Transcript of #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 have some of the deepest, most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games.

You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in the late '70s and '80s, open-world video games wasn't a thing. So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can.

Sure.

What are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time, maybe films that were highly influential on you? I mean, Godfather.

Well, I think for me, probably Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather 2. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think, and the bit at Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island, and you get that shot, it's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.

How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the cinematography? And how much is the acting? You got De Niro. You got young Pacino.

Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter. So I think he wrote, at least co-wrote, the script. So it's almost like the writing and the acting almost become the same thing. It's one of those films, both of them are those films, which I was thinking about, this idea of a perfect film where everything's good, where the acting's seminal, where the writing's seminal, where the music is seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes, you know, define what you think about things. You know, it's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about the Godfather.

What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have movies like 2001: Space Odyssey, slow.

Yes.

It used to be back in my day, it used to be slow.

Life got faster. Life just got, you know, I think as we moved from the '70s into the '80s, into the '90s, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker. You could show a look, and just that meant you realized that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with modern, you know, high-quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're rewatching them.

Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right?

Yes.

A mixture of crime and humor.

And almost like an open-world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. You see, you know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the '80s, early '90s, more than any other film. And it's so iconic. In some ways, I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino. You know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people. You know, it changed everything. I mean, the Sopranos obviously are completely inspired by Goodfellas.

Yeah, Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.

The look, the clothes, the music.

Yeah. I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, it's just the drama building up to that.

Dig another hole.

Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films.

I think the great Vegas film. The bits that I always, that I love at the end when everything's wrapping up. And on the one hand, you see the Robert De Niro character. He's still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the mob bosses from back home, they're discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's that incredibly cold line. And one of them, they're thinking about the old, you know, I think it's the casino manager. And one of them just goes, "Ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?"

I don't know. I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors. You got with Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas. I mean, falling in love with a prostitute. You're also, you've written some of the great crime stories ever.

Thank you.

And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about being a bit of a romantic yourself, appreciating the depth of love stories in literature at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. You got an Oscar for that.

I think you did for that, didn't you?

Plus, there's a caricature of the drug world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18. And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.

Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?

No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson, if he was also a market gardener. I love that persona. But he's kind of, it's hard. If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.

Is this an American caper?

No, it's in this animated show we're developing in this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse. And it's in one of the stories in that.

What is Absurdiverse?

Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open-world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies. We're still thinking that all through. And we're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment. And it's early days, but it's looking very exciting. And it's trying to be like trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.

Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges, or is it pure comedy?

I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours. It won't work.

Okay. So comedy needs some darkness.

Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.

And there's going to be an open-world video game in that world.

Yes.

When?

Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through.

So what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game? Why does it take so long to get it right?

That's an interesting question. I think if you the scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way. Why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building in one go a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. You know, these things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.

We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent, but I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So first of all, you said you love great war books and movies.

Yes.

So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least.

Of course.

There's more crime, fast-moving crime movies like Scarface. I also love True Romance.

Love True Romance. Possibly the best, one of the best scripts ever written.

Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino. What do you love about True Romance? I think sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made.

Yeah. I mean, True Romance is super fun. Tony Scott was a really good director. So it moves at a really good speed. It's funny. It's completely unbelievable. But you really care about the characters. It's the kind of, you know, this world that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievably... You could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know, you just... It's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking like, you know, what do you like about films? It's the idea to be in a world. You want to...

And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super-racist discussion.

Rant.

Rant.

Dennis Hopper as your sort of dream dad.

Yeah, dream dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a podhead on a couch.

Gary Oldman.

Gary Oldman.

Was a raster.

Yeah. And you have, I mean, a real love story. Like a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.

And it's just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film. It's endearing.

The Elvis as a character. It's kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love.

Crossed with Player Against Sam. It sort of feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

What about greatest war film? What would it be for you?

Greatest war film, if I'm feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See, which is probably the most intense film ever made. And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always want to watch the original cut. I don't prefer the re-edits. I like the original first release. I think it's tighter and slicker and works the best.

Yeah, of course. Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, I think, madness.

Yeah, from the first scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece and, again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue.

Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems. And there's different ways of doing that. And you've talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another book and movie that shows that.

Yeah, and I watched the movie years before I read the book. And I didn't understand the movie. And then I read the book, and I read a lot about the editing of the movie. And I understood why I didn't understand the movie. And that's because the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot, and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that they're spread apart by ages in the book to assemble. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. It would have been like a six-hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful, but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it.

And in terms of Westerns, what's the greatest? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Unforgiven. Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I think for me, it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year, Butch Cassidy and The Wild Munch.

I love Robert Redford and Rest in Peace.

That film, it's just, it's impossible to imagine any buddy film without Butch Cassidy.

Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you also. Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?

I love Unforgiven, but the truth is, with Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of Westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of Westerns. They were always on TV. You know, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit, quite a bit about Westerns. And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns. I tried to watch no more Westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I didn't like about them, what would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game.

From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love.

No, films.

Films.

Films was always the... Well, what I loved first as a kid was films. Older, began reading books properly at age of about eight, was watching films long before that.

Nice.

And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred. I think they got at different things. Games, I played and above all watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid, and, you know, other people playing them. And I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They're responsive. They're alive. And that's captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun. Or, you know, beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well.

Oh, wow.

And when I suddenly began to see, first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story, but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making these things that was this, you know, where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like. And I think that was when I really went, these are amazing. And that's when I really fell in love with. I could see it in moments, and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me.

Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open-world games that are so narrative-driven. So it's like you didn't have too many examples.

Yeah, and before that, it was PS1, or even before that, games looked terrible. You know, that you would be like, it's eight pixels. It's a car. You know, it was not a car. It was, they just didn't, it was always, you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. And all they were about, you know, very surreal subject matter, because you couldn't make them remotely real. And suddenly we had, we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city, and it was in three dimensions, and it felt alive, and we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life.

Yeah, I think GTA III is probably one of the most influential games of all time. It created a feeling of an open world. What do you think it takes to create that feeling? You know, there was like these looming skyscrapers, there was the changing traffic lights, there's the feeling like, first of all, you had a feeling you could do anything, and then the world was reacting to it in a way that didn't feel scripted.

Yes, and it wasn't scripted. It was really, really, really low-rent AI. Like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened. And I think that was incredibly, it was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with, and the simulation seemed to have a personality. So you could push and see, and the world would push you back in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this, I think one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed.

So there's these two concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them. One is systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games. And the systemic is from the environmental perspective, which means that there are these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world. And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping, but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything.

And I'm in it. And it's the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful. And I think with GTA III, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my life personally. And I was very able to engage in it probably for the first time professionally, actually awake and do something. And it, we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven.

There's often been a tension through your work between an open-world at freedom and the narrative-driven storytelling. And I think you've often, maybe always, gotten the balance right. So what is the value of each, and how do you get the balance right?

Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly, I think at various points, we debated or, you know, I had theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people in the team who would really push for less story, less story, you know, let the whole thing evolve organically. You know, have it all be procedural. Have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going, story can be done well, can be incredibly compelling, and it gives you some structure.

But you felt that character's personality. You felt the depth. You've actually talked about the really powerful concept of creating a 360-degree character. I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation, which is a really interesting philosophical concept. I started to immediately think of that. Can I imagine how good of an NPC am I? Can I imagine myself in every part? I tried to do that very much when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War II, within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side, just imagine myself if I was a soldier.

It was a lot of thinking, a lot like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about a project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas, very like one sentence, they are a Serbian immigrant or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife, you know, type, very, very simple stuff, and then just start to think through it from every angle and, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they were acting like this?

