A former Rockstar Games employee revealed, that a GTA-based game was in development. Unfortunately, it was canceled for… interesting reasons.
Everyone loves Red Dead Redemption’s single player add-on Undead Nightmare, which turned the game into a zombie survival adventure. While that was totally novel and surprising, it turns out that Rockstar already tried their hands at a zombie-focused game years before.
Obbe Vermeij, former developer at Rockstar North, revealed in a blog entry that Rockstar tried to make a zombie survival game in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, that game never saw the light of day and it took until now for us to even find us about it.
Rockstar Canceled Zombie Survival Game Set In Scotland
As Vermeij revealed on his blog, the game, which had the creative code name “Z”, was supposed to be based on GTA: Vice City and was worked on for a month in 2002.
Apparently Rockstar was not happy with Vermeij sharing info about prototypes from over 20 years ago, so he removed his blog entry by now. However, using the Wayback Machine, you can still check out the blog for yourself.
The unnamed game was supposed to be set on a “windswept, foggy Scottish island” and would have seen players explore this island by using vehicles. Fuel limitations and constant zombie attacks would have been important gameplay elements.
But it was ultimately canceled, and apparently because it “seemed depressing”, according to Vermeij. As someone who spends a lot of time in Scotland, I can confirm that it does get quite gray and gloomy over there. Add zombies to that mix and I can see where they’re coming from.
And while it’s a shame that we never got to see this game, we at least got the amazing RDR: Undead Nightmare over eight years later in 2010.