Originally developed by a small team at the Dundee-based studio DMA Design in the mid-90s, the open-world crime series has since gone on to become a billion-dollar enterprise requiring multiple studios across the globe to work against the clock to ensure its latest entry is bigger, better, and more breathtaking than the one that came before it. Because of this, we're always fascinated to look back at some of the plans for the series that never quite saw the light of day and imagine the roads not taken on its path to superstardom: from playable cities and modes that were announced but never realized to ports of the game that graced the pages of magazines only to disappear from the release calendar without any explanation as to what had happened.
Recently, we've been busy compiling a list of these projects, amassing everything we could find about these projects, trawling through our old archive of interviews for comments from developers, and conducting additional conversations whenever necessary. The list includes everything from early concepts for projects that ended up releasing to versions of the game that were scrapped and wholly original titles that were killed before they had the chance to reach the market. Enjoy!
Race 'N' Chase
Before Grand Theft Auto was Grand Theft Auto, it was being developed under the name Race 'N' Chase. Race 'N' Chase was a very different project from the one that ended up releasing in 1997 across PC and PlayStation in the UK and saw players exploring three cities (described as New York, Venice, and Miami in the design doc) across four different game types.
GTA 64 & GTA Sega Saturn
As we mentioned above, Grand Theft Auto was originally released for the PC and PlayStation, but what you might not know is that two other ports of the game were also planned. These versions were for the N64 and Sega Saturn and were part of the publisher BMG's original agreement with DMA Design. Evidence of these appears in the original design document for Race 'n' Chase as well as various gaming outlets throughout the '90s.
The Sega Saturn version, for example, appeared in Mean Machines Sega (issue 44, June 1996) and Sega Power (Issue 81, August 1996), but was later revealed to have been cancelled in a Saturn Power article (issue 10, February 1998). Meanwhile, the N64 port was considered multiple times throughout the decade and was briefly covered in N64 Mag (issue 29, June 1999) and IGN64 (March 1999), before eventually being put to one side. In the past, we were able to speak to Grand Theft Auto's producer Gary Penn, as well as Brian Baglow, a writer on the original game at DMA Design, who gave us some potential explanations for why these versions were dropped.
"So what that effectively did was it took N64 off the table for all the other games. So there would be no N64 GTA, no N64 Tanktics, and no N64 Covert. So it went from 16 versions to 13. So we immediately lost three versions. And then what happened with the Saturn version is that it also had to be dropped because it was just too problematic. We had to cut them just to make sure we could focus on the other versions. So the decision was made just to focus on PC & PlayStation."
Baglow, meanwhile, added, "Each of the platforms that were out there at the time had vastly different capabilities. Different storage systems and so on, and we were leading with the PC version, which is arguably the most powerful. So that was being built — the tracks were going down in front of the train in a lot of places — and the idea of rewriting a different engine for the N64 and then figuring out how to strip content and strip capabilities made no sense. The same with the Saturn version. I seem to remember Alan Campbell working on that, but I don't know how far he got."
GTA 1.5
Before development on Grand Theft Auto 2 officially started, the idea was floated inside DMA Design to work on an expanded version of the first game, as opposed to a sequel. This is according to the ex-DMA Design producer Gary Penn.
In an interview from a few years ago, he told us, "GTA 2 was going to be just a remake of 1 tidied up. It wasn't intended to be a cynical thing. It was kind of like GTA 1.5. These days you might think of it in terms of DLC, or a remaster with DLC, which was a great idea because the first one was manky as fuck and really needed fixing. So that's how it started." According to Penn, the reason this project never ended up seeing the light of day was because when Take-Two bought the rights to Grand Theft Auto, it decided to scale up the project, hoping to do "a full-blown sequel" instead. As a result, DMA ditched the original three maps (Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas) in favour of making a futuristic sequel set in the cyberpunk metropolis of Anywhere, USA.
GTA 2 N64
Much like Grand Theft Auto 1, the second game was also briefly considered for N64 at the start of its development. Very little is known about this project and how far it got, with the only evidence of its existence being a brief mention in a Take Two SEC filing from 1999 and some mentions in publications like IGN and the video game magazine GameMaster.
GTA 2: Berlin
Shortly after the release of GTA 2, Take-Two announced it would be producing an expansion pack for the game, called GTA 2: Berlin, similar to how Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 and Grand Theft Auto London 1961 had been released in the wake of the first game.
