Rockstar Video games co-founder and former GTA collection author, Dan Houser, says he nonetheless hasn’t watched Grand Theft Auto 6’s prolonged reveal.
Houser – who wrote and produced its greatest video games together with Grand Theft Auto 3-5, Crimson Lifeless Redemption 1 and a pair of, Bully and Max Payne 3 – left Rockstar in 2020 to discovered his new firm Absurd Ventures, which is creating, amongst different issues, an open-world motion sport.
Talking in a brand new interview with Selection, Houser defined that he’s been actively avoiding taking note of what Rockstar – helmed by his brother, Sam – is doing with the subsequent GTA, as a result of he doesn’t need his personal work to be influenced by it.
“I haven’t seen it but. I’ll try to keep away from it as a result of I all the time try to keep away from stuff that’s going to distract or disrupt me creatively,” Houser stated. “And on condition that I spend a considerable amount of time attempting to make open-world video games, and the remainder of my aware time attempting to determine modern methods to market them, I don’t must see what different persons are [doing].
“I’m all the time attempting to consider new methods of doing it, not sit there in some type of comparability of what I might have achieved otherwise.”
Houser claimed that his coverage of avoiding media wasn’t restricted to GTA and that he doesn’t “play a variety of open-world video games” in any respect.
He defined: “I discover once I play them, I can virtually deconstruct the strengths and weaknesses of the crew in actual time and it’s distracting. I’m all the time considering, ‘Effectively, their animation crew is weak, however I feel this sport design is unbelievable.’ And, ‘Oh, I can think about that assembly once they talk about this function.’
“I’m not a sport designer, I’m a type of artistic director. So I’m attempting to all the time discover new issues that haven’t been achieved earlier than, or that I can steal from older media, fairly frankly or simply impressed me or issues I all the time thought of.”
As a substitute, Houser stated his crew retains up with the most recent video games and traits. “It’s not my job inside any firm that I’ve ever labored at, fortunately, to be the person who understands what everybody else is doing,” he stated.
“I’m attempting to consider new methods of doing it. So after we labored on ‘Crimson Lifeless Redemption,’ as quickly as we began working, I by no means watched one other Western. I by no means watched ‘The Sopranos’ till after I left Rockstar.
“I noticed one episode, as a result of my girlfriend-now-wife and I did watch the finale in actual time. I’d not seen any of it earlier than that second. After which I watched all of it throughout COVID. And I’m grateful. It’s so good that it could have disrupted every part I did on ‘GTA,’ had I watched on the time. So I actually try to keep away from issues that I feel are going to overly affect me.”
Based on Houser, Absurd Ventures is at the moment engaged on two open-world video games. One in every of these video games is a comedy action-adventure, whereas the opposite is “positively much less of a comedy”.
