Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser left the company in 2020 and now runs a new outfit called Absurd Ventures. Houser will be forever connected to the GTA franchise, and he's now weighed in on GTA 6.
He told Variety that he did not watch the "Extended Look" trailer and doesn't plan to. Why? He said he tries to avoid consuming things that are going to "disrupt me creatively."
"And given that I spend a large amount of time trying to make open-world games, and the rest of my conscious time trying to figure out innovative ways to market them, I don’t need to see what other people are [doing]," he said. "I’m always trying to think about new ways of doing it, not sit there in some kind of comparison of what I would have done differently.”
Also in the interview, Houser said he doesn't play a lot of open-world games anymore, for similar reasons.
"I find when I play them, I can almost deconstruct the strengths and weaknesses of the team in real time and it’s distracting. I’m always thinking, ‘Well, their animation team is weak, but I think this game design is fantastic.’ And, ‘Oh, I can imagine that meeting when they discuss this feature,'" he said. "I’m not a game designer; I’m a sort of creative director. So I’m trying to always find new things that haven’t been done before, or that I can steal from older media, quite frankly or just inspired me or things I always thought about.”
It's not that Absurd Ventures is burying its head in the sand, however. Houser went on to say he has a team of people at his company who take the time to examine "what everyone else is doing."
He said when Rockstar began to develop Red Dead Redemption, he avoided watching any more Western films. For GTA, he said he avoided HBO's acclaimed mob show The Sopranos (1999-2007) because "it would have disrupted everything I did on GTA" if he had seen the show while formulating the GTA series, which was first released in 1997.
"So I really try and avoid things that I think are going to overly influence me," he said.
Houser is now working on multiple projects at Absurd Ventures, including an open-world comedy game that he will reveal further "in the next few months." Another is a dystopian sci-fi game about "video game development gone very wrong" when a rogue AI becomes sentient.
He said in the Variety interview that "there could be no greater compliment" than to be forever associated with GTA. At the same time, Houser said he hopes some of what he works on at Absurd Venture can be successful in its own right.
Dan Houser's brother and Rockstar co-founder, Sam Houser, remains at Rockstar and was involved in the creation of GTA 6. GQ writer Sam White recently posted a series of tweets (and then deleted them) saying an interview he had planned with Sam Houser fell apart at the last minute. That's notable because Sam Houser rarely gives any interviews at all, nor does he appear in Rockstar's official promotional efforts for the company's releases.
GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. In other news, Rockstar recently revealed some of its secrets and detailed how a game like GTA 6 gets made.