The expansion was mentioned in a couple of German magazines in 1999 including PC Games (October 1999) and Play The PlayStation (December 1999), and was also mentioned in an SEC filing from Take Two. According to these separate news sources, the game was going to be released in Spring 2000 for PC and PlayStation and would have been set in the 80s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would also have featured a period-appropriate soundtrack, which was to be comprised of German New Wave music. The reports stated the game was being developed under Take-Two's German division, but no one we spoke to at Rockstar Toronto and DMA Design could remember the project when we asked them about it.
In a message on LinkedIn, Lipka told us, "As far as I can remember, there was indeed the idea back then to create an extension with Berlin's districts for GTA. 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. I would have to look through my archives to see if I still have anything concrete on that."
Lipka went on to add the expansion was probably "a cooperation between the team from Scotland and a German team from near Munich and of course, people from Berlin", but said he wasn't 100% sure. He suggested Christoph Hartmann, a former vice president of international marketing at Take-Two might know more about the development and why it never ended up coming out, but our attempts to contact Hartmann have so far been unsuccessful.
We did, however, manage to reach out to someone who worked at the Rockstar New York office during this period, who gave us a potential answer on why Rockstar didn't want to go ahead with the project. They told us, "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 realizing that's not how the lay of the land worked. We'd get a call like, 'Hey, what do you feel about GTA Berlin?' 'Fuck off, go away.'"
It's currently unknown if any work was actually completed on the project, or if it simply remained an idea on paper. So we'll keep digging to see if we can uncover more.
GTA 2000
After work on Grand Theft Auto London 1969 and Grand Theft Auto London 1961 was finished, Rockstar Toronto briefly worked on a mission pack called GTA 2000, which was intended to be distributed as a magazine cover disk, before it was eventually cancelled.
Not much is known about the project, but back in 2022, Raymond Larabie, an artist on the GTA London games told us the following about what he remembers from his limited involvement with the project:
"Rockstar Toronto was working on a mission pack for a magazine cover disc called GTA 2000. I didn't get to see what it was about, but I made a graphic for a space shuttle ruin on Mars that was to be used in the game, so I assume it took place on Mars. I think it was cancelled before much of it got done. It was never intended to be a full-length game, just a quick game. I don't think there were playable missions, as it got cancelled so soon after it started. I never heard any reason for the cancellation, but it's strange that it never makes any of the lists of cancelled games.
He continued, "I remember seeing Ed Zolnieryk working with the GTA 2 code, and I saw my space shuttle graphic in the game or the editor on his monitor. I was probably too busy with Max Payne PS2 at that point to pay much attention to it."
GTA Online Crime World
In an SEC filing, dated March 23rd, 1999, Take-Two wrote that it was "currently developing a multi-player on-line version of Grand Theft Auto and we intend to develop additional multi-player on-line versions of our titles in the near future."
While no name was given for this project in the filing, later in the year, the company announced the development of GTA Online Crime World shortly after Take-Two acquired DMA Design in September 1999, along with GTA 3D (the game that would eventually become GTA III). GTA Online Crime World would later go on to be mentioned on early online gaming websites like Gamespot as well as within the pages of magazines like PC Zone (issue 83, December 1999), and was reportedly set to build on the network multiplayer experiences previously included in games like Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2, and Grand Theft Auto London 1961.
It's unknown whether the project was going 2D or 3D, or how far exactly it got, but incidentally, the following year, in March 2000, Take-Two revealed an ambitious plan to merge Rockstar Games and DMA Design with an Israeli tech company Pixel Broadband to form a new entity called Broadband Studios, which would enable the other participants in the deal to use Pixel Broadband's priority software Jive to make subscription-based, high speed, multi-player online games, for those with a broadband connection. It's not a huge leap in logic to assume that these two initiatives may have been linked, but as the former DMA Design and Take-Two employee Brian Baglow told us, "the idea [behind the merger] went nowhere", with a few press releases and articles being all that remains to suggest it was ever going to happen.
Interestingly, while talking to the former Rockstar director of development Susan Cummings, she also mentioned that a GTA MMO was also talked about within the company, stating "There was lots of things that started. Like there was talk of a GTA MMO. There was one in the works at one point, it's just nothing ever came of it. It was just never the right project."
Obviously, as we know now, GTA IV would eventually reintroduce online multiplayer to the series in 2008, bringing with it a bunch of playable game modes as well as a free play option letting you explore Liberty City with friends and strangers. GTA V, meanwhile, expanded on this further in 2013, letting players roam a version of San Andreas populated with other people to compete in races, roleplay as their own original characters, and embark on a separate story to the main plot, among other things.