So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all human beings. So you're basically living with that character. If we can contrast, what is it, Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system, Nigel Dave, you've been working on recently as part of a better Paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep.

I don't think he's decided.

Yeah, I don't think he's decided either, but he seems to be bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity, and it seems that the children, quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. And actually, there's a really interesting idea there, which is maybe it's not the AGI, ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it.

Yeah, I've been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one note, and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of bog-like fog. And I thought, that's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting. AI is being built by humans and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers. And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team.

But an ever-present one.

Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.

Yeah, but there's some characters that really create a flavor of a world.

In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital, large-scale, massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build. And so he's almost like God in his world. He's not quite God, but he's got a lot of the qualities of God. So he has to deal with, am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?

And of course, there's the leader, the CEO of the company that's also a character. That's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. His name is Mark Tyburn. And Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that, all those people who want to build their own utopia.

Yes. I mean, I think there's two processes. I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end as well. But I also think that there's something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens. Because what they're saying is, I like humans apart from the bad bits. And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there's a side where people are just, you know, hideous perfectionists want to get rid of, you know, the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty.

I like humans apart from the bad bits. That's so beautifully put. Yeah, that there's, it's so counterintuitive. But the people that say, we're almost there, we just need to, there's this path we take and we'll be perfect then, and that somehow gets us into trouble. It's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits. We have to love the bad bits about humans. We can't, those bugs are features.

Yeah, there's bad bits and then there's flaws. And I think we're all flawed and we can really try to be better people, but we still have to accept that we're flawed and we're not perfect. And we have to accept that in other people. And I think when we do that, we're more human. And that's probably usually the right course.

I mean, it really is, return to that Solzhenitsyn line of the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man. And he also, like the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves as from day to day, from month to month, throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better. And as the perspective shifts, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding, and as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection.

Yes. And I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. When you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil, and there's certainly good, and that all we can try to do is be better.

And it's funny that Nigel Dave, by the way, I liked it and it grew on me very quickly, has that line and is struggling with it. It's fascinating to watch. It's really, as a character, and there's also going to be a video game of a better paradise potentially.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, we've got that in early development in Santa Monica.

Oh, nice.

And it's pretty fun. It's very early, but we assembled a really fun team and they're doing amazing work. So it's a pleasure to work with them.

I mean, it would be so great. And I suppose new for you because it's kind of near-term future.

Yes. First, I always, well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space, but only if I could do it. I was like, well, what is sci-fi? It's science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis. The story was Blade Runner is my favorite. And that's, it's obvious, you know, the replicants are better than the humans. And so this, I finally felt, we found an interesting hypothesis.

And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and smarter AIs. It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It's a real commentary as the thing is happening. So I have to ask as a person, you as a person who loves literature and one of, if not the greatest writer in video game history, Kurt in the book, A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful.

I'm not that afraid of them for large-scale concepts. I don't think they're going to be very good at that. I think if you were, I think it's harder if, you know, I began and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away like writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job and I'd just write the website copy. And then by doing, and then working on little bits and pieces.

Yeah, it's, I agree with you totally, actually. And it's hard to really put a finger on it. So one way to illustrate that, I speak English and Russian, and I've been reading Dostoevsky, both languages, and using LLMs to translate back and forth, because I was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky.

Which ones?

Richard Pervier and Larysa Volokhonsky.

Yeah, I read quite a lot. When they first did Crime and Punishment, it was amazing.

They're wonderful translators and a wonderful love story too. But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic. And they're, you know, that couple of translators are world-class experts capturing the magic. And I can't quite put that into words. Because you said like totally novel ideas, yes. But also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time that captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90%, like you mentioned, human-like phrasing about like the bulk of the storytelling, but the magic, you know, whether it's the endings of Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that.

I don't think they're going to come up with magic. I think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.

I have to ask you about your writing process. And we could break it up on Grand Theft Auto, GTA IV is when it really started ramping up. How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series? How many words are we talking about? I saw some thousands of pages.

I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA IV, it was about this high. And GTA V is about that high. But that was including all the pedestrians who'd had pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world. Because you interact with each one of them. But even the main script for the main missions was thousands of pages long.

What was the writing process like on that? To generate one page at a time.

Bit by bit by bit over several years. But you start with, once people had determined, oh, here's the, here's the world. We're doing one based on a version of New York, say GTA IV. And I was living in New York, had been living in New York for a few years. Wasn't sure if I was happy. Was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual. And that was why I was looking at some of GTA IV again recently. And it's really dark.

Do you remember a few maybe lines that brought Nico to life?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of, it was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle. And his cousin's, which was a kind of comic moment. And his cousin's, and then they go to the cousin's flat. And the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were, and I was like, this is, can I make this work in a game? It's very different from stuff you normally see in games.

You remember, during the war, we did some bad things, and bad things happened to us. War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry. Maybe that is no excuse.

Yeah, he escaped, he's a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.

Yes. He can never escape his sort of violent past. Or, I don't know if he can never escape it, he never does escape it. You know, whether he's got agency or not is a whole nother question. Of course he doesn't, because you know, he's a character in a video game. But, you know, whether he ever could have escaped in another way, who knows.

I think he's probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series. What, of all the characters you've written in Grand Theft Auto, would Nico be the best character you created?

I think he's the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. You know, he normally, he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right. He's the nicest person in some ways. Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he's the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways. He's also tough. Like he just comes across as tough. I loved CJ and San Andreas. I thought Melee did such, just the way he spoke gave him such humanity.

And of course, Michael's from Grand Theft Auto V, and he's one of three protagonists with also Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V when the three characters come together. Can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto V? Is there some degree, I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but is there some aspect of the three protagonists sort of, you know, Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha Dmitri and Ivan, sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature and just the tension between them that allows you, the three of them become a character in themselves.

Their relationship.

Their relationship.

Yeah, it was, I think one of the reasons that the team did such, that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular, is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was. It was a crime, it was a crime drama, you know, began as a crime sim in GTA 1 about stealing, you know, two top-down cars. And we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And I think having done, you know, GTA IV, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards, the challenge was, can we combine, can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists?

One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA V from a fan, GTA V is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA V and GTA Online. GTA IV is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me. When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met? How is that even possible? We know the answer isn't money because there's other studios with a lot of money and they are two decades behind Rockstar.

I think it's cold. I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. You know, the culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and people just, you know, and also an ambition to make. I think we were like, we thought GTA III could be really popular, but really popular to us meant quite honestly, it's going to sell two or three million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative.

Navid Khansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker, who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games, spoke highly about his time working with you. Quote, "We always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn't coming from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn't matter how hard we worked." So I'm sure there were some tough grinds.

Finishing it is certainly, it's tough, but it also is, you know, intensely rewarding. And you get something done and you've made something. And that feeling is, as you say, really, really incredible. I mean, sometimes it's a little bit empty as well. Because when you finish it, you're like, and my life's got nothing to it. And then you have to, you know, but that's the same with any big undertaking you take. I don't think there, you know, when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work-life balance. But the truth is you're not working that hard all of the time. So it's just, you have to just manage it slightly differently.

Man, that's such a heavy thing about the human experience. I've talked to Olympic gold winners, and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal.

Yeah.

Because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about. This has been everything, and they are truly happy to do it. And then it's like, what else is there in life? Compared to this, what else is there? So that's the ups and downs of life. You need the darkness, you need the lows to really experience the highs. Let me ask you about the pressure. There's an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto 6.

I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and it just saying, and I try just to go, and with all creative work, I go, well, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven't been found out yet. Just do my best, and hopefully I won't be found out this time. And just if I can be, if I can go, I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy someone else. I probably have done all of the above. You know, try to bring something new to it.

Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?

