Bully 2 was started but never finished, according to source

(Image credit: Rockstar)

Easter eggs and references to Bully found in Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have fans of Rockstar's open-school game Bully convinced there's a sequel secretly in the works. According to sources quoted by VGC, a sequel was being worked on several years ago, and a playable slice of it existed, though production ultimately went nowhere.

According to the sources, a concept for the sequel's plot and where it would star Jimmy, the protagonist of the first Bully, and "depicting some of his time back in education, perhaps at school or college, was one option being discussed."

At some point between May 2010 and the end of 2013, Rockstar New England apparently put together a "very small slice" of Bully 2, "complete with simplistic open-world gameplay. It was built using the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE), the same engine used for Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5, Max Payne 3, and both Red Dead Redemption games."

But that was as far as it went, and the team were ultimately moved on to other projects.

Thanks, VGC.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.