We almost got a zombie game from Rockstar

A former Rockstar North employee revealed what they once worked on at the studio.

If Rockstar Games comes up, the only thing that comes to mind these days is what about the next episode 6 of Grand Theft Auto. Don’t worry, it’s coming now. Expected at the beginning of December we get the first trailer. Until then, you could collect extremely useful souvenirs to overcome impatience, such as the framed Rockstar tweet. But if you’re not only excited about the studio’s future, but also its past, we can still provide you with some interesting information now, thanks to a former employee of Rockstar North.

Obbe Vermeij worked at the company from 1995-2009, and recently leaked information that the studio was once working on a zombie survival game. It is from Vermeij’s since-deleted blog post Insider Gaming reported. According to this, Rockstar’s zombie adventure would have taken place on a remote Scottish island and the code of Vice City would have been used for it. The project lived for about a month at Rockstar North, sometime in 2002.

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According to Vermeij, they wanted to make a zombie game because “artists love zombies”, adding that „I’m not sure why that is”. They would have started from the code of Vice City, but would have transformed it to create a deserted Scottish island that is constantly besieged by zombies. Players would have been able to use vehicles to travel around the island and getting fuel and moving constantly would have been the keys to survival.

This is obviously not an infinitely unique idea in itself, which is why the concept may be familiar to many people. A decade later, almost everything was about zombies and countless games were made in which we could essentially do that. Just think back to the ARMA 2 DayZ mod from 2012 and you can already see that people would have been receptive to making a survival game out of something familiar, in this case Vice City, in which vehicles and resources are important against the undead in combat.

In the end, Rockstar’s zombie game was never made because the developers found the idea too overwhelming. So they moved on to something more fun, which was none other than the next GTA, that is, San Andreas. In the end, it took almost a decade for Rockstar to deal with zombies again: for 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, an add-on called Undead Nightmare was released after its release.