Believe it or not, it's been six years since Dan Houser left Rockstar Games. Co-founder of the most prestigious and hyped studio in the games industry, lead writer on numerous entries in GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Bully and Max Payne 3, he spent more than 20 years shaping the identity of these major franchises before walking away from Rockstar in 2020. Not entirely amicably, either — or at least, it certainly made waves. Since 2023 he has been pursuing his career through Absurd Ventures, his new studio, where he is currently developing several new intellectual properties (IPs, as they're known). In a 28-minute podcast with Variety for the show 'Strictly Business', Dan Houser has just lifted the lid on his next two video games, whose worlds clearly have very little in common with GTA.
A comedy and a dystopia about AI
The first will be an open-world game leaning far more towards comedy, with a cast of colourful characters. Dan Houser explains that the game aims to play with "comedy and character memory", but that we'll have to wait a little longer before he reveals anything more. He said "a few months". The second title heads in a completely different direction, with a dystopian science-fiction story centred on the behind-the-scenes development of a video game. The project will tell the tale of an AI that becomes sentient after being created by two developers who didn't get on — to the point where the AI ends up developing a fraught relationship with its own existence.
But these two games are part of a far bigger project within Absurd Ventures, not least because Dan Houser is developing it all with Jeffrey "Lazlow" Jones, his former writing partner at Rockstar Games. He tells us they're working together on several original universes, including A Better Paradise, American Caper and the Absurdaverse, with the ambition of spinning them out across different media. Graphic novels, comics, fiction podcasts and animated series are already in the works or in development, with the video games rounding out these various universes. It's a new approach that lets Dan Houser start afresh after more than 20 years at Rockstar. He acknowledges the significance of his work on GTA and Red Dead Redemption, but explains that the goal now is to rediscover that same drive to innovate with new franchises. For him, the idea is to use this new chapter to tell different stories and find new ways of creating.
Dan Houser doesn't play open worlds any more
That ambition also explains why Dan Houser is deliberately steering clear of GTA 6. With Rockstar's game due out on 19 November, he reveals that he still hasn't watched the lengthy 27-minute presentation broadcast on Netflix in August. And he intends to keep his distance! The fact is, after spending much of his career dreaming up open-world games and then working out how to present them to the public, Dan Houser explains he'd have nothing to gain from watching what Rockstar Games is doing today and comparing his own ideas with those of his former colleagues.
The distance he's put between himself and his old studio goes much further still, as Dan Houser explains that he barely plays open-world games at all any more. When he does fire one up, he says he tends to immediately start analysing how the game was built, picking out the strengths and weaknesses of the various teams rather than simply enjoying the experience. He'll find himself mulling over the animation, the game design or the decisions that were probably taken during development. A habit that, by his own account, ends up distracting him from what he's actually trying to achieve with his own projects.
Nothing illogical about that, given that Dan Houser applied the same method when working on a new game back at Rockstar Games. During the development of Red Dead Redemption, for instance, he deliberately stopped watching westerns so as not to be influenced by what already existed. He also recounts that he only discovered The Sopranos after leaving Rockstar Games, aside from the final episode, which he watched at the time with the woman who is now his wife. He eventually binged the whole series during lockdown, and reckons its influence could have thrown off his work on GTA had he come across it while he was writing the game.
GTA 6 without Dan Houser
The fact that it's Dan Houser obviously makes his two new games especially hotly anticipated, all the more so since GTA 6 will be the first major entry in the series developed without him. The former writer knows that comparisons with his previous work are inevitable, but says he doesn't want to spend the rest of his career being judged solely through the lens of his past successes. He hopes Absurd Ventures' games can forge their own identity and find their audience without constantly being measured against GTA or Red Dead Redemption.
He also explains that success shouldn't come down to the numbers or a project's commercial impact. His goal, he says, is above all to create work he can be proud of, with the feeling of having made something interesting and sufficiently different. That was already how he handled the pressure when he was working on games back in the Rockstar days: asking himself whether he'd made the game with as much integrity as possible, and whether he could genuinely be proud of the result. It's a philosophy he intends to keep at Absurd Ventures, even if his next games are inevitably going to be measured against the considerable legacy he left behind. That's part of the deal when you've become a video game legend, and it's not something he can fight.