"Godzilla Takes Manhattan" / GTA III (Dreamcast)
Prior to the development of Grand Theft Auto III for PS2, the project initially started as a demo for the Dreamcast, which the DMA producer Gary Penn affectionately calls "Grand Theft Auto: Godzilla Takes America".
This project wasn't originally meant to be an official GTA project but was instead a 3D tech demo of a city that the Space Station Silicon Valley team lead Leslie Benzies and a couple of programmers brought into the office one day, shortly after finishing work on that project. At the time, the GTA 2 team was completing work on that title in 2D, while elsewhere in the studio, another team had started development on what would eventually become Manhunt. But the Space Station Silicon Valley had nothing to move on to, so Gary Penn assembled a group of DMA developers and began spitballing ideas for other city-based concepts.
It was at this the DMA co-founder David Jones recommended that they turn it into a Kaiju-themed project, with Jones supposedly informing the team that he may be able to land the rights.
"I remember Gary being rightly excited about the Dreamcast's analogue controller triggers," said Jack. "He had proposed a system whereby one trigger would control the neck and the other the jaw, which created this little core challenge of carefully picking things up (people/eggs/boxes) and not properly crushing them. We had a few sketched gameplay systems where you had to rescue/defend eggs, or you could pick people up and carry them as hostages."
Penn, meanwhile, informed us about another design, one that would see the monster rampaging through the city: "You stomped around, you'd eat people and grow, and then you'd destroy even more things. And the idea was as you ate and destroyed, you'd grow and you'd eat and destroy some more. They had got the guts of that working on Dreamcast."
If you're wondering why this project never made it to release, the answer is quite simple. In September 1999, Take-Two bought DMA from Infogrames for $1 – plus the assumption of certain debts the developer had accrued – bringing with it a number of sweeping changes to the studio. This included moving DMA from its historic home in Dundee to a new location in Edinburgh, where it became Rockstar North, and consolidating the Silicon Valley and Grand Theft Auto II developers into a single team. It was at this point that a decision was made to use the technology from the demo. Development of Grand Theft Auto III continued on Dreamcast, but exactly how long this version of the game was worked on or how far these experiments got depends on the source.
In 2023, Aaron Garbut, the current co-studio head at Rockstar North, told Game Informer about the Dreamcast tech demo, "When we finished our first game at DMA Design, we had some time to prototype and come up with ideas. We also got access to a couple of Dreamcast devkits. Over several weeks, we managed to create a number of blocks of a city with docks, retail areas, and brownstones. We were playing, really, but we added characters walking the streets and cars driving around."
The former Rockstar North programmer Obbe Vermeij, meanwhile, had a slightly more conservative view of these early Dreamcast experiments on Twitter, saying that they simply resulted in a simple demo featuring a basic character walking around. He stated that the project ended up being switched to PS2 "when it became clear the DC was not commercially viable" and called it "a shame" as the team was huge fans of Phantasy Star Online at the time.
GTA 2.5 (GTA Miami)
While the Space Station Silicon Valley team was underway on Godzilla Takes America, Grand Theft Auto 2 was released and that game's team moved on to designing a third game, which it called GTA 2.5.
This was going to be set in Miami and would have featured an isometric "2.5D" perspective, which the Grand Theft Auto III programmer Obbe Vermeij described in his blog as "basically the 'Sim City' perspective."
Speaking to the ex-DMA Design producer Gary Penn, he said of the game, "So there was a GTA 2.5. And because of the technical limitations, it was top-down, but pulled back and at more of an angle. I think these days you could do it with a tilt-shift and it would look really fucking awesome. But it was okay. You know, the camera sort of rotated and shifted around a bit. It wasn't really 2.5D, it was proper 3D. It was just the camera wasn't down there behind the key character as it was in 3."
A source we spoke to who worked at Rockstar Games' New York office told us it was in development for PC & PS1, and said that it was the Grand Theft Auto project "that came the closest to fruition". It was cancelled when the DMA Design offices were closed and the decision was made to merge the Space Station Silicon Valley team and the Grand Theft Auto 2 teams to make Grand Theft Auto III.
Eventually, after releasing Grand Theft Auto III, the team would go on to release Grand Theft Auto Vice City, a standalone game set in the Miami-like Vice City modelled after the location from the first GTA. It's unknown whether GTA 2.5D had any major influence on this decision.
