Rob Nelson says Rockstar's open to a GTA outside America someday, but the US still has plenty left

Insider Gaming picked up on something Rob Nelson said about the future of the series, and it's the kind of quote that's going to get chewed on for years. Basically: Rockstar isn't shutting the door on a GTA set outside America at some point, but Nelson reckons there's still a lot of the US left to dig into first.

I get why people latch onto this. Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City, Los Santos. We've been bouncing around the same handful of fictional American cities for decades now. A GTA in London or Tokyo or Rio sounds wild on paper.

but hold on a second

The man's point is fair though. GTA is a satire of America at its core. The cars, the radio ads, the strip malls, the whole ugly beautiful mess of it. Pull that out of the country and you're building a different game with a different voice. Rockstar's never been shy about taking their time either, so "open to it" probably means "maybe in 2040, ask us again."

And let's be real, we're nine days out from Leonida. Nobody's actually thinking about the next map right now. We've got Vice City, the Keys, Grassrivers, Mount Kalaga, Port Gellhorn and Ambrosia to poke around in first. That's a whole state of American weirdness to get through before anyone needs to start sketching out a non-US setting.

Still, it's a fun thought experiment. If they ever did it, where would you even want it to go? I'd take somewhere with real car culture and a coastline, personally. Somewhere the radio stations write themselves.

What city would actually work for a GTA outside the states, or is the American setting too baked into the DNA to mess with?

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Source: Insider Gaming · Curated content.