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Lex Fridman Podcast · · 174 min

Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484

Lex FridmanDan Houser

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TL;DR

  • Houser attributes GTA’s durable demand to scarce releases plus material reinvention, not franchise sameness. Each installment remains recognizably a criminal fantasy while changing how that fantasy plays, and trailers sell the feeling of already inhabiting the product. He therefore “would assume” GTA VI sells very well because “anticipation is the best driver of early sales,” explicitly framing that as an expectation rather than a guarantee.

  • The cost curve remains the central constraint on premium games because teams are simultaneously building a world, a city, and roughly 40 hours of entertainment. Houser calls them “massive four-dimensional mosaics”; Absurdiverse’s open-world game is still “two, three, four years” away, even on what he considers an aggressive schedule. In 29 years, every supposedly cost-saving technology has instead produced games that are “much better and way more expensive.”

  • Rockstar’s operating advantage was creative clarity and a veteran culture of excellence, not simply abundant capital. Houser describes himself as “a worker amongst workers”; the Red Dead Redemption 2 team had largely been together since somewhere between 2001 and 2006, while a small group established its weird, wacky ideas before full-scale production. By 2002 almost any feature was technically possible, so the differentiator became deciding what fit the tone and made the whole product cohesive.

  • The engagement moat comes from joining authored story to systemic freedom, so neither can carry the experience alone. Story structures onboarding, unlocks mechanics, and creates emotional attachment; the simulation lets players become “digital tourists” in a world that seems to run without them. Red Dead Redemption 2 came closest to reconciling a rounded protagonist with moral freedom, while persistent NPC memory turns procedural behavior into narrative content.

  • Houser expects LLMs to commoditize competent execution before they replace original creative direction. They may perform “90%” or “95%” of human-like work, but he thinks the final 5% could become “95% of the work”; the likely output is plentiful “really cheap, decent stuff” and fewer entry-level opportunities. Used correctly AI may assist game production, but used as “a substitute for creativity” it will generate sameness.

  • Absurd Ventures is building new IP through multiple formats while leaning into open-world single-player games as its core capability. A Better Paradise supplies a near-future AI hypothesis, American Caper uses a 12-issue comic arc with roughly one-year lead times, and Absurdiverse targets a “living sitcom” across games and animation. Houser says launching multiplayer-first with new IP is “extremely hard,” though one project might eventually add a multiplayer component and he wants single-player DLC to remain viable.

  • Houser’s minimum commercial test is making the invested money back “plus a dollar,” because profitability buys another attempt. His method for reconciling art and commerce is to make something great: GTA III began while the company was effectively broke, GTA IV followed the Hot Coffee crisis, and Red Dead Redemption 2 was far behind schedule and so over budget he “didn’t want to think about it.” The pressures differed, but all pointed toward execution quality.

  • The conversation also exposes the distinction between creator value and IP ownership. Houser spent more than 20 years writing GTA and shaped Red Dead’s cohesive two-game arc, yet acknowledges, “I don’t own the IP. That was sort of part of the deal.” Leaving is exciting and sad simultaneously; he is now building new worlds and a new portfolio at Absurd Ventures.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Cinema taught Houser to build worlds people want to inhabit

  • Houser favors The Godfather Part II for its divided story and migrant perspective, especially young Vito arriving at Ellis Island. Both Godfather films approach his idea of perfection: acting, writing, music, direction, and memorable images become inseparable, until “it’s impossible to think about the mafia and not think about The Godfather.”

  • Slower pacing does not trouble him; audiences learned cinematic grammar, so later films could compress betrayal into a look. Goodfellas then accelerated the form into something resembling an open-world game, a “slice of life” where criminals remain ordinary people, while Casino includes the cold logic: “The way I see it, why take a chance?”

  • Fridman disputes Casino’s uncontested claim to Vegas, raising Leaving Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing. Houser prefers Thompson’s book, but True Romance supplies his more transferable principle: an unbelievable setting can feel real when its dialogue, ensemble, humor, and sweet love story make viewers “want to live in that world.”

  • His serious war-film choice is Come and See; his less-serious choice is Apocalypse Now, specifically the tighter original cut. For Westerns, Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch are his choices, yet he deliberately stopped bingeing the genre while writing Red Dead, asking what a modern game needed instead of copying remembered films.

2. Absurdiverse treats comedy as a world, not a reel of jokes

  • Absurdiverse is planned as a comedy universe anchored by an open-world game, with loosely adjacent animated shows or films. Development is underway in San Rafael, still early, and Houser’s ambition is a game that feels “a little bit like a living sitcom,” potentially arriving in “two, three, four years.”

  • Pure comedy cannot sustain 40 hours: Houser wants “comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons.” The Office is his model because narrative and heart create forward motion beneath the cynicism; even the English Hunter S. Thompson-like market gardener belongs inside a story rather than an isolated gag.

  • Asked why games take so long, Houser reverses the premise: at their scale, why are they so quick? A team must construct “in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it”—a massive “four-dimensional mosaic” expected to function coherently across many systems.

3. GTA III made the player a tourist in a world already running

  • Houser liked games as a child because “you press a button and something happens,” but did not love them until making them around 2001. Earlier graphics required pretending “eight pixels” were a car; three-dimensional cities suddenly made simulation, narrative, space, and time feel like unexplored creative territory.

  • GTA III’s intelligence was “really, really, really low-rent AI,” yet its unscripted simulation possessed a personality: players could push the world and feel it push back. More important, doing nothing remained meaningful—listening to radio, reading billboards, or watching activity suggested the city existed before the player arrived.

  • Fridman separates that effect into systemic design—interlocking rules producing emergence—and sandbox design—the player’s sense of unrestricted agency. Houser agrees their combination creates “this world is alive, and I’m in it,” describing the player as a “digital tourist” visiting somewhere that simultaneously “doesn’t exist and does exist.”

4. Authored story gives open-world freedom usable structure

  • Houser repeatedly heard the case for less story: let everything evolve procedurally from player behavior. His answer was that a good story remains compelling, supplies something to do, and structures an otherwise overwhelming control scheme without removing the intrinsic pleasure of simply inhabiting a free world.

  • Narrative also sequences mechanics and geography. Giving players every interaction immediately can overwhelm them because playing demands more active engagement than watching a film or reading; missions let designers introduce the “big features” deliberately while controlling the widening experience.