GTA Tokyo, GTA Bogota, and GTA Sin City
In 2003, before the release of GTA: San Andreas, Take-Two Interactive filed 10 trademarks for Grand Theft Auto, which notably included titles like GTA Tokyo, GTA Sin City, and GTA Bogota, hinting at possible new games set in Japan, Las Vegas, and Columbia. This provoked some fan speculation that we might see these locations visited in a future Grand Theft Auto release, but Rockstar has since stuck to the three fictional cities introduced in Grand Theft Auto (such as Vice City, San Andreas, and Liberty City).
In December 2023, following the leak of Grand Theft Auto 5's source code, data miners found evidence of Grand Theft Auto Tokyo at one point being in development for the PS2, so we asked a source who previously worked at Rockstar if they could potentially shine a light on this, and the other trademarks that were filed.
As for the other titles, our source told us, "Around that era, the internet was a different place. Much like domains, you would file it just to keep squatters away from it. You don't want to be held hostage. And as we were considering what cities to do, sometimes we'd file a trademark with a different understanding of how the internet worked let's say then versus today. You felt you could file it. You wouldn't have the same internet sleuths who would jump in and say 'Hey, look what they just did. Look what they just did.' So they're a lot more careful about that these days. However, those were mostly just to protect from domain squatters."
GTA Advance (Destination Software)
In May 2001, the New Jersey publisher Destination Software announced that it had acquired the rights to bring Smuggler's Run, Midnight Club, Grand Theft Auto III to the Game Boy Advance.
As part of this announcement, IGN reported at the time that the British studio Rebellion would be responsible for bringing the first couple of titles to the Nintendo Portable, while either DMA Design or an external team would handle the handheld version of Grand Theft Auto III. However, around November 2002, reports started to surface that the GTA project had been cancelled, which Destination Software categorically denied in the press, leading to a lot of confusion over the exact date when the project officially ended and whether it was related at all to Crawfish Interactive's Game Boy Advance title. We were able to get in touch with two former Rockstar employees who helped straighten out things.
When we asked Susan Cummings, a former director of development at Rockstar, about the project, she labelled Destination Software "a budget-ware company", and speculated that "it would have been a deal that Take-Two would have done and [the Rockstar co-founder] Sam [Houser] would have hated."
This was then later corroborated by an ex-Rockstar staffer who was at the company at the time, who told us, "We were tied to them because Take-Two signed a deal with them to distribute a lot of our games: Midnight Club, Smuggler's Run, Grand Theft Auto. They were sending us builds of Midnight Club at the time, which were terrible, and we were talking to them about Grand Theft Auto because they had those rights. So that was something pre-signed."
According to this second individual, the project never progressed much more than a design document and was distinct from the later attempt from Crawfish Interactive. It was eventually abandoned not long after its announcement once Rockstar had enough sway within Take-Two "to get out from under it".
As they explained, "Destination stunk. We looked at a lot of the products they were trying to do for us and nothing really cut the mustard. So we inevitably walked away from that deal under a little bit of strife."
Of course, the above doesn't necessarily explain why Destination kept telling the press that it had the rights to the property, even after reports circulated that it didn't. In the past, we've attempted to reach out to Destination's co-founders to hear their side of the story, but have unfortunately been unable to make contact with them.
GTA Advance (Crawfish Interactive)
After Rockstar killed the Destination Software deal, the company went looking for another development partner to help create a portable take on the series, according to a source who worked for the company. This led them to eventually partner up with the UK studio Crawfish Interactive, who had impressed the publisher with some of the tech being used for its 2002 handheld first-person shooter Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, based on the action film of the same name.
According to a former Crawfish developer Dave Murphy in a GameFaqs forum (accessed via BriPro.com), the game "was set a few months before the events of GTA III" and "The main character wasn't the same as the PS2 but he looked kind of similar."
Much like in the game, the character "is taken on by the mafia at the beginning of the game, like the original, but stays working for them throughout as he chases a mafia deserter and a case full of money from the Callahan bridge to the Cedar Ridge Observatory.". It was set to feature "a mix of old characters from the PS2/PC version and new ones based on [Crawfish staff]" and was also going to introduce a Katana and Minigun for players to use. These were two weapons that would later appear in GTA: Vice City, though Crawfish were not aware of this at this time.
In 2002, rumours began to spread online that Crawfish was attached to the project, but later that year the the developer abruptly closed its doors, putting the future of the project in jeopardy. Efforts were made to revive the game at Climax's handheld division, which had brought onboard several former Crawfish employees, but ultimately Rockstar decided against moving forward with the project and instead partnered with the US-based developer named Digital Eclipse.
