Rockstar Wanted a Japanese Studio to Build GTA Tokyo, Says Former Rockstar North Tech Director

Rockstar once planned a Grand Theft Auto set in Tokyo and wanted a Japanese studio to build it, according to Rockstar North’s former technical director Obbe Vermeij.

Vermeij laid out what he remembers of the project to RockPaperShotgun: negotiations with a studio took place, he knows which one, and he is not saying. Take-Two Interactive filed a trademark for GTA Tokyo in 2003, the year before GTA: San Andreas shipped, and abandoned it in 2008.

“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.”

— Obbe Vermeij

He remembers little about the design, and what he does remember is concrete. It would have been contemporary rather than historical, closer to the present-day setting of every mainline GTA than to the period piece Rockstar eventually made with Red Dead Redemption.

“It definitely had samurai swords in it, I remember that, but I think it was present-day probably. It wasn’t, like, sort of the medieval era in Japanese history, or anything.”

— Obbe Vermeij

The idea left a trace in code. References to “Tokyo PS2” turned up recently in GTA 5’s source, which is the kind of leftover that survives a cancellation by accident. Vermeij worked at Rockstar from 1995 to 2009 across the first four mainline 3D games and several handheld spin-offs, and he says a non-American GTA came up constantly in that period, always with the same shortlist attached: Moscow, London, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, with Paris and Tokyo rounding it out.

Japan was the one city on that list with a business case behind it. Grand Theft Auto has never performed there the way it does in North America and Europe, and the localised versions of the first three 3D entries arrived well after their original releases through Capcom, shifting a few hundred thousand copies each in their launch years. Vermeij’s read is that the gap bothered the people at the top.

“I think perhaps the Housers were a little annoyed that GTA wasn’t as big in Japan as they thought it deserved to be. So it kind of made sense to get a local studio to do it.”

— Obbe Vermeij

Dan Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020, has since given the argument for why none of it happened. Speaking to Lex Fridman, he said the studio kept concluding that too much of the series was built out of Americana for a foreign setting to hold, pointing back to GTA London on PS1 as a novelty rather than a template. Guns, outsized characters and a specific read on America were the thing itself, in his telling, and moving the map would have broken it.

Houser’s Americana argument is the weakest part of this for me, because Yakuza has spent two decades proving that a few square kilometres of Tokyo nightlife carries a crime story fine without a single highway chase. I regret the handoff more than the setting, because a GTA built by people who grew up in that city would have arrived with a point of view the series has never had to go looking for.

Vermeij lands in roughly the same place, and he is blunt about why a Japanese team was the right call rather than a courtesy. Players there want different things from a game, he says, pointing at how poorly first-person shooters travel, which is an argument for handing over the keys instead of translating a menu. His own verdict on the hypothetical is that he would have played it.

GTA 6 makes the road not taken sting a little more. Aaron Garbutt, head of development at Rockstar North, told Edge that the new game carries real RPG elements, with players free to buy cigarettes and beer at a shop, ride the train for a day, or spend an evening at a club instead of advancing anything. Garbutt framed it as letting people lean into how they want to play rather than pushing content at them. Buying beer and riding a train is Yakuza’s entire register, and seeing it turn up in Leonida makes the Tokyo version read to me less like a fantasy and more like a missed turn.

Vermeij had one other read from the same conversation. He expects Rockstar may pull the GTA 6 PC release forward rather than leave an eighteen-month gap, on the theory that generative tooling has made an unofficial PC conversion cheap enough that somebody will attempt one from the PS5 build. A clone would be worse than the real thing and would still take sales.

The console version is the immediate question. Rockstar has already started to send copies to outlets, with the review embargo set for November 18, one day before Grand Theft Auto VI launches on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Pre-loading opens on November 10.

Read also: fans are arguing that Rockstar has one more video left before launch, and the GTA 6 new trailer rumors point at November 11 or 12 based on how the studio timed the final trailers for GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2.