Because they don't come out that regularly. And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different. You know, people have very strong feelings. I like this one. I didn't like that one as much. Because they are pretty different. So there would be a simultaneity where you know what's going to happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, you know, it's going to be a game about being a criminal. But the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. So I think the way that the IP kept evolving meant people being really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well.

You've mentioned that you haven't written for Grand Theft Auto VI. What's it feel like Grand Theft Auto VI returning to Vice City? This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the '80s. So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit?

Scarface, Miami Vice.

Miami Vice.

And our '80s childhood. You know, what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game and it was set, I think, in '86. And we made it in 2002, so it's 16 years after. And now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So it was, the '80s were not that long ago when we made it.

You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.

Oh, yeah.

Especially if you're thinking about satirizing American culture. It has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld. It has the influencers, it has the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super rich people, and the desperately poor, just the whole of it. Would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of characters that are possible that human nature can generate?

I think it's one of them. You know, there's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles. I think they're all very good for exactly what you laid out. You know, you could say, move it to any of those and it would work. You know?

So yeah, there's a melting pot aspect to New York also, right?

Yeah, a melting pot aspect to LA. You know, there's glitz, glamour, underbelly, immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them. I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just for GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book. You know, this big slice of life. He did it with London. You know, this psychotic version of these, you know, big all kinds of characters in a melting pot. Any of these global cities work well for that.

Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?

We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top-down for the PS1. That was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was, there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. You know, it just felt like it was, the game was so much about America, you know, possibly from an outsider's perspective.

So you've created, I don't know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games.

I think so.

I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say, to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and having to watch Grand Theft Auto VI released? Or is it more excitement? Is it, what's the feeling?

I think it's a, it's, how would I describe it? Of course, it's all of the above. You know, it's exactly as you, you know, pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now, super excited. Of course, letting go of something I've worked on it one way or another for like 20 odd years, you know, and wrote on the last 10 or 11 that came out, wrote all of them, you know, lead writer on all of them, whatever it was.

When you're done with a game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like when you're done with Red Dead 2, it's like you're saying goodbye to Arthur. Like the characters you created, you're walking away.

You kind of are. It's like going to Arthur in the end of the game, even before the end of the game. Yeah, I think you've, you know, I've been with them for seven, eight years, and you have to kind of let it go, or you can't go on to the next one. So there's always this thing of, okay, that's done. And sometimes people would ask me questions about older games. And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in the set, I couldn't really necessarily even remember. I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go. So it's not, you're so immersed in it and thinking about it.

Yeah, it's funny from the player perspective. It feels like an old friend that I miss, whether it's John or Arthur or Nico. It's a real goodbye. There's a real sadness to finishing a video game.

I hope so.

Legitimately a sad experience, not just because the story is sad or...

Because you've been with them so long.

Yeah, and it's a real goodbye to close it. There's that feeling when you're sort of closed the video game. And it's, I mean, it's like saying goodbye to a friend.

That's when you finish a book you love. It's the same feeling. And I think that was something that we really, in the early days of Rockstar, really aspired to have that, where people would have that. It wasn't just the mania of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters. You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible. So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.

Yeah, the end of On the Road by Kerouac, Forlorn Rags of Grown Old. I just remember closing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world? It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling. You've achieved that. It's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead. And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Nico. I have to ask about, in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do. And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front, people are getting more divided.

One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are, it still has lead times, but the lead times are not four, five years. The lead times are, you know, a year and we're putting, we can make little updates much, much newer. And we're, you know, we're just wrapping issue 10 of a 12 issue arc for that. So it's not quite, it's not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015, 2016, is going to have of how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast.

So American caper is, first of all, epic comic book. I love it. The art.

Yeah, the art's beautiful. David Lappam is the artist. He did an amazing job. He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

What made you want to set it in Wyoming?

I hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about. I started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West. And I was like, I'd spent a lot of time in like the countryside and upstate New York and thought I'd never really captured it quite right. And just the idea of these places as they change, it didn't, it was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA. You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored.

And there is over the top stuff. There's.

Yeah, it's definitely slightly over the top.

So let me take notes on this. There's a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe. There's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.

He's not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box. And his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some of the mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

And of course, there's this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil. So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.

Yes.

Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean, this is the notes I've been taking.

He is a somewhat confused, longevity-obsessed, rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.

And bull semen is a big component of longevity.

Yes, he's very into all the life hacking, you know, roiding HGH and making money. And he's lost his mind living on a big ranch.

Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.

Yes. Based on someone I know who got completely redpilled and I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

Yeah, so, you know, satire of American culture. Quick pause. Bathroom break?

Sure.

I think GTA V had the biggest launch in video game history and GTA VI has the potential to topping that. First of all, do you think it will and more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?

I would assume it will because it's so anticipated and anticipation is the best driver of early sales. As we saw with GTA IV versus Red Dead Redemption 1, you know, GTA IV is far more anticipated. It sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you're spending someone's money. So the number one success is, are you making that money back plus a dollar?

Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars when if you look at like the '80s and '90s, you know, nobody took video games seriously and even in the arts. And now they're basically, I mean, it's very possible if we look at 10, 20 years from now that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.

I think they've possibly already done that in some ways. And certainly as a business proposition, they've already done that. But I think that's not, you know, as a way of telling stories, I think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better at other kinds of stories. You know, I think if you want a long discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better. We always felt games were the coming medium. And so we spent 20 years saying, "Games of the future, games of the future."

You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done. I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long experienced team. I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game, and then we kind of had to follow through with that I think was helpful, that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.

Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the RDR world? So of course it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's a fundamentally different... I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption 1, and then even more so Red Dead Redemption 2. That was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.

Thank you.

So like what drugs were involved?

No drugs.

Okay.

No, no. Stop the drugs long before.

Okay.

That's why I did all that work. I had nothing else to do. So yeah, open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way. Kept me busy. But Red, so Red Dead, I'll tell you, I'll give you my version. The games are made by big teams.

Yeah.

So I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. We made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that being a Capcom game, and they didn't want to finish it. So we finished it and they released it in Japan and we released it in the US in, I think, 2004, and decided we would start work on an open world cowboy game for PS3. Didn't think too much more about it and that was a bunch of other stuff to work on. And slowly, 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life, began to meet with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game and began to think about some stuff and start thinking about, well, what works for an open world game, what works for a cowboy game.

Can we just, as a small tangent, when you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy, what do those notes look like? Are they like doodles?

They look like either a yellow pad or a Blackberry in those days or an iPhone in these days. I'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note. I think it's a good idea. It's a good idea. Or it might be scribbling on a pad. And then I'll assemble, if they're done digitally, then I'll assemble them into one long word file. And then I'll look at them and go, you know, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea, and see if it comes to anything. See if I can aggregate them together and then read through them. There's anything coherent there.

Oh, I see.

So I don't know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent.

So that was part of the creating the 360-degree characters.

I think so.

Here's this man that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence, who also cares about his family.

He's grown up and is trying to step away from that and be a man, be a grownup. And can he get away from it? And then when he can't get away from it, what's he willing to do to save his family? And that was, I felt, starting to get some idea, feeling just, I mean, she hadn't given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of, I'm going to become a parent. So I hope some of that, and obviously then I didn't probably write any more for six months. Later on, we had a child, but certainly that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.

You got the feeling that you can actually do it. It's true. It could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable, the dialogue between cowboys.

Yes.

I mean, there's probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable and like a Shakespearian type of drama, but not the cheesy kind.

Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke. I mean, I love dialogue. I'm always, you know, I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy, it didn't sound ridiculous. You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke. That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was. And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey, and you cared about him. You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though he didn't know them.

