Lazlow Jones, one of the former writers at Rockstar Games and being the Director of Production, has sat down with IGN for an exclusive interview with them where he speaks about leaving Rockstar Games after almost 20 years of being one of the main people behind the creativity of the company to the new games studio he now works for. He also speaks about the Epsilon Program.
Lazlow Jones was with Rockstar Games from April 2001 until April 2020, completing a 19 year run with the Gaming company. Lazlow was best known for his Radio Hosting in the GTA Series, where he started off hosting Chatterbox FM in GTA III, after the positive feedback from fans about his Radio Show, Rockstar Games then hired him to Co – Write and produce all the Radio Stations in Vice City. After that he became a permanent person within the series, with GTAV having his own main role within the story.
IGN Interview
In the IGN Interview, that was posted yesterday Lazlow Spoke about the time of leaving Rockstar Games and what happened. Lazlow saying to IGN that he left Rockstar Games in early 2020 and then the Covid-19 Pandemic hit.
Lazlow also told IGN that just a few weeks after Red Dead Redemption 2 released in October 2018, his sister informed him that she had terminal cancer, this meant Lazlow moved her in with him so he could become her primary Caregiver, at the same time he was still writing and producing for Rockstar Games, he also added he spent a lot of time writing his comedy from the Chemo Wards “which is a very interesting creative exercise.”
Lazlow said taking care of his dying sister made him stop and analyse things, he left Rockstar Games and then COVID happened. He spent of lot of time watching documentaries like Black Mirror. He then said Dan Houser, the Co-Founder of Rockstar Games, who also left back in March 2020, a month before Lazlow hit him up and asked him to form a new studio, which is now known as Absurd Adventures.
Being asked about Burnout and if he got sick of making Grand Theft Auto Games and Red Dead Games, he didn’t agree or disagree but did point out Nine GTA games were released whilst he was working at Rockstar, and went from working on GTAV, to Red Dead Redemption 2, back to GTA Online and then to GTA 6. He was excited to start work on a new intellectual property and it made even more sense to him to go work with Dan Houser due to the project being set in the future, which he hadn’t worked on a futuristic game before.
IGN also said that Lazlow doesn’t want anything thinking that Absurd Ventures is trying to take on Rockstar Games and compete with Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption.
Lazlow also pointed out that Rockstar Games has form at nailing a certain time period, past and present, but Absurd Ventures is trying to nail the future, which Rockstar Games have never attempted before. He did add that everything Absurd is doing, is satire in the truest Rockstar sense.
Lazlow is already sick of AI and its just getting started, saying he rolls his eyes at the thought of AI, and Absurd Ventures of coming at it from a Rockstar Style perspective, but how do you take the piss out of AI in the year 2030? 2040? You can read the full interview here
A disturbing Phone call from a fan
Lazlow Jones revealed that during the development of Grand Theft Auto V, a fan had left a message on his work phone, Lazlow took the call in which he was welcomed by a women introducing herself as representing the followers of the Epsilon Program. This women and the followers were GTA fans that had gone through every GTA game looking for new information about fictional religion in which we know as The Epsilon Program.
Lazlow carried on by telling IGN that this women was saying they were Worshippers of this fake in game religion that Rockstar had made up. Lazlow went straight to the Headquarters in Manhattan, New York to tell them all about the crazy voicemail and even joked about getting rich on the backs of people searching for the meaning in life.
“She genuinely sounded like she was a follower of the Epsilon Program,” he said. “It’s crazy when you make a satire of something… because we were very straightforward about it. We created a website for the Epsilon Program back in 2004, and all the copy on that, it’s in my mind very clear that it’s a money-grab, modern day fictional religion. But they sounded like proper followers of it. It excited me and scared me to death simultaneously.”
Epsilon Program made bugger in GTA 5 due to phone call
Lazlow told IGN that the phone call didn’t put them off this fake Religion, instead they doubled down on it in GTAV, creating more various missions and cutscenes for the game and even going as far as writing a Bible for the in game religion called The Epsilon Tract, in which it was split into pieces around San Andreas for players to find.
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