Rockstar allegedly planned on making GTA Tokyo after GTA 3
Rockstar Games was apparently planning to make a GTA Tokyo game as a sequel to Grand Theft Auto 3, according to a recent report.
Rockstar Games achieved mainstream success with Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 when we got to explore the immersive world of Liberty City. The developers would then move on to make two consecutive GTA games using the same engine. Apart from an expansion pack for the first Grand Theft Auto title, we never got to see a city outside the USA.
Now, according to dataminers, it seems that Rockstar had once planned to make a Grand Theft Auto title set in Tokyo, Japan.
This article details everything you need to know about this.
Take-Two once reportedly filed trademarks for GTA Tokyo
According to a report by Time Extension, Take-Two Interactive filed 10 trademarks related to Grand Theft Auto before the release of San Andreas in 2003. This included GTA titles with different city names like Tokyo, Sin City, and Bogota, implying Grand Theft Auto games set in Japan, Las Vegas, and Colombia respectively.
That said, Rockstar decided to settle with cities and locations in the USA, like Miami (for Vice City) and Southern California (for San Andreas), where the latter included Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. According to the Time Extension report, dataminers discovered evidence that Grand Theft Auto Tokyo was once in development for the PlayStation 2. This discovery was allegedly made after the GTA 5 source code leak in December 2023.
The source that disclosed this information to the news outlet said:
"Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo was one of the cities being considered at the time. Sam was pretty caught up with the Tokyo scene. He had just released GTA III back then and they were doing a lot of travel to Tokyo back then to promote the game. It seemed like a cool, interesting city to do it in, but at the end of the day, it just came down to logistics."
They further added:
"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."
So, we now know why the Grand Theft Auto series is exclusively set in the US. There could be another Grand Theft Auto: London in the future, but a GTA Tokyo is a bit unlikely. The Yakuza franchise has several open-world game series set in modern-day Tokyo, so Rockstar wouldn't want anything too similar to it.
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