When did you know how you're going to end Red Dead Redemption 1?

I remember I did a meeting with the Christian designer. I can't remember what year, probably some point, late 2008, early 2009, and we were discussing the last bit and said, I think he's got to die. And he leapt on the idea and went, that's, you know, yes, yes. And then I went, no, it can't work. Games can't work like that. They can't work if he's dead. And then I began to think through, well, if we just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up. And then began to think through, actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way.

Yeah, and spoiler alert, of course. How do we tell the story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. He does all the, John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang, and he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch, and then the government betrays him and sends troops to kill him. And there is dialogue. I mean, that is just, I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but it does, again, I went, the actor was so good and we'd seen a bunch of his work by then. He had such a good, he was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us, that you could feel with that point, like I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy. And so I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

So you were imagining his voice.

Yeah, and I think all of those actors on Red Dead Redemption 1 were so strong that they really brought that game to life. If them and Rod, the director, hadn't done such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell.

Yeah, you've said that the ending of that ending of RDR 1 is one of the best things you've been a part of creating. Why? Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?

I think because for the story to work, I mean, just from a technical challenge, for the story to work, he had to die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die. It was probably the fourth, fifth, or sixth open world game I'd worked on. And I, you know, spent all these years before that working at how these stories worked, how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could.

I mean, it's incredible because I don't think, I don't remember a single video game that has done that before.

Well, I would like to have at the end of GTA IV, Kill Niko, but you couldn't do it. You know, the game doesn't work. So it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it. And then going, let's do it. Let's take the risk and do it. Or we can't do it. Let's try it. Try it. And it worked.

Yeah, what about the decision with the son? You know, John gives so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn't end up in a life of violence. And then it, I mean, it's very Godfather-like. He's dragged back into it through revenge.

That was also the game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right ending, 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know. But I know that we had to make the game work.

Interesting.

So it was, I think it was, I think it kind of worked in that way where Jack can't escape. But I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn't, you know, both were interesting to me.

Can you just dig in a little deeper? Like, what do you mean for the game to work? It's such a direct, it's like a Kubrick talking about, for this movie to work, it has to have, because from my perspective, I just think about the story. What's the technical aspect for the game to work?

It's just the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you, you know, the games don't really end and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. So at the end of the game, you had to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of features, which is you can, you know, run up to someone and punch them or run up to someone and shoot them or run up to someone and rob them or run up to someone and talk to them. And that's kind of, you know, jump on a horse or do all this other stuff in order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360-degree experience with it.

I love there's real power for the avatar to end, the finiteness.

Yeah. Both the Red Deads, you obviously change avatar, which we got, you know, and then did it again. I think there's something interesting about that moment when you change from one character to another because they are you and they're not you, you know, and then suddenly you're someone else.

I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it's a beautiful experience. It's like an unforgettable experience. And what else can video games possibly reach for? You know, to create that experience, that's what great films do. That's what great, great, great books do.

It's that, I mean, it's that and the world building in games. I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taking on these narrative adventures. When that combines, you've got the amazing experience.

So who do you think is the best character you've ever created in RDR? So to me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games, ever. I think there's not even, I mean, John would be the second, which is hilarious to say, but like those are, John would be a close second, but Arthur is definitely, and you've talked about in that interview, you said that a lot of video games work on the same premise that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero.

Yeah, in a game.

In a game.

We wanted to reverse it.

Yeah.

So there were a couple other themes that matched that. So they're guys from the Wild West, but they're being pushed ever further east. So it's almost like an anti-Western, an Eastern. You're traveling east. You're traveling into civilization. And I don't think I would have been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career because it was, you know, it was the idea of getting a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting.

What about the component of mortality, of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period, sort of just realize the prospect of like real sort of fear of death, realization of death?

Yeah, I thought that was really.

It's part of the story.

Really fun thing to play with. John dies in Red Dead 1 and wanted to top that with Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way. And so the idea that John's death is fairly sudden. And so if he's got this long drawn out death, and then I'd always been obsessed by TB. As diseases go, it's a great literary device, you know, because it is this long drawn out slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker. And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he was, just after he'd had his child, my father, and survived, but only three of them out of like 35 survived.

Yeah. Do you think it's the greatest character you've ever created?

I think he's the best lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters. And I think he's the most rounded and works the best. I kind of, him and Niko are the two I like, you know, they were the two most ambitious. So for me, it's always sort of a toss up, you know. But then I loved all the stuff like the art team did such an amazing job. It was there with the journal and that kind of stuff, the way that all the features worked into Arthur's character.

So you also like the side characters. You like the flavor of the full cast. What are some of the favorites you've created? I'm sure the one you're currently working on, Dr. Dave, you called him a side character.

Well, he's not a protagonist. He's like a god, not a character. So he's not, him I'm enjoying. I love Dutch. You know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game and the actor did such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me all of their backstory, which I'd been playing around with by that point anyway, a little bit in my head, but I knew it was this bigger gang stuff and then I sort of saw exactly who he was.

I would just say that Dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a godlike figure in both of the Red Dead Redemption games. He's the leader of the gang. And there's a father-son relationship with Dutch, I mean, with Arthur, with John. I mean, there's a family feeling to the gang that you explore all of those dynamics and then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis. You're going against the family, going against the father because he is transforming his sense of the world, of morality, of all those kinds of things.

He's just drowning in his ego at the end. You know, his ego gets the better of him. I think he's a, but there was something flawed, but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger. And that's mostly off camera. But then you're sort of, you know, always been as an individual, I've always been very susceptible to charming people. And he's charming. And so I always kind of, I can see how people get captivated by charming people. And the idea of, here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him.

I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am to charm and charisma.

Yeah.

Because it can cloud your judgment about human nature.

Completely. And that's what happened with him. And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.

Yeah. But also it clouded Arthur's judgment.

Oh, completely. Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him. He was worshiping him. He'd given up his power to him. And then I think for Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying. You know, that's what I thought that was really interesting.

Yeah, it's truly tragic for Arthur to be losing his identity, lifelong identity, and the sense of belonging and losing his life at the same time. In facing the mortality, he is realizing that he's not, all of it has been a lie.

But he gets to do some, well, it depends on what the choices you make, but he gets to do some good.

Yes.

And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption.

Just a little bit, but realizing your whole life, you've been living not a good life.

Yes.

You've been not a good man.

Isn't that what we're all afraid of?

I guess it's never too late to change your ways. So the biggest, most important question, primary, central to the reason we're talking today, the number one question from the internet, it is so ridiculous, but I must ask, have you seen Gavin? Who is Gavin? So for more context, there's a guy named Nigel in Red Dead Redemption 2 who's frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game.

Not three or four. Somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two. Yeah. I just love the way he shouted Gavin. It just amused me. So at some level, it probably is trolling in that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery. You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it. But it was meant to be without ever fully being explained that Gavin's not there anymore. Gavin's either gone home, Gavin's left him, Gavin's, and we were going to keep exploring that idea.

Did you have any idea how much imagination, excitement, and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?

Yes and no. I mean, you never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games. And a lot of it comes down to acting as well. The guy was just funny when he said Gavin. It was just funny. You know, but there was a ped in Red Dead Redemption 1 that everyone was obsessed by. And I really wasn't expecting that. So we try and put a few characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing. But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by. There are other characters I think are funny and people don't even notice them. You know, or they see them in a completely different way.

Did you have a part in writing the letter?

Yeah, I can't remember if I wrote it. Either I wrote it or Mike wrote it or we both wrote it. I really can't remember, to be honest with you. But yeah, I certainly would have edited it. And Mike might have written it or I might have written it. I really can't remember.

It's so fascinating because that little piece of writing, of course you have thousands of pages. That little piece of writing gets like analyzed.

Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth. And if Mike was here, I'd ask him. He might remember. I can't remember. We do so much of those things. And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories. And some became very clear and some were still a little kind of opaque. But the general vibe was there was no Gavin. Either there was no Gavin or he'd long since left. So it's kind of a split personality, you know. And then we were going to over subsequent games that provide more information.

So in some sense, you yourself don't quite know. You kind of have an idea. So he could, like, which way do you lean more, theory one or two? Is he dead and the guy and Nigel's in denial or is there real communication going side to side?

No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality. And the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game, were we going to reveal that Gavin was dead or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac? You know, that was what we're still playing around with. I think the idea was that he was never going to meet, he was never going to meet Gavin in this game.

It's just fascinating because you have to think about all of that. You have to write all of that. You have to have those discussions. You have to have those debates.

And it has to feel fresh. That was like what we'd done before. Constantly looking as you do, you know, I think I did, you know, somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games, got to do stuff that's new. It can't repeat itself too much.

I mean, we also live in the age of the internet. Just like you realize there's like millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.

Thank God.

It's like, it's fascinating that they're having, think about people reading like James Joyce or something and thinking about the character, like breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about like arguing about different interpretations of it. To me, that in itself is also beautiful.

Yeah, we want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want, you want these discussions.

Yeah.

You know, and you want, as long as it feels tonally appropriate for this whole big sort of shaggy dog story experience you're making. It's Gavin was just about, and he was so weird, and he just was intrinsically just something funny about an English person screaming Gavin. I don't know why.

Yeah, some of that humor. I mean, there's certainly in Red Dead Redemption, there's humor, but there's a lot of it in Grand Theft Auto. And it's hard to put into words why that's funny, why it becomes mean, why it becomes viral, because it's just funny.

I know why I think it's funny, but what you can't, what I'm not good at doing at least, is going, this thing will become really popular online and this other thing won't. You can create this bunch of, you know, 50 different side things that people might get captivated by, and you just do not know what they're going to respond to.

How do you know when something's funny? You just feel it.

I know what I think is funny.

You just give away yourself.

Because it's ridiculous as well. That was just, there's nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin a lot. He just said it in a funny, I just thought it might be funny, and he just said it in such a funny way. And then it just became funny. We often have those side characters, and they're not that funny. And I think they're going to be hysterical. And then you put them in the game, and they're often, they're fine, but they're not amazing. That guy just brought that stuff to life.

Yeah. And there's a backstory too. I mean, Londoner and not.

Yeah, I know that was what, you know, just there's something sometimes fun. An English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny. I don't know why.

So about the strange man, AKA the man in black, is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto 5? Like, who is the strange man?

Well, the strange man was again, was someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead 1, and we, well, we're making Red Dead 1, and we'd made this, we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world. But, and we'd already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously. But unfortunately, we'd taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game, apart from the big fixed position ones. And we'd taken out the cars, and we'd taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians.

There is a connection between the main character and the, is it like a Jungian shadow type of situation?

Well, it's sort of, because he knows what you're up to. The connection is, and what's never really made clear is, does he know this about everybody? Like, is he following you or is he able, because of the pact he's made with evil forces, able to do this for everybody? And I don't think we necessarily ever clarify that. He's certainly able to do it for you.

I mean, there's, so narrative wise, there's techniques to reveal a kind of self-reflection analysis of the main character's thoughts. I mean, that's why I brought up the therapist with Michael. That was a really powerful, interesting thing to do in the video game. Like, I don't think I've seen, that's such a cool, I mean, there's a Sopranos element there with a therapist.

A little bit, yeah.

I really love an opportunity for a character to just self-reflect through that technique.

But it also changed depending on what you'd done.

Yes.

So it was sort of slightly, it wasn't as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done. So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point. And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander, was just funny because he was awful. So it was like LA, you're in therapy, it's very LA, but he's also very LA. He wants to write a book and betray you, which felt like a good twist. And it was, he felt like a Grand Theft Auto therapist. But just like the idea of making the player in a game, and games are intrinsically kind of physical.

I think to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, about video games that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is insanely specific, intricate details in the story, but also visually. It just added to the feeling that the world is real. So I have to ask, what are some of your favorite insanely specific, intricate details in RDR?

Those guys did an amazing job on those.

Yeah. I mean, I just, and there must have been a meeting and there must have been engineers and graphics designers.

I think just artists, modelers, I think, I don't think it was that hard.

Okay.

For that pun.

Thank you. Thank you for that. Arthur's hair and beard grow in real time. So gun maintenance matters, firearms get dirty and perform worse over time. Animal carcasses decompose realistically.

Yeah, you feel like they do.

That's still extremely rare in video games, that temporal aspect.

Yes.

That permeates through time. You know, NPCs remembering you.

That's the best. I mean, that's the thing I love. Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that, because I think it's super interesting.

It's really powerful.

To make them, yeah, really interesting. I think it just, it's a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content that is also systemic and procedural.

Yeah. Is it technically really difficult to do for the game, for the game to feel like it remembers you?

I think with modern tech, it's not that hard, but there's a lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting.

Yeah, to have a memory. So that's really powerful. The mud physics. So Arthur's boots get muddy and leave actual tracks. I mean, that's just incredible. Really, really incredible.

You know, we made a dusty game. Red Dead 1 is a super dusty game. You know, the problem with cowboys is that if you've tried to make a greatest hits of the cowboy game, and then you've got to make a sequel, you've got to come up with different geographies. So that's why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted a game that had snow and mud, because those were things you hadn't really seen in Red Dead 1. And then the challenge is how do you make mud good in the game? And the guys did an amazing job.

I mean, the snowstorm that starts the game, RDR 2, I don't remember the last time I've experienced anything like it, but you felt it. I don't know how the hell you do that. It's not just graphics, it's everything, everything together. I suppose some of the dialogue is really important.

Well, so the acting, they feel cold.

Yeah, that's right.

And they feel desperate. That was that feeling of sort of exodus, like you're running away from something that gives the game sort of energy at the start.

And it was at night. Oh man, it was just massive.

And there was a big group of them. The other con, you know, first game started up as a lone wolf, suddenly you're in this big group. So it felt very different.

In Arthur's body, bullet wounds persist. So that temporal consistency, that's really important. And then underweight Arthur looks gone, and overweight Arthur gets a gut and fuller face. Again, those like decisions that you make reveal themselves in the game across time, and they're consistent. I don't know. I did not see many games do that. It must be difficult to do, but to give that level of care to the details in that way across time and for specific graphical representations of things is incredible.

Yeah.

Do you have favorites? Where you were first like, this is amazing.

I think all of it, I think the way the whole, to me, the thing that I would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together. You know, the fact that each of those, they all feel like they belong together with each other. You made this cohesive, very, you know, quote unquote realistic for a video game experience, and all the details feel like they mesh.

Well, for me, everything about the horse, for a lot of people. Now testicles shrinking included. What's the process of deciding? The internet seems to really care about, I mean, they love the game so much, so they want to know if anything was cut. And I'm sure stuff was cut because you have to choose. What's the process of deciding what to cut, what the cut scenes like? Is there any scenes that you had to let go of that you really miss or wish you could have done in either GTA or RDR?

Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be. You know, I think there was always, there was a bit at the start of RDR where he'd had a baby who just died in Red Dead 2, and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too tough in some ways, but I think it gave him real, and he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby. And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with, because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting.

I think editing, editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down is an art form, but it's also just, it feels like torture because you're letting go of things you put so much love into.

