Unreleased GTA Games Discussed By Ex-Rockstar Games Devs In Report

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According to a new report speaking with former Rockstar Games developers, the company had several GTA titles that never saw the light of day. Places like Tokyo were considered. The settings of these canceled games varied widely compared to what we have seen over the past two decades.

GTA Tokyo

The capital of Japan is very popular. According to sources that Time Dilation spoke to, Sam Houser was said to be “quite taken with the Tokyo scene”. This was because members of Rockstar such as Houser traveled extensively to the city for promotion of GTA III. The game had just been launched and “Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo was one of the cities 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 great, interesting city to do it in, but at the end of the day, it just came down to logistics. Getting to the research team long enough to map the city and just the cultural satire in terms of what could possibly work in an appropriate narrative way in that city. Connecting those things was a bit difficult and we thought it was cooler to stick with the cities that were featured in Grand Theft Auto 1.”

source

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of a possible GTA Tokyo game. Take-Two Interactive trademarked 10 GTA items, which included GTA Tokyo. These were made right before the launch of GTA San Andreas. The world and the internet is a different place than it was back then and that’s one of the reasons we know about some of these things. Time Dilation go on to say that another source talked about it:

Much like domains, you would archive it just to keep squatters away from it. And as we were thinking about what cities to make, sometimes we would come up with a brand with a different take on how the internet worked. You wouldn’t have the same internet sleuths jumping in and saying ‘Hey, look what they just did. Look what they just did.’ So they are much more careful about it these days. However, these were mostly just to protect against domain squatters.”

source

GTA Advance

While we got a GTA game for the Game Boy Advance, there was a version made by a different studio: Clawfish Interactive. However, the studio disbanded about a year or so after a deal was struck. We learned about this game several years ago, but a Rockstar source has now shared some information Time Dilation as to why it was cancelled. Here’s what they had to say about Clawfish Interactive’s GTA GBA game:

“We built this game. Vice City was in development at the time, so we were locked in. So we couldn’t share a lot of assets back and forth for story beats. We didn’t let these guys know we had helicopters all of a sudden. You can fly. We has boats and everything else it was just let’s build a GTA 3 extension and we’ll make it a side story so we don’t trip over someone else’s story.

Ex-Rockstar developer

Every month for a year, Clawfish would submit what they had done with the game in that time period for Rockstar to take a look at. They would usually last about 10 days. There was a requirement that it be of a certain quality and completion. If Rockstar were happy, they would get an invoice from Clawfish and Rockstar would then pay it. This funded the studio for the next period.

The Rockstar Games source revealed that Rockstar did not receive an invoice from Clawfish directly but rather a “factoring company”. Rockstar was said to be unhappy with this. That wasn’t the only thing they weren’t happy about. Rockstar’s quality criteria were not met. At this point, Clawfish was in significant amounts of debt to the factoring company. The studio then closed.

You can learn more about this and other canceled GTA games here. Time Dilation has some really cool work on Rockstar Games lately. We encourage you to check out their interview with one of the designers of Rockstar Games’ iconic logo. It shed light on how it was made. We covered this report here. In addition, sources told them last month that Rockstar canned a DS version of Bully and a GBA port of The Warriors.

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