A key former member of the Grand Theft Auto team has said Rockstar toyed with ideas for many non-American settings for the series, including the capital cities Tokyo, Rio, Moscow and Istanbul.
Of them, Tokyo apparently came the closest to being realised. “We had ideas about GTA games in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and Istanbul. Tokyo almost actually happened,” Obbe Vermeij, former technical director at Rockstar North, who worked on GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas and GTA 5, told GamesHub. “Another studio in Japan were going to do it, take our code and do GTA: Tokyo. But then that didn’t happen in the end.
“People love having these wild ideas,” Vermeij added, “but then when you’ve got billions of dollars riding on it it’s too easy to go let’s do what we know again, and also America is basically the epicenter of Western culture, so everybody knows the cities, even people who haven’t been there. They have a mental image of the cities.
“I think it’s unlikely it’s going to be in Bogota next time, especially since there’s just more and more money involved as the project gets bigger. It doesn’t make sense to set it in some leftfield location for novelty. GTA: Toronto? It just wouldn’t work.”
I wonder if the Torontonians and Bogotanos know they live in leftfield cities…?
Jokes aside, GTA has rarely, if ever, been set outside of US-adjacent cities, with most of the games based in and around Los Santos (loosely Los Angeles), Liberty City (loosely New York), and Vice City (loosely Miami). There was once a London-themed expansion for Grand Theft Auto 1, set in the year 1969, but that’s as close as it got.
“I’m afraid we’re stuck in this loop of about five American cities. Let’s just get used to it”
Rockstar co-founder and former GTA lead writer Dan Houser recently explained that the series kept coming back to cities like Miami and New York and Los Angeles because they’re melting pots of activity, where extreme wealth rubs against extreme poverty, and where glitz, glamour and organised crime can all be found. Other major cities might have that, but do they also have one other key ingredient – guns?
“You needed guns,” Houser said, “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 have really worked in the same way elsewhere.”
When pushed on whether the series might ever be set in Europe, Obbe Vermeij answered, “It’s just not realistic. I would love it, and if games still took a year to make then yeah sure, you can have a little fun, but you’re not going to get that when there’s a GTA every 12 years.
“You’re not going to set it in a new location. You don’t really need to either because the technology changes so much. Nobody is going to say that they’re not going to play GTA 6 because they’ve already played Vice City. That doesn’t make sense. It’s completely different.
“They’ll revisit New York again. They’ll go back to LA or maybe Las Vegas,” Vermeij added. “I’m afraid we’re stuck in this loop of about five American cities. Let’s just get used to it.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 will take us back to fictional Miami, or Vice City as it’s called, but in the present day rather than the 80s, as in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. GTA 6 will tell a story based around dual protagonists Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, marking the first time a GTA game has had a playable female lead. GTA 6 will be released in November next year.