Yeah, it can be changes. You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, let's change it, that could be, of course, that would be upsetting in some ways. Otherwise, you can care about it. But, you know, if I was over-involved in the big creative thing and he goes, okay, it's the right decision, I can probably live with that. Fine. I think sometimes for designers, when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really, really hard.

Is there DLCs like for RDR or GTA that you wish you had the time when you were there to have created?

Of course. There's always things I wish I'd done. I always wish I'd done more.

What would you have added? This is a fun like nerding out.

We, the internet knows we made a DLC, single player DLC for GTA 5 that never came out. And we were also never really worked on another game, but I liked the idea of it that was a GTA zombie game that would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun.

What was the GTA 5 DLC?

It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent.

Oh.

It was cute. It was, it never quite came together and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead 2. So there's always compromises. But it was, you know, I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of GTA 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards. Or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these extra things. So I would, I personally like to have done more of that in that company.

Does it make you a little bit sad that the gaming industry in general is moving towards more online, less single player DLC? Maybe that observation is incorrect, but it feels at this moment to me, it feels like it's easier to make a lot of money with online.

If you get it right.

If you get it right. And the company's a reason for that.

It's more corrupted and all of this.

Because there's so much power to the, what you did with Red Dead Redemption 2, I don't know how during that time you were able to pull that off, but that was like a breath of fresh air or in a time where everybody was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that. You go on and drop, again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character in video game history, single player.

We still love single player games. And I think as we started up Absurd, we did a lot of soul searching. And also a lot of like cynical looking at what goes well in the industry. Luckily, if you want to do what we're forced to do and also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single player games. You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP. It's just extremely hard. So luckily we are like focusing on what we're good at, which is open world single player games.

Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterwards that you didn't go with? So like worlds, I don't know, pirate games. I mean, I would love to see the notes, the possible options.

Never thought a lot about a pirate game. My son is obsessed by that game Sea of Thieves at the moment. So he's constantly saying, do a pirate game. Haven't really thought about it too much. We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game. And it never came together.

It's the Agent.

Agent in it had about five different iterations.

Oh, so good.

I don't think it works. I concluded, and I keep thinking about it sometimes. I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it. And I've concluded as an open, what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games, or it needs to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.

So for people who don't know, it would be hypothetically set in the 1970s Cold War era.

That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in current, we had so many different versions of this game. We worked on so many different teams.

But it would be more geopolitical like espionage.

Yeah, espionage.

And assassinations.

Yeah, assassinations. I don't know what it would have been, because it never really, we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it. We're doing the early work as you get the world up and running. It never, it never really found its feet in either of the.

So interesting.

And I sort of think I know why. Because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic. And they beat to beat to beat. You know, you've got to go here and save the world. You've got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want. And I want freedom. And I want to go over here and do what I want. And I want to go over and do what you want. And that's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do.

So interesting. So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio.

And cruise about.

Or ride a horse and just look at nature.

So lots of things would work as open world games, but I don't know if a spy does.

That's brilliantly put. But to me, there's such a espionage and assassinations and the geopolitical international context is so interesting, but you're right. I just want to listen to, what is it, Lazlo and.

Yeah. Well, you can't be able to save the world until you need this time pressure.

With a Russian accent or something. Yeah, wow. Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting.

And then we played around with a knight's concept that was, you know, knights and sort of trying to do a version of a mythological game that could have been fun and, you know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.

Knights would be going really far back in history.

Yeah, it would have to go. It never got to writing any of it. Just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas, but it was, it was something I thought I would never do and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.

You left Rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched Absurd Ventures, as we've been talking about. What do you miss about your time at Rockstar? Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?

Of course. It was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20 something years, 21 years or something.

Yeah.

It was, and I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it. And I was always living in New York. It was at times very intense and other times magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

The lows and the highs.

And the middles. It was just my life. You know, my life was that job and the people I knew in New York and my family. And we were doing something that was intense and innovative and, you know, both loved and hated by wider society in different ways and at different times and in this weird company that was constantly in trouble. So it was really fun.

Just even looking back at that time to today, how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?

Well, I was a child. I was a 25-year-old child who didn't know anything. And I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn't writing. And I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally scribble in it. And I still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video games, which were the least literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time. There was no room for that on PS1 games, really. Thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do it.

But as a writer, as a scholar of human nature, first of all, were you surprised that you were actually able, like you had it in you, through humor and tragedy, to create these incredibly compelling characters? Because I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he's going to be the greatest writer ever. And I feel like every 20-year-old says this. It's just James Joyce pulls it off.

Yes.

So were you surprised that you were actually able to do it? And how did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?

The team got better and better. So we could write in a more ambitious way. The animation got better, so we could support it in a better way. We could go deeper. Like, I mean, you couldn't go that deep on a PS2 game. So it was also just the technology evolved. I don't know. I felt like I was good at doing it and well trained for it. And I'd been in the right place at the right time. And I was both lucky and had a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce them to about 10 sentences, was amusing.

Lazlo mentioned that, it was another legend who you're still working with. He mentioned that you would lock yourself in a, writing dialogue for radio, I think. You would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed ice cokes. Is this accurate information?

Very accurate.

For which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process? Is the anchovies and onion pizza?

I would also get pepperoni on my half, just to be technically accurate. He wouldn't, because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days. But then he'd admit to me, he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer. So it was a sort of fake vegetarian. That was, I think we still do it now sometimes as a sort of moralize, but that began in 2001. The office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no, and I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard. It didn't have a window. I was literally sitting in a cupboard.

Just to give a little bit more of a shout out to Lazlo, what's it been like working with him for over 20 years? He's working with you still? He's a kind of this flamboyant, colorful personality, much loved for being a voice also on radio in the Grand Theft Auto games?

Yeah, and the rule was when he was the character, I would write the first pass of him. So I would, and I would get nastier and nastier over time.

Yeah, that's awesome.

So to the point when he's having his head shaved and, you know, being punished by everybody. Even game after game, he got worse. He began as his quiet, in GTA 3, he's a quite likable character. And then, you know, over the next 12, 13 years, it just got worse and worse. So I think he's glad not to be doing that anymore, but he did it with great grace. He's just a great partner because he likes, you know, like me, we just like making stuff. He likes to make stuff. He likes to work in new spaces. He's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that.

In the best possible way, yeah. Outside of the games you've participated in and created, what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?

Tetris.

Tetris.

Tetris Game Boy, no question.

Tetris and a Game Boy, yeah.

It was the perfect device for playing that game. I never liked it as much as anything else. My wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids, trying to get them for Christmas right now. It was the most addicted I ever was to anything in my life. I have far too many addictions that I was obsessed by, dreaming about it. And when you linked two together with the cable, and if I got four, it would push yours four up, it's like the perfect game design. So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.

Yeah, it's extremely simple.

Yeah.

Pure gameplay, no narrative.

No, no, nothing. No, no personality at all. It's a completely different thing.

Perfection.

But perfect in its way. Open world games can't be that perfect.

Yeah.

But you always dream of making something like that.

And Super Mario.

I think the N64 ones, all of those early 3D games were very amazing when you first saw them. On the N64, PS1, when you went, suddenly it was like these games, they were live and they're believable in a different way. I think that was very interesting.

It looks unlike anything else.

Nintendo has that look, doesn't it? Always.

Yeah. And I think that's the, they're known for this Nintendo polish of every pixel has a purpose.

Yes.

And what do you, I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible. It's really beautiful. And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of sort of the feeling of a world, but it's not quite open. World.

No, but it's amazing. It's almost like the new ones, they almost, to me, feel like Hitchcock. They're just speaking the language of video games. You know, like, you know everything's going to work this way and that way. It's quite systemic, but it's so, how it all glues together is so amazing. It feels like when you watch a Hitchcock film, it's not reality. He's speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong, with a very strong accent almost. It's very, very cinematic. It's not realism at all. And that's what those Zelda games kind of feel to me, like they are these amazing things that could only be video games.

