Former Rockstar employees reveal all on unreleased GTA games that never made it

Former Rockstar Games employees have been speaking about a number of Grand Theft Auto titles and expansions that never saw the light of day after being in development or never making it past being a concept.

Hype is in overdrive for the latest instalment of Rockstar's iconic series, with GTA 6 scheduled to release in Autumn 2025.

With the series being so popular, there are so many different directions Rockstar could have taken with the series.

And a number of former Rockstar employees have spoken with Time Extension about some of the ones that didn't make it.

According to the publication, the full list of games and DLC that never made it is as follows in chronological order:

• Race 'N' Chase
• GTA 64 and GTA Sega Saturn
• GTA 1.5
• GTA 2 N64
• GTA 2: Berlin
• GTA 2000
• GTA Online Crime World
• 'Godzilla Takes Manhattan' / GTA 3 on Dreamcast
• GTA 2.5 (GTA Miami)
• GTA Tokyo, GTA Bogota and GTA Sin City
• GTA Advance (Destination Software)
• GTA Advance (Crawfish Interactive)
• GTA 5 DLC
• GTA San Andreas VR

While there have not been any new comments on GTA 5 DLC or GTA San Andreas VR, there are some very intriguing points about GTA 2: Berlin, GTA Online Crime World and GTA Tokyo, GTA Bogota and GTA Sin City.

Starting in order, GTA 2: Berlin was announced by Rockstar's parent company Take-Two as an expansion for the base game and would have been set in the 80s before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Alexander Lipka, who worked as the regional sales manager for Take-Two in Germany during this period, said: "The plan included underground rides through the expansive Berlin, as well as visits to the Berlin radio tower, and of course, everything with German car brands."

But the idea didn't go down well with Rockstar employees apparently.

A former Rockstar North employee who worked at the studio at that time said: "With GTA Berlin and the other stuff, what you tended to have was the other people under the Take-Two umbrella sitting in the remote offices getting big ideas and trying to run with it before realising that's not how the lay of the land worked.

"We'd get a call like, 'hey, what do you feel about GTA Berlin?' F**k off, go away."

Strong.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Moving on to GTA Online Crime World, the success of GTA Online is well documented and it seems it's something that was thought about for a while time before it was first introduced in GTA 4 in 2008.

In 1999, Take-Two confirmed it was working on a multiplayer title.

The company then revealed in 2000 it was planning to merge Rockstar with DMA Design and an Israeli tech company called Pixel Broadband to form a new studio so subscription-based, high speed, multiplayer online games could be made.

But it's reported the merger didn't get far and thus the online game was canned.

Speaking to Time Extension, former Rockstar director of development Susan Cummings said: "There were lots of things that started. Like there was talk of a GTA MMO (massively multiplayer online game).

"There was one in the works at one point, it's just nothing ever came of it. It was just never the right project."

Imagine that, a GTA MMO...

And finally, before the release of GTA San Andreas, in 2003 Take-Two filed 10 trademarks for the series, which notably included titles like GTA Tokyo, GTA Sin City, and GTA Bogota.

But since then, the three fictional series of Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas, based on New York City, Miami and Los Angeles respectively, have been stuck to.

A source told Time Extension: "GTA Tokyo was one of the cities being considered at the time. Sam (Houser, co-founder and president of Rockstar) was pretty caught up with the Tokyo scene.

"He had just released GTA 3 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.

"Around that era, the internet was a different place. [The other trademarks] were mostly just to protect from domain squatters."

With GTA 6 set to conclude the HD trilogy of games set in that universe, it will be interesting to see what Rockstar has planned for Grand Theft Auto after that releases.

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.