A claim going around says Take-Two Interactive's CEO confirmed a new L.A. Noire as Rockstar Games' next big game after Grand Theft Auto VI. He did not. The post takes a vague, heavily hedged answer and inflates it into a confirmation that does not exist.
Here is what actually happened. Back in April, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked at a conference whether the company was looking at doing more with L.A. Noire. He said "Yes," which got a reaction from the room, then immediately walked it back to nothing. His fuller answer was "you never know," followed by his explanation saying the company is looking at doing something with all of its intellectual property, but there is nothing to announce. He even added that if there were real news, Rockstar would announce it, not him. We covered these exact comments back in April.
What the L.A. Noire rumor actually holds up to
The claim | The reality |
|---|---|
The CEO said something positive about L.A. Noire | True, but vague and hedged |
That confirms a sequel or a real project | No, he said there is nothing to announce |
It will be the next game after GTA 6 | No evidence, and the timing does not fit |
San Francisco, the Zodiac Killer, a 2030 setting | An unverified 2023 4chan leak |
Some L.A. Noire project happens eventually | Plausible, but far from confirmed |
The L.A. Noire sequel story is one cracked door and a lot of wishful reading.
As you can see, what he said is not a confirmation. It is the most non-committal answer a CEO can give, the corporate version of "maybe someday." Zelnick later clarified that related remarks had been misread as an announcement. Nothing about a sequel, a release window or a place in the lineup was ever said.
Does this mean that the rumor has no legs to stand on at all? Not necessarily. Rockstar acquired Video Games Deluxe, the studio led by original L.A. Noire director Brendan McNamara and rebranded it to Rockstar Australia after the studio already made the L.A. Noire VR Case Files and corrected the initial launch mistakes made on Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. So the person who created the game now runs a Rockstar studio, which makes some future L.A. Noire project more plausible than most potential legacy IP projects.
The other details are even murkier. The San Francisco setting, the Zodiac Killer plot, the roughly 2030 timeline and the next-level face scanning aren't new information at all. They all trace back to an anonymous 2023 4chan post, later shared on GTA Forums where it went viral. The poster got some GTA 6 details right beforehand, which gives it a sliver of community credibility, but anonymous forum leaks from years ago are exactly the kind of thing that ages badly.
Then there is the simple matter of bandwidth. Rockstar is going to be buried in GTA 6 and its online mode for years after launch. As we laid out in our look at what actually comes after GTA 6, any new internal project would not start serious production until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest with a release deep into the 2030s. The idea that a full L.A. Noire sequel is loaded up and ready to be the next thing out the door does not match how Rockstar works.
So, yes, a future L.A. Noire is possible, helped by McNamara's studio now flying a Rockstar flag. A confirmed sequel as the next game after GTA 6, set in San Francisco chasing the Zodiac Killer, is not a thing anyone official has said.