For me, another really powerful open world is the Elder Scrolls world. It's role playing, it's fantasy, dragons, all that kind of stuff.

Todd is great at what he does.

Yeah.

They're slightly, they're more, I mean, from a technical perspective, we're always involved. I'd be in the same with the new games. We're constantly trying to find the balance between, you know, RPG, a role playing game and an action game. And, you know, and try to go, well, an action adventure game with RPG elements. And what does that mean? And I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space. But for me, it always just comes down to, oh, is it easy to play? Oh, are mechanics super slick? And then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive?

Yeah, I think the Elder Scrolls series have almost always leaned a little more towards the open world.

Yes. They're real RPGs.

Yeah.

You know, we've not really, the games that, you know, I've worked on, they've not really been RPGs. They've had RPG elements onto a story-driven action game. It's a kind of, just a slightly different emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing. He's brilliant at doing it.

And I think Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim are games where you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around.

And feel the world.

Feel the world, just feel the world.

And The Witcher, same thing.

And Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3, really interesting. They really tried to make every choice that you make genuinely branch the game towards not the illusion of choice. It's really, choice really does something. And that's really hard to pull off technically.

Yes. And hard to pull off. You're always sort of debating the sweet spot between that and a strong story. You know, and strong mechanics. It's hard to get them all. And you know, as a game making team, the whole, you know, the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

A difficult topic. You dedicated the book to your mom and dad. And in particular, you wrote to my father, who died while I was finishing the book. What have you learned about life from your dad?

To show up, to be present, to go to work every day, to love creative things. You know, he was a lawyer, but he was also a jazz musician. And he did both to the best of his abilities, you know, and to value family as more important than either of those things. You know, he was a present guy, I think. And, you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved, but loved films, loved music, wasn't into video games, but liked that we were doing weird things.

Was he proud of you?

Yeah, I think so. I hope so. And he was, for a lawyer, he really venerated, at some level, giving the man, the quote, unquote, the man the finger. Like, you know, whenever life goes crazy, he just was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous. And I think that, you know, he always wanted to answer people back, always give the silly comment. And I certainly, you know, taken that from him to my detriment probably, but it makes life more fun.

So you have a bit of that in you.

Unfortunately so, yes. Not good at shutting up, not good at toeing the line.

I think I speak for most of human civilization that fortunately you have that as part of who you are because it comes through your stories.

I think it made school difficult. You know, they sent me to this very formal school that was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s. And, but then they want, you know, I was always getting trouble just for, not for doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all of the time. Couldn't be quiet.

How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally yourself afraid of death?

Well, my father passed away in May. So a lot more since then, obviously. I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it? I don't know. Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly grow up and settled, of course, for them. I don't know. Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all.

What do you think about the nothingness? I mean, that in itself is terrifying.

Yeah, that is terrifying. I mean, I tend to, I tend to, you know, I've spent long periods of my life tormented by that stuff. The last few years, I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life and that we have some kind of spiritual or soul-based existence. I'm not quite sure if it matters if there is a God or not. We should probably live our lives the same way either way. But I tend to think that, you know, there is a metaphysical purpose to life and part of that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose.

Also, there's a component to your brain. When talking about Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, you said that you have been, by fortune, struck with a bit of a capacity for the grandiosity of feeling. So you feel the world deeply, sometimes romantic, sometimes overly romantic. You've said, I like this line, "Feelings may destroy you, but they're the best thing we have." So that ability to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you?

That's a really interesting question because it's obviously both. You know, at times it's both or times it's one or the other. When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel like you're connected to things, when you're seeing beauty in people and joy in experiences, of course, it's wonderful when you're feeling like, you know, bereft and set adrift by the world and you can't connect it to it in some way and you're lost and abandoned by God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is.

Do you think it's possible to have one without the other?

No.

Yeah.

No, of course not. When I think about growing up to the extent that I am capable of growing up, it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself, you know, going, okay, it's not perfect. I'm not perfect.

You said you often feel like a hack. Is that that self-critical part of your brain? Is that a feature or a bug?

That's an, I think it's the new thing that we're going to lean into, the bug feature.

Yeah.

It's both, isn't it? I mean, it cannot lead that self-critical brain. I think lots of people suffer from, and I think the internet is designed to induce. If you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online. It clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency. So it can also become a feature.

I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti, who's a legendary psychiatrist, student of the mind, about this. He worked with many famous creative people and he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius. And I thought, I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.

I'd rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far. There's a danger that negativity, for me, that negativity and consciousness become the same thing. You know, and sometimes I have to fight to not just be perpetually negative. And that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people and certainly has been for me. I think if you're trying to do, you know, good stuff and you're reflective inevitably and, you know, you live in this world of constant, constant criticisms by the internet.

And I do think in general, as you get older, that's a real challenge for people. You can see the different trajectories people choose to take, but it's easy to slip into cynicism and negativity into this Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, nihilistic kind of worldview. I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good. I think there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first.

I hope so. I mean, that's what I've been, I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully. I could not be more cynical than I was as a child. You know, I could not see goodness anywhere. I couldn't see, you know, I don't think late 1970s to early 1990s England was a great, it was a place of great, you know, optimism and naivete. It was brutal. And I was brutal, I was brutal within it. And I think I've become much more naive and tried to become more innocent in some ways and always tried to see the flawed good in people.

As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic Con. I've been a big fan of his for a long time. He writes amazing stuff at IGN and he has a great podcast. Everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it. Plus, I got to attend the Comic Con and just be there in the audience. And like we were saying offline, the LA Comic Con, it's the first Comic Con I've been to. It's just all kinds of real, genuine nerds, good-hearted.

Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah, brilliant.

It's just so much kindness and goodness and just simple joy in being a fan of a thing was there.

Yeah, which is what those things are all about.

Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time. And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast you did with Sonya Walker, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast. She has guests pick their five favorite most impactful books and so on. You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation, but you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom. Second one was Withering Heights by Emily Brontë, then Tender as the Night by F.

Middle March. It's the best novel written in English. War and Peace is one of the best novels written in Russian, I would argue. I think both of those are, because if you've only got one book, you want a long book.

Yeah, true.

And they're both books that kind of, it's something I was always trying to put into games and, you know, that feeling of all of life is here. You know, you've got love, death, violence, romance, the whole human experience in different ways. So I think that there's something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair. I used to love the novel, not the magazine, because the same thing, all of life is here.

You also spoke highly of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

I was obsessed by them in my 20s. Completely obsessed.

As one must be. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. And I think them as a double act is so amazing. You know, one helped discover the other and then died first and then suddenly it died in obscurity and then was rediscovered as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity, but into decline. I think it's that their relationship is itself very novelistic.

That, by the way, is a phenomenon of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still, that, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died in obscurity, nobody knows them and they become famous later.

Yeah.

That is just so interesting. That's such an interesting, you know, that Franz Kafka, and Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt, like destroyed. So that insecurity, speaking of the critical voice is just, and I think he's one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting. 1984, Brave New World.

Love 1984. Had never listened to it or read it. And then I think I did it on Talking Book or maybe read it, I can't remember, during COVID and became, I think I did both, became obsessed by it. And it's got elements of that creeping into A Bed of Paradise. But it's so good. I hadn't realized how good it was.

Yeah.

And it's so of the moment.

It's almost like because of his fame and it's almost like cliché and you think of the character.

And I remember the year 1984. This is, I remember the song. You know, there's too much. It can't be that good. And then it was that. I came to it completely cold. Just, oh, I should get work my way through this because it's another classic I haven't read. And then it's incredible.