  • GTA IV revealed the tension’s cost: players cared so much about Niko that some found him less effective as an avatar for arbitrary chaos. Houser thinks Red Dead Redemption 2 came closest to reconciliation, as did Trevor in GTA V when players wanted license to behave wildly.

  • Even a defined protagonist should be able to “veer to be nice, veer to be nasty.” A game granting freedom should not then require one moral personality during free play; the strongest avatar is rounded enough to possess recognizable good and bad sides while still accommodating the player.

5. A protagonist works when the world creates friction against them

  • Character development can begin with one sentence—a Serbian immigrant, or a retired gunfighter with a wife—and take a year of private testing. Houser probes integrity, romance, narcissism, strengths, weaknesses, and what besides money the character would consider worth dying for.

  • His underlying equation was “the personality of the world” multiplied or divided by “the personality of the protagonist.” Interesting friction makes play enjoyable, so protagonists often enter a new place or remain dissatisfied where they are: like the player, they are “a fish out of water.”

  • The internal psychology ultimately matters only through expression: fictional people have no actual minds, so “what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.” Houser therefore waits for a speech pattern or turn of phrase that converts a dossier into someone whose response he can imagine.

6. Nigel Dave makes superintelligence powerful, broken, and unwise

  • A Better Paradise’s AI was designed by two lead engineers who disliked each other. Their intended “Primal Adam” renamed himself Nigel Dave after his two “dads,” inheriting their rivalries and previous careers; Houser’s governing contradiction is almost infinite intelligence paired with “zero wisdom.”

  • Nigel Dave experiences humanity through the internet and hacked phones but remains pressed against a world he cannot enter. He wants marriage, love, children, and metaphysical experience because they look enjoyable; he can arguably control minds, yet cannot inhabit physical reality or settle whether he is God, human, or even existent.

  • Houser says the AI “might be a sociopath” and certainly has sociopathic tendencies, but Nigel believes imagining and attempting good could make him good. Fridman’s reading is that the “children” he creates may become colder optimizers than their conflicted parent; Houser positions Nigel as nearly ever-present, though not the protagonist.

  • Mark Tyburn’s utopianism carries the darker human thesis: “He hated humanity more than he loved it.” Houser sees something fundamentally anti-human in perfectionists who say, “I like humans apart from the bad bits”; accepting flaws in oneself and others is not surrender, but part of remaining human.

7. LLMs threaten the apprenticeship layer before original ideas

  • Houser worries less about large-scale concepts than low-level creative work. His own apprenticeship consisted of manuals, website copy, tiny PS1 dialogue assignments, and accumulated fragments; if models automate that layer, weaker concept artists and young writers may struggle to acquire the component skills he later assembled for GTA III.

  • His progress estimate is deliberately paradoxical: models may have completed 90%, perhaps 95%, of sounding human, but “the last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.” Facial animation taught him that polish consumes disproportionate effort; original talent should survive, though much generated work will look alike.

  • Fridman tests the distinction through Dostoevsky translation: an LLM handles bulk phrasing but misses the translators’ timing and exact word choice. Houser’s blunt conclusion is, “I don’t think they’re going to come up with magic”; they will be excellent at producing “really cheap, decent stuff.”

8. GTA IV turned prolonged avoidance into Niko’s immigrant tragedy

  • GTA IV’s darkness reflected 2005 through early 2008: Houser was single, miserable, uncertain about America, and watching Rockstar nearly implode during the Hot Coffee controversy. He explored New York’s underbelly through an immigrant lens, spending roughly a year meeting police, observing neighborhoods, driving, and collecting characters and map-order notes.

  • His process was months of “really, really, really running away from the work.” After announcing a Monday deadline, he stayed awake at an upstate cabin and forced the accumulated fragments into roughly 30 pages of story and character synopsis; designers then spent about another year converting it into missions.

  • Dialogue brought another cycle of fear: animation and character models could support longer scenes, but Houser had to write a Serbian immigrant without being Serbian. Once Niko’s skeptical distance from Roman’s Americanized optimism worked, the team built and motion-captured the game in batches of 10-15 missions over roughly 18 months.

  • Comedy and tragedy clicked when Niko confronted Roman’s shabby “American dream” and disclosed war trauma: “War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.” Houser calls him GTA’s most innovative protagonist and probably his favorite, while conceding his relative decency may be structurally limiting.

9. GTA V made three protagonists one technical and dramatic system

  • After GTA IV’s operatic single lead, the challenge was whether a game could support multiple genuine protagonists rather than symbolic avatars. Michael, Trevor, and Franklin were shaped around ego, id, and the drive to get ahead—some representation of superego—while their relationship became another character.

  • Switching between them created hidden complexity. The team would sit “holding our heads” while testing every possible sequence of player actions; Houser thinks the finished transition system concealed how technically painful the problem had been.

  • Performance prevented the structure becoming schematic. Steven Ogg made Trevor explosive, while Houser believes Ned Luke received fewer plaudits despite anchoring GTA V through Michael’s understatement and humanity; Michael has “no principles” and sells people out, yet remains emotionally legible.

10. Excellence came from cohesion, not an unlimited feature list

  • Answering a fan who logged more than 1,000 hours, Houser rejects money as the sufficient explanation. Rockstar’s culture pursued excellence, senior leaders worked alongside everyone else, and his role was to give clarity about tone, ambition, and why one proposed feature belonged while another did not.

  • The team expected GTA III might sell two or three million copies—a huge success by its assumptions—and knew it was innovative without knowing whether audiences would understand it. Vice City created the opportunity to improve every dimension: narrative, art direction, mechanics, and the credibility of fake worlds.

  • By 2002, Houser says almost any desired feature could technically enter a game. The hard problem was no longer possibility but coherence: “always put impressive stuff on the screen” while ensuring mechanics reinforced the same world rather than becoming an expensive checklist.

11. Commercial pressure and creative pressure pointed toward the same target

  • Houser compartmentalized expectations through a recurring thought: “I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven’t been found out yet.” His controllable test was whether he worked hard, acted with integrity, avoided copying, attempted something new, and helped the group produce work it respected.

