In a newly published interview with the American podcaster Lex Fridman, the Rockstar Games co-founder and former writer on the Grand Theft Auto series, Dan Houser (who left Rockstar in 2020), weighed in on why we will never see the series return to London (as spotted by Eurogamer).
If you know your Grand Theft Auto history, then you'll likely know that the series has mostly taken place in the same three areas introduced in the original game — San Andreas, Vice City, and Liberty City — with each of these being a satire of Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City, respectively.
However, there have also been some exceptions to this rule in the past, with Grand Theft Auto 2 notably taking place in Anywhere City, USA, while the GTA London mission packs were instead set within the UK capital. Because of this, there has always been a bit of a desire among fans to see the publisher and its studios venture outside of these areas once again, to explore more of the series's twisted take on the real world or perhaps even pay a visit to old blighty once again.
Houser told Fridman, however, in the interview, that this was unlikely to happen again, with the creatives behind the series coming to accept that the American setting was key to the series's identity.
"For a full GTA game — we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else," House told Fridman. "You needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider's perspective, but that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't have really worked in the same way elsewhere."
Interestingly, this explanation from Houser doesn't just explain why London has never returned as a setting for the series, but also seems to support what we've heard in the past about why many of the proposed GTA projects set outside America, like GTA Berlin, GTA Tokyo, and GTA Bogota, never came to pass.
In the past, we've spoken to several sources who worked at Rockstar Games, to try to find out what had happened with those projects, with one former Rockstar New York employee telling us in 2024 about GTA Tokyo specifically that it was hard to think of "what could possibly work in a fitting narrative way in that city", compared to the three areas they had already established:
"Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo was one of the cities being considered at the time. Sam was pretty caught up with the Tokyo scene. He had just released GTA III 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. Getting the research team out there long enough to map the city and just the cultural satire in terms of what could possibly work in a fitting narrative way in that city. Making those things connect was a little tough and we thought it was just cooler to stick with the cities that were introduced in Grand Theft Auto 1."
What do you think? Are you bummed that London seems to be off the table for a future GTA game? Or do you understand the reasoning? Let us know!