Rockstar once planned a zombie island survival game using GTA: Vice City code, but it was too "depressing"

rockpapershotgun.com:

GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games were once working on a zombie survival game set on a Scottish island, which sounds like a mixture of GTA: Vice City and legendary Arma mod DayZ. That's according to former technical director Obbe Vermeij, who joined Rockstar North in 1995 back when it was called DMA Design, and left in 2009 following the release of GTA 4. In the run-up to the GTA 6 trailer reveal this month, he's started blogging about the development of several Rockstar games, from GTA through grotty snuff film simulator Manhunt to cancelled projects such as the zombie title and Cold War stealth fest Agent.

Discussing these latter "distractions", Vermeij noted that "[a]fter Vice City [in 2002] there was a sense within North that it would be nice to do something else. Something that wasn't GTA. Some of the artists wanted to do a zombie survival game. Programmers like fantasy. Artists like zombies. Not sure why that is."

Rockstar decided to pursue the zombie game concept for a bit, with the working title "Z". Unless there's another one I'm forgetting, it would have been Rockstar North's first and only game set in the developer's native Scotland. "The idea was to use the Vice code as is," Vermeij explained. "The game was to take place on a windswept foggy Scottish island. The player would be under constant attack from zombies. The player would need to use vehicles to get around but vehicles would need fuel. Acquiring the fuel would be a big part of the game."

Z was only in development for "maybe a month or so", however. According to Vermeij, the concept proved to be a bit of a downer. "The idea seemed depressing and quickly ran out of steam. Even the people who originally coined the idea lost faith. We dropped the idea