However, those were mostly just to protect from domain squatters.”
A source
GTA Advance
Whilst we did get a GTA game for the Game Boy Advance, there was a version being made by a different studio: Clawfish Interactive. However, the studio dissolved about a year or so after a deal was struck. We did learn about this game several years ago but a Rockstar source has now shared some info with Time Extension on why it was cancelled. This is what they had to say about Clawfish Interactive’s GTA GBA game:
“We were building out this game. Vice City was in development at the time, so we were under lock and key. So we weren’t able to share a lot of assets back and forth for story beats. We didn’t let these guys know that we had helicopters all of a sudden. You can fly. We have boats and all that other stuff. It was just let’s build an extension of GTA 3 and we’ll make it a side story so that we don’t trip over anyone else’s narrative.
Ex-Rockstar developer
Every month for a year, Clawfish would send over what they’ve done with the game in that time period for Rockstar to take a look at. They’d typically take about 10 days. There was an requirement it would be of a certain quality and completion. If Rockstar were happy, they’d get a bill from Clawfish and Rockstar would then pay it. This funded the studio for the next period.
The Rockstar Games source revealed Rockstar was not receiving a bill from Clawfish directly but rather a “factoring company”. Rockstar were reportedly unhappy with this. That was not the only thing they were not pleased with. Rockstar’s quality criteria was not being met. At this point, Clawfish were in major amounts of debt to the factoring company. The studio then shut down.
You can learn more about this and other cancelled GTA games here. Time Extension have some some really great work on Rockstar Games recently. We’d urge you to check out their interview with one of the designers of the iconic Rockstar Games logo. It shed light on how it was made. We covered this report here. Plus, sources told them last month that Rockstar canned a DS version of Bully and a GBA port of The Warriors.
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