Dan Houser, the former co-boss of Rockstar Games and former creative director on the Grand Theft Auto series, doesn’t play a lot of open-world games. And he doesn’t plan on playing GTA 6 either. But it’s for a good creative reason: he doesn’t want to be influenced by them as he works on his two new game projects at his new enterprise, Absurd Ventures.
“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 told Variety. 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.”
“It’s not my job within any company that I’ve ever worked at, thankfully, to be the person that understands what everyone else is doing,” Houser continued. “I’m trying to think about new ways of doing it. So when we worked on Red Dead Redemption, as soon as we started working, I never watched another Western. I never watched The Sopranos until after I left Rockstar. I saw one episode, because my girlfriend-now-wife and I did watch the finale in real time. I’d not seen any of it before that moment. And then I watched it all during COVID. And I’m grateful. It’s so good that it would have disrupted everything I did on GTA, had I watched at the time. So I really try and avoid things that I think are going to overly influence me.”
On not playing many other open-world games, Houser said, “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.’ 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.”
Houser’s new company, Absurd Ventures, is currently working on two games, as discussed in my all-too-brief conversation with him at LA Comic-Con last year. The studio has already released American Caper, a graphic novel series. Its double-sized season-finale issue drops next month – a week before GTA 6 – along with the book “A Better Paradise.”