Grand Theft Auto could have been a globetrotting series like Assassin's Creed, according to former Rockstar technical director: 'We had ideas about GTA games in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and Istanbul' while 'Tokyo almost actually happened'

Outside of a trip to London in 1997, Grand Theft Auto has always stuck to fictional analogues of American cities for its settings. But there is a reality where Rockstar's hugely successful crime epic is as globetrotting as Assassin's Creed. According to Rockstar North's former technical director Obbe Vermeij, the company toyed with numerous international locations at various moments in its history. And at one point, we very nearly had a Grand Theft Auto set in Japan.

"We had ideas about GTA games in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and Istanbul." Vermeij said in an interview with GamesHub (via Eurogamer). Vermeij joined Rockstar North in 1995 when it was still named DMA Design, and worked both on GTA 3 and GTA 4 as well as Vice City and San Andreas.

"Tokyo almost actually happened," he added. "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."

According to Vermeij, the reason these locations didn't happen was because Rockstar felt that US-flavoured settings were safer. "People love having these wild ideas 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,'" he explained. "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."

Asked whether Rockstar might set GTA outside of the US in the future, Vermeij says it's highly unlikely, given the series' current development timeframes. "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," he said. "You’re not going to set it in a new location. You don’t really need to either because the technology changes so much."

Vermeij likewise doesn't think we'll ever see another GTA set in an alternative time period like Grand Theft Auto 2, albeit for very different reasons. "The team who made GTA 2 hated it," he says. "I wasn’t on those games, but my team sat right next to them so I could hear all the yelling and the conversations and stuff, and they didn’t like the idea to go into the future because they had to reinvent everything like how weapons work and everything else."

All that said, Vermeij does believe that, with GTA clones like Watch Dogs or Saints Row having fallen out of fashion, there's an opportunity for developers who aren't Rockstar to explore such ideas. "It really is just GTA and everybody else has given up", he says. "Maybe you could set it in the future or maybe it could be set in Moscow or whatever. I would say that’s an opportunity, but I think everybody’s kind of terrified of going against GTA."

On top of all this, I also think that Grand Theft Auto is too bound up in being a satire on US culture to stretch beyond its borders. Casting the same caustic eye on a different country would be tricky to pull off without it looking like punching down. The exception to this is the UK, as that's where Rockstar North is based. But Rockstar just don't seem interested in revisiting London or exploring other UK cities.

Indeed, it'll be interesting to see how Grand Theft Auto 6 approaches this considering how much has changed since Grand Theft Auto 5 came out. Short of another delay, we'll find out exactly what Rockstar's been cooking up all this time in November next year.