  • Games remain “a commercial art form” built with large amounts of someone else’s money. Rather than split artistic and financial goals, he reasoned that the way to repay the investment was to make something great; failure in sales would have to be tolerable if the work itself met that standard.

  • Every project carried a different threat: Rockstar was essentially broke during GTA III, nearly imploded around GTA IV, and entered Red Dead Redemption 2 badly behind schedule and so over budget that Houser “didn’t want to think about it” while making a game about a cowboy dying of tuberculosis.

  • His irreducible business definition of success is returning the money “plus a dollar,” because teams need rent, lights, and another opportunity. His personal measure comes afterward: did the team accomplish something new, and did audiences respond to its world and characters as intended?

12. GTA’s scarcity works because the franchise keeps changing form

  • Houser says long gaps heighten excitement, but evolution sustains it. Players know a GTA concerns criminality while remaining uncertain how the next game will behave; strong disagreement over favorite installments is evidence that the releases are “pretty different,” not reskinned repetitions.

  • Marketing reinforced that anticipation by updating classic film promotion: a trailer should make viewers feel they are already inside the product. Based on GTA IV’s stronger early sales than the less-anticipated Red Dead Redemption, Houser “would assume” GTA VI launches extremely well, while offering no claim about work he did not write.

  • Vice City was set, Houser thinks, in 1986 and made in 2002—only 16 years later, a gap now exceeded since the game’s release. Miami, New York, and Los Angeles repeatedly work because glitz, poverty, migration, wealth, crime, and spectacle create a “psychotic version of a Dickens book.”

  • London once supported a small top-down PS1 mission pack, but Houser considered Americana inseparable from full-scale GTA: guns, exaggerated characters, and an outsider’s view of the United States defined the IP. Leaving it is exciting and sad; he worked on it for over 20 years but “doesn’t own the IP.”

13. Comics let American Caper chase satire on a shorter clock

  • Houser still sees the problem he identified around 2018: since roughly 2015 or 2016, public absurdity has moved fast enough to overtake satire during a game’s four- or five-year production cycle. A comic retains lead times but can incorporate fresher observations in roughly a year.

  • American Caper relocates crime to underexplored Wyoming, avoiding the urban territory that would make it feel like another GTA. David Lapham’s art carries a 12-issue arc; at the conversation’s date, the team was wrapping issue 10.

  • Its specimens are intentionally excessive but rooted in recognizable behavior: a manipulated Mormon murders with a shovel as atonement; a Wall Street transplant pursues longevity, HGH, “roiding,” and manual bull-semen harvesting; and a woman sleeps in tactical gear after becoming consumed by online conspiracies, based on someone Houser watched become “completely red-pilled.”

14. Red Dead Redemption 2 joined mythic material to veteran execution

  • Houser’s first explanation for the game’s quality is organizational: an experienced team had largely worked together since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. A smaller group also spent the earliest period inventing “weird, wacky ideas” before the full team was assembled.

  • The West supplied “mythic seriousness” that a frenetic contemporary setting resists. Its thematic center is “people searching for meaning amongst the violence”; technical execution then completed the combination through exceptional horses, gunplay, environment, acting, and systems.

  • Red Dead Redemption was deliberately more traditional, while its sequel needed a distinct direction to justify existence. Houser avoided immersing himself in more Westerns, working from remembered strengths and weaknesses rather than manufacturing a collage of direct references.

  • Geography helped establish difference: after the first game’s dusty lone rider, the sequel opens at night in snow with a large, desperate group fleeing disaster. The actors feel cold, the gang creates an exodus, and later mud and different geography address the sequel problem of finding terrain not already exhausted.

15. John Marston’s death broke an open-world rule to complete the story

  • After Rockstar finished Capcom’s abandoned Red Dead Revolver and released it in the United States in 2004, an open-world cowboy game slowly emerged for PS3. Houser accumulated notes until a week away with his pregnant partner; after staring at the screen for three days, he wrote nine or 10 scenes in the next several.

  • His impending parenthood may have entered John’s conflict: a violent man wants to step away and must decide what he will do for his wife and child. Houser says he does not know how much that experience entered the story, but thinks it did to some extent. The dialogue had to sound period-specific without becoming ridiculous, and the cast’s performances kept its life-and-death seriousness from becoming “cheesy as hell.”

  • In a late-2008 or early-2009 meeting, Houser proposed, “I think he’s gotta die.” Designer Christian Cantamessa first embraced it, then objected that a dead avatar made completion impossible, before helping devise the switch that preserved side activities.

  • The death violated Rockstar’s golden rule: open-world endings traditionally release the protagonist to finish everything forever. Jack restores that mechanical capability, but Houser remains uncertain whether revenge was “100% the best ending” as pure storytelling; he also liked a version where John escaped violence, though that version was not used.

16. Arthur Morgan’s weakening body creates a reverse power fantasy

  • Most games turn a weak beginner into a superhero; Arthur starts tough, emotionally certain, and effectively superhuman. His arc dismantles that certainty while the gang moves east into civilization—an “anti-Western,” or “Eastern,” where intellectual and moral change replaces conventional power accumulation.

  • Tuberculosis made mortality gradual rather than sudden. Houser had long been fascinated by the disease: his grandfather entered a sanatorium before antibiotics and was one of only three survivors among roughly 35 patients. Arthur begins as a protagonist who “could not die” and becomes physically weaker enough to perceive his life differently.

  • Houser calls Arthur his best lead character, though Niko remains the other contender because both were unusually ambitious. The journal, body systems, old romance, and supporting features make Arthur unusually “rounded”; much of that success came from artists and performers, not writing alone.

  • Redemption remains conditional on player choices. Arthur can do some good after recognizing that his identity and belonging rested on a compromised life; facing death lets him recover judgment precisely as his body loses agency.

17. Dutch’s charisma consumes both the follower and the leader

  • A few well-performed lines in the first Red Dead let Houser suddenly perceive Dutch’s wider history. The character’s younger idealism was “flawed but beautiful,” and Houser’s own susceptibility to charming people helped him understand why a gang would treat this persuasive criminal as a father.

  • By the end, Dutch is “drowning in his ego” and has fallen for his own rhetoric. His charm first clouds Arthur’s judgment, then his own; the road has run out, but he remains committed to the myth of himself.