In a 2003 IGN interview with Crawfish's ex-studio head Cameron Sheppard, gave the following explanation for the company's abrupt closure: "From June through to November publisher interest was unsure on the GBA, ECTS saw an upturn in interest but for titles to start early in 2003. Crawfish had many titles finishing and a number of publishers not paying on time. These issues joined meant that the company couldn't continue quite long enough."
Our source who worked at Rockstar Games was able to provide a little more context on how this related to the GTA project: "These games get built out in milestones. We built this contract in advance and it covers all aspects of development from start to finish. Every month over 12 months, we get a deliverable that is meant to have a certain quality and a certain percentage of the game done. Then after Rockstar approves it for a few days, they get a bill from the company, and Rockstar pays the bill. It keeps the lights on.
"Rockstar wasn't getting billed by the company, it was getting billed by a factoring company. As soon as the build was sent to Rockstar, the next day it would get a bill from the factoring company. That wasn't how any of that works. You send the build. It gets evaluated for 10 days and Rockstar is meant to tell you if they pass it or fail it. And the criteria for pass or fail is — does it stink and did you hold up the spirit of the contract? Is the quality bar good? The answer to that question was no. The quality was middling at best."
A factoring company, as our source explained, is a type of third party that acquires invoices from other businesses to immediately boost the original company's cash flow. According to our source, Crawfish was struggling with getting payments out of its publishers at the time, so it ended up making a deal with one of these businesses to try and keep the lights on and keep everyone employed. Understandably, Rockstar was not best pleased with this arrangement.
"We were having problems getting the footing for the product," our source tells us. "It didn't really feel right on the Game Boy Advance, and the factoring company started to come at us hard and heavy as it turned out Crawfish was in serious debt. They borrowed money from this company and the company was trying to collect from Rockstar."
In the years since the cancellation of Crawfish's GTA project, images of the game have appeared online via the portfolio of the former Crawfish programmer Anders Granlund, and later, in 2016, two extremely early builds of the game were shown off online in a video PtOPOnline. These are now available to download via the website Hidden Palace. In addition to all of the above, you can also listen to some tracks intended for the game over on YouTube, which were composed by the Crawfish composer Steve Collett.
GTA V Single-Player Story Expansions (Agent Trevor, Aliens, Zombies)
Before switching its priorities to focus on support for GTA Online, Rockstar intended to create a series of story mode DLCs for Grand Theft Auto V, similar to how it had released The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony to expand the world of Grand Theft Auto IV.One of the earliest mentions of this story-based DLC was in a Rockstar Newswire update in December 2013, where the company stated the following, "For those ready to jump back into the story of Grand Theft Auto V, we have big plans for substantial additions in 2014 continuing Michael, Franklin and Trevor's action, mayhem and unexpected adventures in Southern San Andreas."
It then further teased that there would be additional story content coming to the game the following year in another update, dated April 2nd, 2014, writing: "Later this year, look for even more additions to both Grand Theft Auto Online and Grand Theft Auto V, including more holiday-themed updates, some very exciting Story Mode DLC and much more."
From this update, it seemed like fans were going to be able to play at least one of these expansions by the end of the year, but nothing was ever released leading people to suspect they had been dropped. Years passed, and then in a 2017 interview with Game Informer, Rockstar's (then) director of design Imran Sarwar gave an update on the status of these titles, stating that the company "did not feel single-player expansions were either possible or necessary" due to bandwidth issues and the team being focused on both GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption II.
Over the years, various pieces of information have come out about these expansions, with data miners discovering files for "Agent Trevor", zombie apocalypse, and alien invasion story DLCs.
GTA San Andreas VR
Initially announced at Facebook Connect in 2021 by Mark Zuckerberg, GTA San Andreas VR was a title said to be development for the Oculus Quest 2, and was described at the time as a project "many years in the making"
It was pitched to players as "an entirely new way to experience its iconic open world in virtual reality", but in the years that followed news on the project's progress wasn't exactly forthcoming, with Meta telling Road to VR in October 2023, "We don't have any updates to share on GTA: San Andreas", as well as issuing a "No Comment" on the topic to the fellow VR-focused outlet UploadVR.
In August 2024, almost three years after it was originally announced, Meta finally confirmed the game was put "on hold indefinitely" in an email to IGN, as well as in the comments beneath the trailer for the Skydance game Behemoth on the Official Meta Quest VR YouTube channel.
