Don’t Expect Another Futuristic Grand Theft Auto, Because “The Team Who Made GTA 2 Hated It”
James Lucas is an Executive Editor from Newcastle, England. They have written for sites like IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, with a special focus on FPS games, Soulslikes, and survival horror.
Rockstar briefly dabbled with a cyberpunk setting in GTA 2, taking us to the pulpy Frank Miller-inspired Anywhere, USA. It was a promising vision for the series, proudly proclaiming that Grand Theft Auto wouldn’t be bound by one setting, but 26 years later, former technical director Obbe Vermeij says that another futuristic game would be “a really big mistake”.
“The team who made GTA 2 hated it,” Vermeij told GamesHub. “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”.
They didn’t like the idea to go into the future because they had to reinvent everything.
It wasn’t just devs who weren’t fond of the idea. Looking back, GTA 2 occupies a weird middleground between the top-down and 3D eras, with middling reviews and a lacklustre reception cementing it as the awkward stepping stone to Claude’s seminal outing. “People didn’t connect with the game or its city as much as they did with GTA 1,” Vermeij put it bluntly.
GTA Is Too Valuable
With dev cycles only getting longer, and budgets ballooning alongside them, there’s more riding on a new Rockstar game than ever before. It can’t just be ‘good’ – with a decade of hype snowballing into every release, these new games have to be events. So, taking big swings like a cyberpunk city is riskier than ever.
“GTA is just too valuable,” Vermeij says. “It could be cool but you just don’t want to gamble with it like that. Plus you’ve now obviously got the cultural impact which is way more important than it was then. You know, the game generates memes and conversation and hits and clicks and views. You just have far less of that if it was set in some vision of the future, I think.”
It was a novel idea to peer into the grungy near future, but even in 1999, it was a half-hearted attempt on Rockstar’s part. The tie-in short movie was clearly set in modern day New York, shirking what made this entry so unique, while the game made several nods to the encroaching ‘new millenium’, making the far-flung future seem as though it were just a few months ahead of the October release.
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Still, if you want to experience what a modern day sci-fi game from Rockstar might look like, co-founder Dan Houser opened the Absurd Ventures studio in 2021 after a brief hiatus from game development and is now working on an expanded sci-fi universe called ‘A Better Paradise’.
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