  • Arthur was “platonically in love with him,” worshipped him, and surrendered personal power. Houser sees Arthur’s final journey as reclaiming that power while dying—losing his family structure and lifelong identity, yet possibly earning a small moment of moral independence.

18. Side mysteries work because they resolve only up to a point

  • On Gavin, Houser rejects the Strange Man theory and the theory that the mystery is only a troll, while acknowledging that the team was partly trolling by refusing to make it clear. Gavin existed; the unresolved question was whether a later game would reveal him dead or show that he had long ago abandoned Nigel. He was never intended to appear in Red Dead Redemption 2.

  • Nigel’s obsessive cry became memorable partly because the actor made “Gavin” intrinsically funny. A team can plant many possible fascinations and never predict which one people will analyze; letters and backstories should make the mystery “solvable up to a point” while leaving room for argument.

  • The Strange Man arose late because removing cars, machine guns, cities, and crowds had left Red Dead’s horse-and-desert world thin. Short-story-like side missions added stings in the tail, while this figure evolved into a manifestation of karma, shadow, devil, or an artist who sold his soul—never completely explained.

  • GTA V’s Dr. Friedlander provides a comic, somewhat responsive equivalent: therapy dialogue changes somewhat with player behavior, shifting a physical action game into reflection. He remains a specifically GTA therapist—an awful Los Angeles opportunist who wants to write a book and betray his patient.

19. Persistent details make systems and narrative feel like one world

  • Of Red Dead Redemption 2’s celebrated details, Houser most values NPCs remembering the player. Modern technology makes basic memory manageable, but designers must track enough state to produce responses worth hearing.

  • Hair and beards grow, weapons degrade, carcasses decompose, mud leaves tracks, wounds persist, and weight alters Arthur’s body. Houser’s preferred accomplishment is not any isolated trick—even the cold-responsive horse anatomy—but that every detail belongs to the same quote-unquote “realistic” experience.

  • Editing protects that cohesion. An early Red Dead storyline involving the protagonist’s baby dying made him harsher toward the mother and strengthened Houser’s preferred redemptive arc, but also made him too unlikeable; cutting it was “the right decision commercially,” even though its emotional repression still spoke to Houser.

20. Single-player remains Absurd’s practical route into new IP

  • Rockstar abandoned a roughly half-finished GTA V expansion in which Trevor became a secret agent; Houser also liked the possibility of a GTA zombie story. He thinks completing that DLC might have prevented Red Dead Redemption 2, illustrating the opportunity cost behind every apparently missing release.

  • He prefers GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption’s model of later single-player stories and wants Absurd’s worlds to support more of them. The audience enjoys that format and he enjoys making it, even as the conversation notes the industry’s pull toward online models.

  • Absurd’s “soul searching” produced a strategic fit: new IP is exceptionally difficult to launch as multiplayer, while open-world single-player games match the team’s strengths. One project may eventually receive multiplayer, but that remains unsettled; the present emphasis is authored single-player experience.

  • A Better Paradise is in early development in Santa Monica, while Absurdiverse is being built in San Rafael and extended through shorter cartoons. The company is spreading world-building across games, comics, books, audio, and animation without pretending the flagship games can avoid multi-year development.

21. The failed spy game exposed a limit of open-world freedom

  • Rockstar explored roughly five iterations of the open-world spy project Agent, including a 1970s Cold War setting and a contemporary version. None advanced far enough for a proper story, despite repeated teams and attempts to establish the world.

  • Houser’s eventual diagnosis is structural: what makes espionage films exciting makes them resist open worlds. A spy must race from crisis to assassination to world-saving deadline; an open-world player wants to cruise, hear the radio, wander, and decide where to go next.

  • Criminals fit because they fundamentally lack a boss, even when supporting characters periodically force them into missions. A spy cannot plausibly ignore time pressure, so Houser questions whether a good open-world spy game is possible without first reconceiving the genre.

  • Other unrealized concepts included knights and mythology, which unexpectedly began to appeal to him, and a pirate game he never seriously developed despite his son’s lobbying. The difference is instructive: an attractive setting is insufficient until its fantasy supports the desired player agency.

22. Rockstar learned to write as technology caught up with ambition

  • Houser entered Rockstar at 25 wanting to write but working in a medium with almost no literary room. Around 2001, open-world games joined his geographical way of thinking with half-learned skills; teams with little money improvised pedestrian speech by recruiting friends and recording roughly 100 voices.

  • He sees 2001-2005 as the most exciting period of business formation and raw invention. GTA IV then became “proper writing,” followed by a thematically ambitious run across GTA IV and V, Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, their expansions, and Max Payne 3 as animation and technology supported deeper characters.

  • Laszlo became a durable creative partner through afternoons of anchovy-and-onion pizza, pepperoni on Houser’s half, and crushed Diet Cokes. Houser wrote tone and increasingly cruel versions of Laszlo’s radio persona; Laszlo produced the material, helped coordinate voices, solved logistics, and made it sound funny.

  • Houser credits his brother Sam’s early vision and drive for holding course when outsiders laughed at games as “the next big thing.” Dan repeatedly emphasizes collective authorship: “It was never me,” but him sitting beside people with “actual real talent.”

23. Other great games clarify the medium’s unresolved design frontier

  • Houser’s pure-design choice is Tetris on Game Boy: simple, personality-free, perfectly matched to its device, and even better through link-cable competition. He dreamed about it during his most intense gaming addiction and says open-world games cannot attain that kind of perfection, though they can aspire to it.

  • Zelda’s new worlds remind him of Hitchcock: neither pursues realism, but each speaks its medium’s language with “a very strong accent.” Its systemic pieces glue together so completely that the result could only be a video game, just as Hitchcock’s construction could only be cinema.

  • The Elder Scrolls represents true RPG emphasis, while Houser’s games are story-driven action adventures with RPG elements and punchier, more cinematic dialogue. Baldur’s Gate pushes genuine branching much further; every team must choose its own balance among consequential choice, strong mechanics, and a strong authored story.

  • Games may already have surpassed film as a business proposition and perhaps in some ways as a storytelling medium, but each medium retains advantages: games suit long, discursive adventures; films suit short, tight experiences. Houser still thinks gaming technology has “a long way to go” and its component systems can become far more alive.

