Strauss Zelnick, boss of GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive, has discussed the difficulties of developing a hit video game — and dropped what sounds like a obvious nod to MindsEye in the process.
MindsEye is, of course, the notorious first game from Build a Rocket Boy — the studio set up by former Rockstar veteran Leslie Benzies. After years in development and enormous metaverse ambitions, MindsEye ultimately arrived as a buggy and poorly-received flop, resulting in hundreds of layoffs.
“Making hits seems to get harder and harder and harder as entertainment industries mature,” Zelnick said, speaking at the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “The folks at Rockstar seem to be able to make these massive hits, and lots of other people have tried. Lots and lots, including former Rockstar employees. And so far, they haven’t been able to do it.
“Doesn’t mean they can’t in the future, by the way,” Zelnick continued. “We’re always running scared. But it won’t be technology that changes the game. What’ll change is that some extraordinarily creative individual or individuals will show up and do something astonishing. Our goal is to get those people to work within the Take-Two system. If we fail to do that, we fail.”
Zelnick went on to discuss the long wait for GTA 6 — and painted the gap between releases in the series as something of a strength. Unlike other video game publishers, Zelnick said, he had ensured that Take-Two had never tried to annualize its franchises (outside of its sports games). In other words, he wasn’t trying to replicate Activision’s demands for an annual Call of Duty blockbuster, or Ubisoft’s past push for annual Assassin’s Creed adventures.
“Our plan might not be to have a specific cadence around our properties because we’re not a cadence-driven company, we never have been,” Zelnick said. “I didn’t show up at Take-Two nearly 20 years ago and say, the way everyone else was, ‘We’re going to annualize our products like clockwork…’ I was an outlier at the time.
“I’m not going to name the properties,” he continued, “but we’ve seen that some very competitive properties have had good annual releases and bad annual releases because it’s just so hard to do. GTA was not the number one property [when I joined in 2007]. It was a top five property, but it was not the number one property. And take a look at what happened to the properties that were higher up in the food chain that were annualized to see what happens.”
Regardless, it has been a very, very long wait for GTA 6 — 13 years since GTA 5! — which sounds like something Zelnick had not intended either.
“Creating some anticipation on the part of the consumer is a good thing,” he concluded, noting that GTA 5 had been ticking over just fine through constant updates to GTA Online and new versions of the game re-released on newer consoles. “What has driven the gap is the amount of time it takes to do something that is as good as it can possibly be for that intellectual property.”
GTA 6 is finally set to arrive this November after numerous delays — and Zelnick recently assured IGN that its release date is expected to stick.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
