What Comes Next For Rockstar After Grand Theft Auto 6?
It’s time to shake things up.
You wouldn’t be wrong for thinking all of Rockstar Games is working on pushing Grand Theft Auto 6 across the finish line. After the 13-year gap between GTA 5 and what’s likely to be the biggest game launch ever, Rockstar and its parent company Take-Two need to do everything in their power to ensure the game lives up to expectations.
However, during an interview with CNBC, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed that Rockstar might have more in the pipeline.
“Rockstar does have a lot of other things going on,” Zelnick told a CNBC anchor who asked how much of the team is working on GTA 6. “But [GTA 6] is, of course, the primary focus.”
While this could be a reference to the studio’s continued support of Grand Theft Auto Online, it’s possible that production has begun on another, unannounced project. It’s been over a decade since Rockstar released a game that doesn’t belong to its two biggest franchises, so in a world where “other things going on” means something other than the sequels everyone’s expecting, let’s take a look at what other projects the storied developer could be working on.
Bring Back Bully
Bully saw Rockstar stray from dark and gritty experiences to something much more lighthearted.
It’s easy to forget that Rockstar was once one of the industry’s most prolific developers. When the studio hit its stride in the early 2000s, it didn’t coast off the massive success of Grand Theft Auto 3 and its sequels. It also made titles like the controversial stealth action game Manhunt, arcade racer Midnight Club, and experiments like Bully, while also publishing classics like Max Payne and Red Dead Revolver. These series have been all but forgotten since 2013.
Of all the potential post-GTA 6 revivals, the one the internet is clamoring for the most might be Bully. The open-world game, set in a boarding school, married the open-ended gameplay of Grand Theft Auto with the lighthearted tone of a John Hughes coming-of-age film, and has been a cult classic since its 2006 release. It’s a surprisingly heartfelt game that proved Rockstar wasn’t just interested in inducing shock and controversy, and a sequel could serve as a palette cleanser to the grim realism of Red Dead Redemption and the cynicism of GTA. The much smaller scale of Bully’s scholastic shenanigans could also make for a calmer project after developing one of the biggest and most anticipated games of all time.
Is It Time For Another Manhunt?
The first two Manhunt games are fairly gross, but there’s potential in the series’ aesthetics at a time when horror films are thriving.
While an open-world experience would make sense considering the trajectory of the company’s releases, I would personally love to see Rockstar scale things down even further. It’s not often that Rockstar reins things in to make a more linear experience, but when they do, the results are often stellar. Max Payne 3, for instance, is the only time the company made a straight-up third-person shooter, and the result was one of the genre’s best games.
We already know the company is co-developing Max Payne 1 and 2 remakes, so I doubt Max Payne 4 is on the way. However, Rockstar could return to their stealth-action/survival horror hybrid, Manhunt. Manhunt is both the studio’s edgiest and least successful series from the 2000s, and for good reason.
Frankly, the games are gross. You play as an inmate forced into eliminating other convicts in an abandoned city for the amusement of a powerful, mysterious man. They’re ugly and uncomfortable by design, in the same way Eli Roth’s horror movies are. But there’s still potential in updating the series for a modern audience. Cutting back on some of the gratuitous carnage in favor of genuine scares and improved stealth systems could be a winning combination.
Yes, Some Of Us Want An L.A. Noire Sequel
L.A. Noire wasn’t for everyone, but it deserves a follow-up.
If Rockstar does want to go big with its GTA 6 follow-up, it would be great to see them break from the “do anything, be anyone” approach of its last two games. It’s been 14 years since L.A. Noire shook up the Rockstar formula, and I think this methodical police procedural is long overdue for a comeback.
L.A. Noire was as risky a game as Rockstar could have been involved with. Co-developed with the now-defunct Australian Team Bondi, L.A. Noire didn’t let players loose in a beautiful recreation of 1940s Los Angeles. Instead, it played more like a Mafia game, delivering a well-acted single-player story and a series of unsolved crimes you had to get to the bottom of.
The game’s interrogation system was divisive, and the slower pace of its gameplay and world made it more niche than a Red Dead or GTA. But it's the gutsiest game Rockstar released in the 2010s, and it could be refined into something special in a proper sequel. If there’s anyone with the financial cushion to revisit such a weird premise, it’s Rockstar.
There are a lot of franchises Rockstar could pull out of its vault after GTA 6, and I sincerely hope that it considers revisiting any of these old fan favorites before starting work on another sequel in its two biggest series. Rockstar is a legendary company, but even it runs the risk of becoming stagnant if it keeps playing it safe.