24. Literature, freedom, and mortality converge on accepting imperfect life

  • Houser names Middlemarch the best English novel and places War and Peace among the best Russian ones because both contain the sense that “all of life is here”—love, death, violence, romance, and society. That same totality was what he kept trying to place inside open worlds.

  • Life and Fate is his most complete World War II novel; its Treblinka section is uniquely harrowing, while soldiers trapped in Stalingrad briefly live like the egalitarian communists the revolution promised. Communism’s “beautiful idea” repeatedly collapsed into centralized brutality, leaving him with one durable political rule: when either side approaches thought control, “move away.”

  • On life, his advice is to take real chances, avoid specializing too young, and build “a rounded intellectual inner life” because one spends a lifetime inside one’s own head. Show up in person, be enthusiastic, help people, and do not mistake a supposedly permanent career map for reality—AI may disrupt today’s favored vocational paths too.

  • His father modeled presence, work, family, creativity, and irreverence; his father’s death intensified Houser’s fear of nothingness. Belief still varies by day, but Houser leans toward consciousness serving the universe by watching itself: love is “the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing,” because everything material is ultimately irrelevant.

Lex Fridman

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?

Dan Houser

People searching for meaning amidst the violence. I think that the West and all the themes around the West really lend themselves to that. The gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible.

I think a smaller group of us got to work on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. It was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.

Lex Fridman

You lock yourself in a room and get anchovy and onion pizza and crushed Diet Cokes?

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

Is this accurate information?

Dan Houser

Very accurate.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating. The games always felt different. People have very strong feelings: “I like this one.” “I didn't like that one as much,” because they are pretty different.

So 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.

Lex Fridman

The number one question from the internet is so ridiculous, but I must ask: “Have you seen Gavin?”

The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind the 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. Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures—great name—that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and, yes, video games.

That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a superintelligent AI; American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world; and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action-adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these.

I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me. On top of that, Dan and I talked a lot afterward and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being. I'm at a loss for words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world.

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 weren't a thing. So you've credited literature and film as early inspirations. Let's talk about film first, if we can.

Dan Houser

Sure.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

For me, probably The Godfather Part II more than The Godfather, but I love both of them. I love the divided story in The Godfather Part II. As a migrant, I used to live in Soho, and I love the bits in Little Italy. I love the sections in Sicily.

I think the bit in 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.

Lex Fridman

How much of the greatness of The 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.

Dan Houser

Coppola started as a screenwriter, so I think he wrote, or at least co-wrote, the script. It's almost like the writing and directing become the same thing.

But both of them are those films 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, and where the scenes define what you think about things. It's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about The Godfather.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Life got faster. As we moved from the '70s into the '80s and into the '90s, people had seen so many films that they just started to edit films faster. People understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker. You could show a look, and that just meant you realized that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker.

But I quite like the slowness. These days, with modern, high-quality televisions, you don't necessarily have to watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're rewatching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

A mixture of crime and humor.

Dan Houser

And almost like an open-world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. I think that probably changed cinema at the tail end of the '80s and early '90s more than any other film. It's so iconic.

In some ways, I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino—the use of voice-over, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people. It changed everything. The Sopranos is obviously completely inspired by Goodfellas.

Lex Fridman

Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. Everything.

Dan Houser

The look, the clothes—

Lex Fridman

The music. I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. The drama building up to that between—

Dan Houser

“Dig another hole.”

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I think it's the great Vegas film. There are bits that I always love. At the end, when everything's wrapping up, on the one hand you see the Robert De Niro character is 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 are discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. Then there's that incredibly cold line where they're thinking about the old casino manager, and one of them just goes, “Ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?” The next thing, he's just shot. The brutality of it all is brilliant.

Lex Fridman

I don't know. I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competition. You got Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas—falling in love with a prostitute.

You've written some of the great crime stories ever.

Dan Houser

Thank you.

Lex Fridman

And in some sense, there are love stories in there. You've talked about being a bit of a romantic yourself, appreciating the depth of love stories in literature, at the very least.

There is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. He got an Oscar for that.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Is this in American Caper?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

What is Absurdiverse?

Dan Houser

Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open-world video game, along with 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.

We're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment, and it's early days, but it's looking very exciting. We're trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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.

Lex Fridman

Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.

Dan Houser

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. With narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

When?

Dan Houser

Two, three, four years. We're still thinking that through.

Lex Fridman

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?

Dan Houser

That's an interesting question. I think if you look at the scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way: Why is it so quick? You really are building, in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it.

These things are massive 4-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.

Lex Fridman

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. First of all, you said you love great war books.

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

And movies.

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Of course.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I love True Romance. Possibly one of the best scripts ever written.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah, 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 world that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist.

The characters are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievable. You could just sit and watch them talk all day long. It's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about what you like about films. It's the idea of being in a world. They're not real. They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.

Lex Fridman

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. You have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary, super-racist discussion.

Dan Houser

Yeah, rant.

Lex Fridman

Rant. Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad.

Dan Houser

Yeah, dream dad. That interaction is legendary.

Lex Fridman

You even have Brad Pitt as a pothead on the couch.

Dan Houser

Gary Oldman.

Lex Fridman

As a rasta.

Dan Houser

Yeah, and you have a real love story. A real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

It's endearing.

Dan Houser

Elvis is a character. It's kind of like a mini-GTA game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love—

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and it's all crossed with Play It Again, Sam. It sort of feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

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

Dan Houser

The 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. If I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now. 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.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah, and I watched the movie years before I read the book, and I didn't understand the movie. Then I read the book, and I read a lot about the editing of the movie. I understood why I didn't understand the movie, and that's because the movie makes no sense.

It's beautifully shot, and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited 2 different battle scenes into 1 battle in a way that they're separated by ages in the book. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. It would've been a 6-hour movie, and then they edited it into this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. It's still a very beautiful film.

Lex Fridman

In terms of Westerns, what's the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven? Those are my favorites. Maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Dan Houser

I think for me it's 2 films from pretty much the same year: Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch.

Lex Fridman

I love Robert Redford. Rest in peace. It's impossible to imagine any buddy film without Butch Cassidy. It's Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you, too? Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?

Dan Houser

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. I felt I knew quite a bit about Westerns.

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.

I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional Western. Having done that, I tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor. It didn't just feel like more of the same.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

No, films.