And the book I've read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George Orwell. I don't know why exactly, but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism.

Well, you grew up in a communist country.

Yeah, maybe that's it, the roots of it.

I remember, you know, I was a kid in the Cold War in London and we were always terrified of Eastern Europeans. You were going to come and kill us all. And then I ended up marrying a Pole. And I was, and we had Ukrainians, you know, who worked for us and worked with us. And I was sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New York, surrounded with the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian, and he'd been in the Red Army. And I was like, history is so strange that you end up, the Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy.

Yeah.

You know, we face some of that now where you think these structures are permanent and they're going to change.

And you also mentioned that the three great World War II books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vassiliy Grossman, and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene. What makes for a great war book?

I think World War II is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously. And so you can get all these different kinds of stories. And there's so many good, I was just trying to come up with a range of one American, one British, one Eastern European, just to get different perspectives. But there's so many amazing World War II books about all kinds of stories. I think the most complete one, because it is this all of life being there, probably is Life and Fate, which is amazing.

And it was written by Vassiliy Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. And there's also just a deep philosophical component.

And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read. And it really, almost more than any other piece of art around the Holocaust, made me feel what you would feel like at that moment. And it's just an incredible piece of humanism.

And also just, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

It seems like that context reveals in the most pure way human nature and like what kind of, you know, in Man's Search for Meaning is when everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love for, in this case, his wife, is the thing that is a little flame that burns. And Vassiliy Grossman's small acts of kindness is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.

I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get, obviously it's in this Stalinist period and so they're all losing, they all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen. So there's a whole, and everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post the purges. But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building fighting in Stalingrad. And so they know at this moment they're dead anyway. And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin and all his nonsense.

And that was, you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism like it's trivially, it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don't think it's that trivial. It's this idealism of humans. It's like, why, you know, why can't, basically, why can't we all get along? There's a real compassion behind it. There's real love. And what you realize is there is, it's a real study, the 20th century of human nature that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized powers.

Well, I think, I thought a lot about that then, because I was taught by all these disappointed communists, you know, after '89, all of these English communists, you know, were like having to accept, discovering all these atrocities had happened in, you know, so it always fascinated me. And then you think about complexities or where one's own values are in the modern moment. And I say, you know, from, and whether either of them, any what we would call left now or call right now, does it have any bearing on the sort of communist era of those words?

Yeah, it does seem like freedom, individual freedom is a prerequisite.

For happiness.

For happiness, for, and a flourishing of a larger society. So there's, like you said, 1984 is pretty, I mean, it's a caricature.

But it is brilliant.

It's quite, it's actually also just a good story. That's my criticism of Brave New World. It's just poorly written. But I like Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century than does 1984.

I think 1984 with the fake wars and the way that it revealed everything and it was a setup for him. There's something, if he could have seen the internet, there's something, it's like an analog internet that world they build around the main character.

What advice would you give to a young person today about, let's say, career, how to have a career they can be proud of, how they can have a life to be proud of? You've had a non-standard life.

I've had a lucky life in which I have fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.

You've traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that happened.

Series of poor life decisions.

Yeah.

And I ran away. You know, I was, I mean, I ran away to South America. That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with a knife. That was a good decision.

Yeah.

I came to America. That was a good decision. I ran, came to LA. That's, I think, been a good decision. It's been fun to see a different side of America and be in a different creative environment. LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment. The wider entertainment industry stuff, I think that's been fun. What would I say? I would say when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well at.

Did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like this is, okay, this is interesting, this is new, this is different.

Not always, no, but I did the big times where the chance to move to America, for me, that was a big moment. My life was a mess.

That was weird timing. I read that Sam wrote you an email. In South America.

I literally, I was in South America, in Colombia when there was a war raging there.

Yep.

I was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills, age 25. My latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn't start work till nine, but the muggers started at eight. And so I was out walking along the beach at eight and these guys, this raster turned up who I'd been talking to the day before and started trying to talk to me. And then two guys came up to talk to him and I couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed the money or he'd bought me to them.

By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York. Whenever I'm in New York, there's always sirens.

Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA at least.

Yeah, but it's more distributed, it's more.

It's more spread out. You get a bit more quiet here.

Yeah.

And I loved the energy. You know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late and New York was really, really a fun experience for me.

You work with your brother Sam for many years. What do you admire about him as a creative mind, as a human being?

His drive and his vision early on to see what video games could become. He was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing. And I think that was, you know, people would laugh in our face about that in those days. And so to have someone that was strong and saying, no, no, we stay to the course and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.

Are you excited for the future of video games?

Yeah. I think I completely, I still look at, I'm glad you've spoken, I mean, you've spoken so kindly about our work, about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did. It's wonderful, but I just look at it and see problems and see things that we can do better. You know, I think it was always, try each time to do it better. And I've, you know, some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before. And I think it's just, I think the games can get so much better.

I just wish, I know you said video games take a lot less than they could, but I just wish it was faster. Like you've already made me fall in love with Absurdiverse and you've made me fall in love with the Better Paradise and now I'm going to sit depressed realizing I have to wait. I can, of course, read.

We should have some little short cartoons coming out in a while for Absurdiverse and more stuff coming in the next period. But yeah, it just takes a little bit of time. And I think, I mean, movies, big movies are four years plus from start to end.

Yeah.

You know, with all the legal stuff at the start, you know, we'll be about the same.

Yeah. And certain movies from idea to completion, I mean, take 10 plus years.

Yeah, a lot of that's just that development process that is really sometimes feels like it's designed to not make stuff.

A bit more of a specific advice, but on the topic of video games, what advice would you give to maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games? They're inspired by Red Dead. They're inspired of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you've created. Like how is it possible to have a chance of doing something like that?

I mean, it's part of the two ways. Try and do it cheaply with yourself and a small group or join a company that you think is doing it the right way. You know, and I think there's upsides to either of those. I think if you want to make something that's cinematic, AI is going to change some of this. But if you want to make something cinematic, you need resources. You can still make something that's really interesting that isn't super cinematic, but it's an interesting experience in some ways. But the second revolving actors and motion capture and one of those big experiences, it's going to cost some money. So therefore, if you want to do that, you've got to figure out what companies you want to work at and figure out how you get to work there.

Do you have hope for AI helping with some of the video, some of the video generation, some of the world generation, some of the open world assistance in generating the world?

Yes, limited. Absolutely. If used correctly, it will be a great tool. If used incorrectly, it will lead to loads of generic stuff.

Yeah.

You know, I've been in games for 29 years and all the time the piece of tech that's going to make making games much easier and much cheaper is about to turn up and all that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive. So I'm always nervous about saying, finally we have that bit of tech that makes our lives easier, but it looks as if it might be able to do that when you use it in the right way. If you use it, you know, if you use it to try and as a substitute for creativity, it's going to be really generic.

Big ridiculous question. What's the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here? Of life, of existence. Why are we here?

To watch the universe. The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.

Consistently more and more interesting ways, yeah. What role does love play as part of that?

It's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material is irrelevant. So the only things of value are these immaterial things. You know, I do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me.

Well, Dan, from the bottom of my heart, speaking of love, thank you.

What a pleasure. Thank you, man.

Thank you for everything you've created in this world. Me and millions of diehard fans of your games are forever grateful. I know there's a lot of people that would like to say thank you to you.

Just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear.

Yeah.

It was never me. It was always me sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.

Well, I hope you keep being self-critical and creating awesome stuff in the world. And we can't wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. And thank you so much for talking today, brother.

Thank you for having me. What a privilege.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Houser. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway, one of Dan's and my favorite writers. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.