Strauss Zelnick has spoken about the future of L.A. Noire after years of silence, but he has still not announced a sequel, remake, or new release. The Take-Two boss says the company keeps reviewing its classic IPs, but nostalgia alone is not enough for a revival: there also has to be a development team that genuinely wants to work on it.
Next May, L.A. Noire will turn fifteen. Team Bondi’s distinctive detective game won over many players in its day and opened a different path for investigative video games. Since then, however, neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has announced any real sequel, even though hopes have resurfaced from time to time that players might one day return to its smoky, crime-stained, interrogation-heavy version of post-war Los Angeles.
The franchise has not officially been forgotten. Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, discussed the subject during a talk at iicon, a new conference aimed at video game industry executives, and explained that the company has not permanently closed the door on its older intellectual properties. Take-Two’s portfolio includes Rockstar, 2K Games, and Gearbox, which means the publisher has no shortage of classic names that audiences would be interested in seeing again.
Zelnick, however, quickly cooled down anyone waiting for a concrete announcement. “Generally speaking, we’re looking at doing something in the future with all of our intellectual properties”, he said. “There’s nothing to announce specifically about L.A. Noire, and if there were, it would be Rockstar who would reveal it, not me. But, in any case, with regard to our classic intellectual properties, the teams are always looking at what we have, and we’re always thinking about it. The question is, at any given time, do we have a team that’s passionate about working on it?”
Nostalgia Is Not Enough Without Developer Interest
Based on that, a possible L.A. Noire 2, or the return of any other classic Take-Two franchise, would not be purely a business decision. Return on investment would obviously still matter, because a major publisher rarely greenlights a project that does not show clear market potential. But Zelnick’s comments suggest that another condition is just as important: there has to be a development team that sees the IP not merely as an assignment, but as a creative challenge worth taking on.
In the case of L.A. Noire, that is a particularly sensitive issue, because the original game’s development was anything but a smooth success story. At the time, the production made headlines not only for its technology, facial animation system, and interrogation-driven gameplay, but also for its punishing working conditions. The project was associated with crunch, a tense studio atmosphere, and a toxic workplace environment, while several developers directly blamed game director Brendan McNamara for disastrous management and verbal abuse inside the office.
Team Bondi no longer exists in the same form it had during the development of L.A. Noire, but the story did not end completely. McNamara later founded a new studio called Video Games Deluxe, which Rockstar acquired in 2025 and renamed Rockstar Australia. Little is known about its current projects, although it previously emerged that the team had been working on a game called Sowden House. Even then, however, the developers admitted that the project might never be released.
For now, the return of L.A. Noire is therefore more of a possibility than a concrete project waiting to be revealed. Zelnick’s remarks make it clear that Take-Two has not pushed the brand off the table, but they also make it just as clear that there is currently no specific game the company is ready to discuss. If anything does happen with the property, it will not be casually dropped by Take-Two’s CEO during a conference: it will be announced by Rockstar officially.
The Price Of GTA VI Remains An Open Question
Another major part of Zelnick’s talk focused on GTA VI and Rockstar’s distribution plans for its next giant release. The game’s price remains one of the biggest unknowns around the project, as the market has been speculating for months about whether Take-Two and Rockstar will dare to go beyond the usual AAA price range with one of the most anticipated launches of the generation.
The CEO did not give a specific figure this time either. Instead, he said that the company’s job is to “charge much, much, much less than the real value”. In practice, that means Zelnick believes the price of a video game should not simply be tied to development costs, but to the value the consumer perceives in it. In the case of GTA VI, that perceived value is obviously enormous, but the final price tag still has not been officially confirmed.
Source: 3DJuegos