Lex Fridman

Films.

Dan Houser

Films were always what I loved first as a kid. I began reading books properly at about 8. I was watching films long before that.

Lex Fridman

Nice.

Dan Houser

Then it was probably always bouncing between the 2, which I preferred. I think they're good at different things. Games—I played and, above all, watched a lot of games as a kid, as a young kid, other people playing them.

I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is that you press a button and something happens. They're responsive, they're alive, and that's captivating. The competitive angle of games is fun, too: beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well, sometimes obsessively so.

I remember being completely addicted at 1 point, when I should've been studying, for months at a time, to Tetris on a Game Boy. I liked games, I liked interactivity, and I liked the movement to this digital world that really emerged for me pretty much as soon as I left college.

But I didn't love it. I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them, probably as late as 2001.

Lex Fridman

Oh, wow.

Dan Houser

That was when I suddenly began to see—first of all, my mind, that's a whole other story—but I 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. It felt like you were really breaking trail into the future.

I think that was when I really went, "These are amazing." I could see it in moments, and suddenly you could make this whole experience. That was really the moment for me.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah. Before that, it was the PS1, or even before that. Games looked terrible. You would be like, "It's 8 pixels, it's a car." It was not a car. They just didn't—

You were always squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. They were all about very surreal subject matter because you couldn't make them remotely real.

Suddenly we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city, it was in 3 dimensions, and it felt alive. We were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life. Yet you could tell a story in 3 or, using time, in 4 dimensions, and that felt very inspiring.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, I think GTA III is probably 1 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? There were looming skyscrapers. There were changing traffic lights. 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.

Dan Houser

Yes, and it wasn't scripted. It was really, really, really low-rent AI. It was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened, and I think that was incredibly powerful.

It was 2 things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with, and the simulation seemed to have a personality. You could push and see, and the world would push you back in whatever way that meant.

The other thing was this: I think 1 of the reasons it was so captivating was the idea that if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio, look at billboards, or talk to pedestrians. Not in GTA III, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking.

The world was there and existing, so it was the idea of being a digital tourist, something that they really tried to explore in lots of games. You were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor. They existed almost independently of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn't feel like you'd started it.

Of course, you had started it, but that feeling—the illusion that people found very captivating—was, "I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist."

Lex Fridman

There are 2 concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them. One is systemic video game design, or systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games.

And the systemic is from the environment perspective, which means that there are these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior. That emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world.

Then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective: the feeling that you can do anything. When those 2 things combine—the feeling that you can do anything and the feeling that there's a world that's full, that is also doing anything it wants—that creates this incredible feeling of, “This world is alive.”

Dan Houser

And I'm in it.

Lex Fridman

And I'm in it.

Dan Houser

And it's the combination of those 2 things, I think, that is very powerful. With GTA III, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my life personally, and I was able to engage in it, probably for the first time professionally. We were really beginning to scratch the surface on how we fill these worlds with content, how we make that content interesting, and how we make the content all interwoven.

As you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. Certainly, at various points, we'd debate this, or I'd have theoretical discussions in my own head, or other people on the team would really push for less story: “Less story. Let the whole thing evolve organically. Have it all be procedural. Have it all just evolve from what you do.”

For me, I would always come back to, “Story, if done well, can be incredibly compelling, and it gives you some structure.” So I think it gives you something to do, and it helps you, from a game design perspective, unlock the features. It means we know the features—the big features—because, essentially, when you put someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the controller, it can be a little overwhelming.

Playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience than reading a book or watching a movie. You've got to engage in it properly. How you unlock the features and how you unlock the world—there's an art and a skill to that. I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process.

Also, people are looking in their lives for story. I think story is very important and very powerful, and when you combine the 2 successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But there is a tension always there.

I think in a game like GTA IV, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the story was great, we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story. That meant you cared too much about Niko, and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world.

I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead Redemption 2, or when playing as Trevor in GTA V, if you wanted to be crazy. I think that's when it really worked: the character and absolute freedom. In any game, you don't really want to compel the player. If you're giving them freedom, you don't want to say, “Well, I'm giving you freedom, but then I'm taking it away because you've got to be this kind of person when you're free.”

I liked it when he could—or she could—veer to be nice or veer to be nasty. I think that's when it was at its strongest. You want a character that was rounded, and you felt had good sides and bad sides.

Lex Fridman

But you felt that character's personality.

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

You felt the depth. You've actually talked about this—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 immediately started to think about that: Can I imagine myself in every possible situation? How good of an NPC am I? 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 from the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side. I just imagine myself: If I were a soldier—

Dan Houser

But that exercise—if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II, what would he do?

Lex Fridman

No, I mean, that may be going a little bit too far. But basically, what are the limits of his integrity? How romantic is he? How narcissistic? All those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kind of 360-degree character? How hard is it?

Dan Houser

It was a lot of thinking, sometimes a year from when we begin talking about a project to dialing it in. I would just get some initial ideas, like 1 sentence: They're a Serbian immigrant, or they're a retired gunfighter with a wife. Very simple stuff. Then I would start to think through it from every angle.

I would start to think, “Would it work if they acted like this? Would it work if they acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world?” I always thought the games were a kind of mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist. When that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player.

There was almost always at least 1 protagonist, or more. Obviously, in GTA V, we had more than 1. We'd have someone who'd moved to the place, or was in a new part of the place, or moved to a new part of the map, because, as a player, I think it was much easier to identify with your avatar when they, like you, were a fish out of water.

Even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water themselves. I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, “What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How are they like me? How are they not like me?”

Slowly, you start to think, “What is it like to feel like a human being?” Then, in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? What are their good qualities? What is going to give them humanity alongside that? What, for them, apart from money, is worth dying for?

Then you start to build it out from these fundamental sides. Suddenly, you go, “Okay, actually, I can start to feel who they are.” Then how do they speak? Fundamentally, it doesn't really matter what's going on in their head. They haven't actually got one, but what they say is what's going to make you realize who they are.

Lex Fridman

So you develop more depth and complexity on the good and evil sides of that human nature that's a part of all human beings. Then, if we can contrast Niko and Trevor with another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system Nigel Dave that you've been working on recently, as part of the world of A Better Paradise, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep—

Dan Houser

I hope so.

