15 Years Later, L.A. Noire Sequel Still Just a Maybe

"Yes." That was Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's answer when asked if the company was planning to do more with L.A. Noire. Then, almost immediately: "You never know." As first reported by Game File's Stephen Totilo, Zelnick was speaking at the inaugural iicon conference in Las Vegas when Variety's Jenny Maas posed the question. Totilo described the initial "yes" as prompting a jaw drop in the room, which makes the walkback that followed all the more deflating.

Zelnick's full quote lands with all the weight of a press release: "The answer broadly is we're looking at doing something in the future with all of our intellectual property, but nothing to announce." He added that any Rockstar franchise announcement would come from Rockstar, not from him. So what we actually got was a CEO saying his company thinks about the things it owns. I'm not sure that qualifies as news, let alone hope.

L.A. Noire launched in May 2011 for PS3 and Xbox 360, sold over 7.5 million copies as of 2017, and got a remaster plus a VR spin-off later that year. It's been fifteen years. Fans of that game have been running on fumes since the remaster, and Zelnick's tease doesn't add any fuel. The "passionate team" framing he used, asking whether there's a team at Rockstar that wants to work on it, is the same non-committal language executives use when they want to sound open-minded without actually greenlighting anything.

With Rockstar's entire studio presumably locked in on GTA 6's November 19 launch, the idea that an L.A. Noire sequel is anywhere near active development feels like wishful thinking at best. Zelnick's comments at iicon covered GTA 6 pricing and legacy IP broadly, but the L.A. Noire bit was the thinnest part of the talk, a single "yes" followed by several sentences of nothing.