Obbe Vermeij, who co-developed the original Grand Theft Auto games and left Rockstar in 2009 after 14 years, shared new details with Thunderpick on a GTA set in Tokyo that Rockstar planned and then abandoned. He first said 'Tokyo almost actually happened' in a December 2025 interview with GamesHub. PlayStation LifeStyle and Dexerto both reported on the interview on September 18. The Tokyo project would have been a GTA III-style title, meaning a fully 3D open-world game structured like the 2001 original. It was one of several cities Rockstar considered for the next GTA at the time, with others including Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Istanbul, London, and Paris.
Vermeij described the project as further along than a concept. 'Of all our ideas of where to take GTA next, and we had Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Istanbul, and London and Paris too, but Tokyo was the most serious one, and it was just going to be a GTA III-style game set in Tokyo,' he told Thunderpick, per PlayStation LifeStyle. Dexerto reported that samurai swords were going to play a large role in the gameplay. The plan was for Rockstar to hand its technology to a Japanese studio to build the game, much as Rockstar North did with Rockstar Vancouver on Bully. Per Dexerto, the project was run out of Rockstar's New York office, Sam Houser visited the team, and Leslie Benzies was more directly involved. It stalled because, in Vermeij's words, 'the contracts were never signed.'
The reason GTA stayed in the United States, per Vermeij, comes down to scale. He cited roughly $2 billion as the cost of developing a game at GTA's current scope, per Dexerto and VGTimes, arguing that this has effectively confined Rockstar to American cities. His comments arrive with GTA 6 launching November 19 in Vice City, a fictional Florida location. Vermeij left Rockstar in 2009 and has shared development details through a blog and interviews since; his Thunderpick remarks are one of the more detailed public accounts of a cancelled Rockstar project.