There are only a handful of video game makers who have had as profound an effect on the industry as Dan Houser. The co-founder of Rockstar Games, and its lead writer, worked on all the GTA titles since the groundbreaking third instalment, as well as both Red Dead Redemption adventures. But then, in 2019, he took an extended break from the company which ended with his official departure. Now he’s back with a new studio and a range of projects, and 12 years after we last interviewed him, he’s ready to talk about what comes next.
“Finishing those big projects and thinking about doing another one is really intense,” he says about his decision to go. “I’d been in full production mode every single day from the very start of each project to the very end, for 20 years. I stayed so long because I loved the games. It was a real privilege to be there, but it was probably the right time to leave. I turned 45 just after Red Dead 2 came out. I thought, well, it’s probably a good time to try working on some other stuff.”
At first, he looked into film or TV writing, but didn’t like what he found. “That world was not overly excited by me and I was not overly excited by them,” he says. “I’ve spent 20 years talking about how games are the coming medium and now they are the medium […] you look at TV and the budgets and the amount of money they can generate, but the creative ambition is so small at times”. It seemed to Houser that it would be easier to come at the industry with IP that had already been generated. So he moved to Santa Monica and formed Absurd Ventures, bringing in Greg Borrud (founder of Seismic Games and Pandemic Studios) as head of games and, as COO, Wendy Smith, previously at the New Yorker and Ralph Lauren, and a White House special assistant during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
‘It was a privilege to be there’… Red Dead Redemption 2. Photograph: Rockstar Games
It was clear from the start it wouldn’t just be a video games studio. In 2024, the company released the 12-part story podcast A Better Paradise, a dystopian thriller about an ambitious online game world overseen by a powerful AI presence that begins to become sentient – with devastating consequences. Its creator is the mysterious tech billionaire Dr Mark Tyburn, a British inventor who intends the game as a digital utopia, then abandons it when things go awry. In some ways it is a satire on our current digital oligarchy, in which billionaire tech bros wield astronomical influence over society.
“All of these tech companies start out with grandiose ambitions, this ‘we are going to save the world through togetherness’-type gibberish,” he says. “We’ve created some of the most powerful people in history in terms of reach and mind control. Those people end up living with far more money than anyone’s ever had. And it feels, as someone who lives in the society that they have helped create, that there are moments in those journeys when they must have felt their product was not quite what they intended it to be and was doing unforeseen harm, and … they went out of their way to ensure that was not regulated. That Faustian moment I find fascinating, and that’s not to say I wouldn’t make the same choice or judge them for it, I just find it interesting.”
We’ve created some of the most powerful people in history in terms of reach and mind control
Tellingly perhaps, the company at the centre of A Better Paradise, Tyburn Industria, feels much more like a games studio than a social media mega-corp. Also, the lead protagonist is a writer who finds himself at the centre of the game’s development. Is there an element of autobiography here?
“Yeah, of course – at that level,” says Houser. “But I also wanted to write about games and tech in a way that felt authentic. To lean slightly more into the games side in terms of the office environment was really easy for me. I know what it’s like to work in a games company obviously. I wanted to try and bring that to life in a way that felt real and to capture some of the micro dramas.”
Having turned A Better Paradise into a novel, Houser’s Santa Monica studio is now working on an open-world video game version. He’s not saying how it will fit in with the podcast, just that Mark Tyburn and the AI at the heart of his game, NigelDave (a wildly intelligent program, fixated by humans but with no understanding of how they function), will both figure in the action.
Also in development at the company’s second studio in San Rafael, is the Absurdaverse, a comedy universe populated by a menagerie of weird characters, from a skeletal warrior to an ageing hippy. The company is planning a series of animated TV shows and/or movies for the concept, but also another open world game, which Houser has described as, “a living sitcom”. Again, he’s vague on the details, but it looks to be a more story-driven take on The Sims, possibly utilising AI to create emergent narratives around the characters and their lives. “We’re trying to use the memories of NPCs in a fun way,” he says. “Just trying to make it a bit more alive. You’ll see when we talk about it more, but it is shaping up really well. It’s a completely gamey game – very mechanics driven. With both games, we’re trying to make them really strong on mechanics, really fun to play, accessible, but plenty of depth.”
‘A living sitcom’ … Absurdaverse. Photograph: Absurd Ventures
Houser is also planning a game around the company’s third IP, the comic book series American Caper, co-written with fellow Rockstar alumnus, Lazlow. With its cast of escaped convicts, crooked lawyers and Mexican beauty queens, it is perhaps the closest out of all his new projects to Grand Theft Auto. Which is perhaps why the interactive version is going in a different direction. “I’m not making an open-world game for that,” says Houser. “We’re actually looking at maybe doing more of a story game. We’re still kind of exploring it.”
We talk a little bit about the current prevalence of forever games such as Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox and how they’re sucking up a lot of the world’s playtime. But Houser is adamant that there’s still a vast audience for mature single-player narrative experiences – and that’s what he’s aiming at.
“We’re trying to be ambitious, to make new stuff,” he says. “At some level [our projects] are traditional console games, accessible, but action-oriented story-driven open world console games – but then at the same time, we’re doing it a slightly different way or with slightly different subject matter. Three years ago we were watching one of those PlayStation showcases, and if you blinked and missed the credit sequences, you couldn’t tell where one game ended and the other began. Everything was sort of dark purple and about space ninjas. They were about this apocalypse or that apocalypse but always felt the same.”
“That’s fine. Some of them are amazing games. But we were like, well, we’ve got limited money and we are starting from scratch. We have to have good stories and fun dialogue, and make sure our gameplay is amazing and accessible, and our art direction has to be fresh – at all points, it has to feel different. We have to make stuff where people go, ‘Well, I’ve never played a game about that’, and then treat the audience, not just as gamers, but as human beings.”
So he’s not worried about the industry’s current obsession with live-service multiplayer mega-games? “I still think there is enough of an audience who want new stuff and single player-led stuff,” he says. And then in his characteristically self-deprecating way he adds: “I hope so. Or we’re in a little bit of trouble.”
