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Rockstar Games’ co-founder and former lead creative director Dan Houser has revealed why he left the company after over 20 years.
As part of the press tour for this first ever book, A Better Paradise, Houser took part in an interview with BBC Radio 4. The writer discussed his career from the early Rockstar days to what he has been working on now and even his thoughts on the recent alleged union busting at his former company.
Host Kate Molleson kicked things off by asking if Dan could ever have imagined how successful Rockstar Games‘ titles would become to which he said:
“I think the scale of the last couple (GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2) were beyond any imagining; I worked with incredibly talented people so thinking that group, me piggybacking off their vast brains, could do something amazing that’s why I worked there.”
Molleson goes onto ask Houser why did he leave Rockstar in 2020. Dan responded by saying:
“Because the projects were really long and tough and take a long time to make. It can be a tough journey getting things at that scale with that many moving parts finished. You’ve got 450,000 lines of dialogue and equal number of parts of other things all trying to assemble itself. It’s this huge production experience. That swallows all of your time for many years at a time and I don’t know if I had another one of those games in me.”
Backing Up The Leak
This comes after renowned Rockstar insider Tex2 shared the apparent reason for his exit according to two Rockstar Games employees. Last week, Tex revealed Dan disagreed with his brother Sam’s direction for Rockstar. The insider has since revealed one of these staffers knew about the GTA 6 trailer before Jason Schreier and Sam visiting all of the Rockstar Games offices.
Based on what Dan said above, it backs up what Tex shared. Dan just said it in a more PR friendly way. He did not want to commit another 5-10 years to working on a single game. Rockstar have been a single game studio since before GTA V came out. Now Dan has left Rockstar, he has created and released an audio drama, a novel and a comic. Plus, he is working on two different games.
The writer recently said the big open world game has been in development for 18 months and has a few years to go. Evidently, this is not on the same scale as a GTA 6 or Red Dead Redemption 2. In this BBC Radio 4 interview he delved deeper saying it is in “early, early development” he is “not super hands-on with it at the moment I’m just gearing up for a lot of work on that next year.”
If you’d like to listen to the full interview, you can do so here.
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