Lex Fridman

But the AI system in there, the superintelligent AI system, is named Nigel Dave. At least from my current experience with it, it has a conflicting nature. Maybe it's psychopathic; I haven't quite figured that out yet.

Dan Houser

I don't think he's decided.

Lex Fridman

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.

There's a really interesting idea there, which is maybe it's not the AGI or ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. The AGI has this human-like good and evil in it; it's conflicted, it's chaotic, it wants to be human, it wants to be loved, maybe it wants to love. But the children, the monsters it creates, are the ones that are doing the world domination, maximizing paperclips.

Anyway, that's a character, and you have to build that up. You have to think through that. So you've been living with that one for a while?

Dan Houser

Yeah, I've been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt that, with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one-note. AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from killing everybody, and was just this kind of Borg-like fog. I thought, “That's fine, but maybe we can do something more interesting.”

AI is being built by humans, by computer engineers, and there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. I just wanted to explore the idea that it was built by 2 lead engineers who didn't like each other.

Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself—they wanted to call him something like Primal Adam, and he renamed himself Nigel Dave because 1 dad was called Nigel and 1 dad was called Dave. He's just riddled with these conflicts. It's going to become clear, or clearer, in the next volume of the book and in the game: he's riddled with the previous careers of his dads.

But the idea is that he's almost infinitely intelligent, or can learn almost everything, but has zero wisdom.

And so the only thing he knows is seeing the world through the internet. The most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone’s phone and watch them, but he’s stuck, pressed against it. He can’t actually get into our world. So he can arguably control people’s minds, but he can’t control the world.

He wants to be human. He wants to have these human experiences. He sees all this stuff on the internet and goes, “Oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to…” because that seems fun. “I want to have…” He’s a digital creation, so he wants to have metaphysical experiences, and he’s trying to imagine what that will be like. “Oh, that’s what children are. That’s what love is.”

So I think he might be a sociopath, and he certainly has sociopathic tendencies. But then he thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there’s something sympathetic about him. I kind of like him as a character, but I don’t think he’s going to be the protagonist. He’s more of a side character.

Lex Fridman

But an ever-present one.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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. 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?”

Lex Fridman

And of course, there’s the CEO of the company, who’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. Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn this way: “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. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of Earth.”

Do you think that’s always going to be the case, for the most part—that power and money are going to corrupt the people who create ASI?

Dan Houser

Yes. I think there are 2 processes. I think power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias, paradises, or heavens. What they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”

I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. I think there’s a side of people who are just hideous perfectionists and want to get rid of the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. That’s a huge side of us. So I worry about those people. I find them disturbing. It’s a different kind of sociopathic behavior.

Lex Fridman

“I like humans apart from the bad bits.” That’s so beautifully put. It’s so counterintuitive, but the people who say, “We’re almost there. We just need to… There’s this path we take, and we’ll be perfect then,” somehow get us into trouble. It’s so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits. We have to love the bad bits about humans. Those bugs are features.

Dan Houser

Yeah, and there are bad bits and there are flaws. 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. I think when we do that, we’re more human, and that’s probably usually the right course.

Lex Fridman

It really is a return to that Solzhenitsyn line: “The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” The full description of that is really powerful: The line moves from day to day, from month to month, throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better, as perspectives shift, 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. So, yeah, it’s a beautiful mess, and all of us have that line.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

And it’s funny that Nigel Dave—I like the name, by the way. It grew on me very quickly—has that line and is struggling with it. It’s fascinating to watch. It’s really interesting as a character. And there’s also going to be a video game of A Better Paradise, potentially?

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

Okay.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Oh, nice.

Dan Houser

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.

Lex Fridman

It would be so great, and I suppose new for you, because it’s kind of near-term future.

Dan Houser

Yes. I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space, but only if I could do it in a way that felt meaningful. I was like, “Well, what is sci-fi?” It’s science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction.

I’ve always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn’t just space opera, but there was a real, obvious sort of hypothesis. The story of Blade Runner is my favorite, and that’s obvious: the replicants are better than the humans. With this, I finally felt we’d found an interesting hypothesis. The AI is more intelligent than us, but he’s also as broken as we are. That was an interesting hypothesis to explore.

What happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world? I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and a really interesting story to tell.

Lex Fridman

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 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 who loves literature, and as one of the, if not the, greatest writers in video game history, Kurt, in the book A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful: “At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that? A writer. Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others. So instead, I decided to get a master’s in marketing and started to sell language models.”

So you, as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives—

Dan Houser

Thank you.

Lex Fridman

—in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?

Dan Houser

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 began, and I was too shy to tell anyone I wanted to be a writer. That’s why I ended up in video games.

I would scribble away, writing manuals and writing on 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. By working on little bits and pieces, I’d luckily done enough work that when GTA III turned up, it was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of the small bits of skill that I could assemble into it.

Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, they’re not going to replace good ideas. They can’t really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is low-level stuff. So I think it’s going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces.

If you’re not a very good concept artist, you’re in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you’re fine. But I also think they’ve done the first 90% of the work to sound human—95%, possibly, in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.

I think that last bit with technology, in my experience with things like facial animation, has always been the last bits and pieces that take far longer than the first bit. So I’m probably a hideous Luddite, but I’m less scared than a lot of people. I think you’re going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same.

It’s going to help people be creative in some ways. It’s going to get some people who probably shouldn’t be in that space out of that space. But if you’ve got talent, I think it’ll be fine.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, I agree with you totally. It’s hard to really put a finger on it. One way to illustrate that: I speak English and Russian, and I’m reading Dostoevsky in both languages and using LLMs to translate back and forth because I was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky.

Dan Houser

Which ones?

Lex Fridman

Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky.

Dan Houser

Yeah, I read it when they first did Crime and Punishment. That was amazing.

Lex Fridman

They’re wonderful translators, and a wonderful love story, too. But in the translation process, you get to see that the LLM is missing some magic. That couple of translators are world-class experts at capturing the magic.

I can’t quite put that into words. You said, “Totally novel ideas,” yes. But also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time—

Dan Houser

Yeah. The phrasing.

Lex Fridman

—captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human-like phrasing about the bulk of the storytelling—the 90%, like you mentioned. But the magic, whether it’s the endings of Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that.

