Rockstar were "definitely" thinking about giving a Japanese studio the keys to GTA, says former tech director - "I have a name, but I'm not gonna say it"

Obbe Vermeij on ancient plans for a GTA Tokyo

Since time immemorial, North American and European publishers have racked their brains over ways to make their games sell in Japan, ancient heartland of mythical beings like Mario, Sonic, and Polaroid Pete. In the late noughties, Microsoft launched a big push to give Japanese youth the Xbox virus with such targeted console exclusives as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. And Rockstar once dreamed of making a Grand Theft Auto game set in Tokyo.

Speaking to me last week, Rockstar North's former technical director Obbe Vermeij shared a little about the abandoned project. Emphasis on the "little" – it doesn't appear to have gotten very far, despite recently unearthed allusions to "Tokyo PS2" in GTA 5's source code.

Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive filed a trademark for GTA Tokyo back in 2003, the year before the release of the Los Angeles-flavoured GTA: San Andreas. At the time, Rockstar were apparently looking at collaborating with a Japanese studio on the project. "So this was kind above my pay grade," Vermeij told me. "But yeah, there were negotiations with studios, and I have a name, but I'm not gonna say it, because then it becomes like a bigger thing than it is, and I'll probably get it wrong, and I don't know how far the negotiations were, how serious it was. I mean, it was definitely serious. It was the plan. But I don't know how close it got to actually happening."

The game itself would likely have been a contemporary story, not a historical yarn like Rockstar's subsequent Red Dead Redemption. "It definitely had samurai swords in it, I remember that, but I think it was present-day probably," Vermeij went on. "Or sort of not too [far off] - it wasn't, like, sort of the medieval era in Japanese history, or anything. It was definitely not like that."

Vermeij was at Rockstar from 1995 to 2009, where he worked on the first four mainline 3D GTA games, plus some handheld spin-offs. During that time, he says, Rockstar frequently considered the idea of a Grand Theft Auto set outside the United States. "In the same way that we were always thinking about other games, we also thought about cities that would be cool, and it was always the same list," he said. "It was Moscow, London. Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, maybe Paris and Tokyo. It was always the same ones that people suggested."

Grand Theft Auto has never quite the money-spinner in Japan that it is in North America and Europe. Localised editions of the original three 3D GTA games were published by Capcom, sometime after the original releases, selling a few hundred thousand copies apiece in their launch years.

"I think perhaps [Rockstar's co-founders] the Housers were a little annoyed that GTA wasn't as big in Japan as they thought it deserved to be," Vermeij reflected. "So it kind of made sense to get a local studio to do it. Japanese people actually kind of like different games from westerners a fair bit. For instance, they don't like first person shooters and stuff. So, it made sense to have a Japanese studio have a shot at it, and I think it would have been really cool, because you know, a GTA made by somebody else in Japanese culture – that's something I would probably play."

Take-Two ultimately abandoned their original "GTA Tokyo" trademark in 2008. It's not clear how much Rockstar have considered setting GTA overseas since Vermeij's day, but co-founder Dan Houser (who left the company in 2020) recently told podcaster Lex Fridman that they ultimately decided it wasn't a credible objective.

“We made a little thing in London 26 years ago - GTA London - for the top-down for PS1," he said. "That was pretty cute and fun, as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, 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 really have worked in the same way elsewhere.”

If this article has left you pining for the Shibuya Scramble NPC-tipping sim that will never be, I bring good news: Japanese developers are quite capable of making their own urban open worlders. The obvious go-tos are Sega's Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, with their abundance of lovingly modelled eateries and discount stores. There's also Ghostwire: Tokyo, a respectable first-person parkour sim, though this particular incarnation of Tokyo has a lot of paranormal congestion. All these games have the advantage of being playable on PC right now. As for GTA 6? Who can say, but Vermeij thinks Rockstar might want to port it sooner to get ahead of the slopcomp craze.