L.A. Noire Sequel Not Off the Table, Zelnick Says

"With regard to our legacy IP, the teams are always looking at what we have and we're always thinking about it."

That's Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick speaking at the iicon conference yesterday, responding to a question about L.A. Noire's future. He prefaced it with the usual corporate disclaimer: "nothing to announce on L.A. Noire specifically." But the fact that he engaged with the question at all, rather than deflecting entirely, is more than fans have gotten in years. And when you pair his words with a studio acquisition that happened over a year ago, the picture gets a lot more interesting.

Zelnick added that for any legacy IP revival to happen, Take-Two would need a team that was "passionate" about working on the project. On its own, that sounds like boilerplate. Every executive says things like this. But here's the detail that turns a vague non-answer into something : in March 2025, Take-Two acquired Video Games Deluxe, the studio founded by Brendan McNamara. McNamara was the creative director at Team Bondi, the original developer behind L.A. Noire. His studio also developed L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files back in 2017. That acquired studio has since been renamed Rockstar Australia.

So when Zelnick says they need a passionate team, there's already one inside Rockstar's structure with direct ties to the franchise. I'm not going to pretend this confirms anything, but the dots are sitting very close together.

Why This Matters Now

L.A. Noire released in 2011. Team Bondi shut down shortly after. For fifteen years, the game has existed as a beloved one-off, a detective thriller with interrogation mechanics that nothing else has quite replicated. Fans have asked about a sequel constantly, and the answer has always been silence or deflection. Zelnick's comments yesterday are the closest anyone at Take-Two has come to acknowledging the demand publicly while also hinting that the infrastructure to act on it might exist.

I wrote about this yesterday from the angle of how long fans have been waiting, but Zelnick's specific language about passionate teams, combined with the Rockstar Australia situation, deserves its own spotlight. If McNamara's studio is working on something L.A. Noire-related, it would explain why Zelnick didn't shut the door. Executives tend to kill speculation cleanly when there's nothing behind it. He didn't.

Of course, Zelnick had plenty of other things to talk about at iicon. He doubled down on GTA 6's November 19 release date, joking that he expects "a lot of people will be calling in sick" that day. He also dodged pricing questions with the usual value-proposition language, saying consumers need to feel like "the price they were charged was fair for what they got" without committing to a number. Marketing for GTA 6 is expected to ramp up soon, and a Take-Two quarterly earnings call in the coming weeks could bring more concrete details on both the price and the broader release strategy.

But GTA 6 coverage is everywhere right now. Every outlet on Earth is counting down to November. The L.A. Noire thread is the one I find exciting, because it suggests Rockstar's future might not be a single-franchise company. Midnight Club, Bully, Max Payne; there's a deep catalogue of Rockstar IP that's been gathering dust. If Rockstar Australia is the model for how Take-Two revives legacy franchises, putting the original creative leads back in charge under the Rockstar banner, that's a strategy I can get behind. Whether it actually leads to a new L.A. Noire or just stays a conference-stage tease is something we'll probably find out after GTA 6 ships and Rockstar has bandwidth to talk about what's next.