This Is Vegas
Surreal Software spent years building an open Las Vegas of racing, gambling, fighting and parties before Midway collapsed and Warner Bros. stopped the expensive production.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- full production started
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A cancelled open-world action game developed by Surreal Software for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Players would resist a developer's plan to sterilise Las Vegas by mastering four overlapping styles of nightlife and crime.
Existence timeline
Surreal starts a multi-system open-world game.
Midway reveals the Las Vegas sandbox.
Press sees driving, gambling and nightlife systems.
Warner Bros. acquires the studio and project.
The internal team is absorbed into another Warner studio.
The unreleased project leaves the schedule.
Why it ended
Midway's bankruptcy moved the project to Warner Bros., which closed Surreal and ended development in 2010.
Last confirmed trace
Multiple trailers, press demonstrations, screenshots and former-developer reports survive from the large production.
What it left behind
Its reported cost and abrupt disappearance made it a symbol of the unsustainable scale of late-2000s open-world development.
How we classified it
The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.
The strongest verified milestone maps to full_production_started under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.