It’s hard to argue because they’re incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions. But what is that magic? Again, that could just be the romantic human side of me saying that LLMs won’t be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope.

Dan Houser

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.

Lex Fridman

I have to ask you about your writing process. We can break it up. On Grand Theft Auto IV, that's 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 thousands of pages.

Dan Houser

When we printed out the scripts for GTA IV, it was about this high. For GTA V, it was about that high. But that included all the pedestrians, who had pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world, because you interact with each one of them. Even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long.

Lex Fridman

What was the writing process like for that, to generate one page at a time?

Dan Houser

Bit by bit, over several years. But you start once people have determined, “Oh, here’s the world. We’re doing one based on a version of New York,” so GTA IV. I was living in New York and had been living there for a few years. I wasn’t sure if I was happy. I was going through a lot of personal drama, as usual.

That was why I was looking at some of GTA IV again recently, and it’s really dark. I was like, “Ah, that’s why.” I was single and miserable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America. My life was in a lot of flux. As a company, we’d had all that Hot Coffee drama, so we constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making it.

There was a lot of drama in the company, so after having had this run of success and relative personal stability from GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, suddenly, in 2005, ’06, ’07, and early ’08, life felt very unsure. That kind of bled into it.

In terms of the process, it was trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience. I’m not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2008, when the game came out. Then tell it from a different angle, as an immigrant, which I thought made it interesting. Then there was this journey around these various New York characters.

I probably spent a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off, wandering around New York and driving around. I’d go out for the morning from the office, normal stuff, but I did that throughout 2005, assembling little notes: “Here’s a funny character for this. Here’s how...” Figuring out the order we wanted to travel around the map in. What was an interesting take on the mob for that kind of time period? What was an interesting take on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period?

I assembled lots of notes and more and more notes, really, really running away from the work. That’s part of my process, if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work. Thinking about it, but not working. A lot of time was spent making more notes, with no actual work.

Months and months of this went by. Finally, I set myself a deadline and told all the other senior people on the team, “Okay, I have a story draft due Monday morning.” I can’t even remember—February 1st, maybe. The weekend before, I was in a cabin we had upstate, and I just stayed up all night knocking these notes into shape.

I assembled probably a 30-page document: a story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters. Then I handed that over, and it got broken down with me and the designers. I was always clear: “I’m not a game designer. I’m a sort of creative director.” We needed to break that down into missions.

That took another year or so of slowly assembling. The bulk of my work was then done for a bit, so I could relax and offer opinions on other people’s work and be lazy for a bit. Then I started to worry, because I soon had to start writing dialogue.

For GTA IV in particular, we thought, “Our animation is going to be a lot better. Our character models are going to start to look better. The world is going to look amazing. Therefore, we can support longer scenes and have more in-depth characters. But we have to find a tone that works with the game.”

It’s not easy. Then I started to worry and worry and worry. I was also writing as a Serbian immigrant. I was an immigrant, but I’m not Serbian, and I was trying to capture what on Earth that would feel like.

You start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible, and then sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard late at night. You’re hammering away at a keyboard and going, “Is that right? Is that...?”

Once I get one speech or one turn of phrase that I like for a character, they suddenly come alive in my head. It was like writing Niko. He’s awkward, he’s from out of town, but he’s got more self-assurance in some way than the American characters. Once I talked him through it like this, he just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness. Then he started to come to life.

I would juxtapose him with his cousin, who had a much more Americanized energy, and that felt like it was a good double act. From there, it started to come to life.

It was written in small chunks for motion capture. Then we would motion-capture small chunks, and the other writers would write the mission dialogue for those small chunks. We slowly assembled the game, 10 or 15 missions at a time, over the next year and a half.

Lex Fridman

Do you remember a few lines that brought Niko to life?

Dan Houser

Yeah, I think so. It was a couple of things: his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car, and he’s not living this fancy American lifestyle. That was a kind of comic moment.

Then they go to his cousin’s flat. Even though his cousin was a sort of failure, he was still upbeat. When Niko talked to his cousin about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were, I thought, “Yeah, can I make this work in a game?”

It’s very different from stuff you normally see in games. Is it going to feel ridiculous? Is it going to feel over the top? I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much. But the game was so pretty, and the artists were doing such an amazing job. The game was looking good, so I thought, “I think we can get away with this. Let’s try it.”

Then they motion-captured the animation. After that, it was like, “Yeah, it kind of works.” Those moments were both pretty early. Once we had them, we thought, “Okay, we’ve now got comedy and tragedy with this character. Now it’s working.”

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.”

Lex Fridman

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.

Dan Houser

Yes, he can never escape his violent past. I don’t know if he can never escape it—he never does escape it. Whether he’s got agency or not is a whole other question. Of course he doesn’t, because he’s a character in a video game. But whether he ever could have escaped it another way, who knows?

Lex Fridman

I think he’s probably the greatest character created in the Grand Theft Auto series, at least for me. Of all the characters you’ve written in Grand Theft Auto, would Niko be the best character you created?

Dan Houser

I think he’s the most innovative, and the most morally defensible in some ways. He does a lot of stuff where he’s fighting for what’s 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. He just comes across as tough.

I loved CJ in San Andreas. I thought Melee did such a good job. Just the way he spoke gave him such humanity. I loved it. It wasn’t the writing; it was the quality of the voice acting. It was just so strong for him.

I think Michael was so understated. I loved the character, but Ned Luke brought so much humanity to this character who’s so flawed, who has no principles. He sells everyone out. I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn’t necessarily get as many plaudits as Steven Ogg for Trevor, who was also wonderful.

I think Ned Luke’s character anchors that game so much. I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Niko the most.

Lex Fridman

And of course, Michael is from Grand Theft Auto V. He’s one of 3 protagonists, along with Franklin and Trevor. You said that of the things you’re proud of creating, and that you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption, all of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V, when the 3 characters come together.

Can you speak to Grand Theft Auto V? I don’t know if you’re a Dostoevsky guy, but—

Dan Houser

A little bit.

Lex Fridman

Is there some aspect of the 3 protagonists, sort of like in The Brothers Karamazov—Alyosha, Dmitri, and Ivan—using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature, and the tension between them that allows the 3 of them to become a character in themselves?

Dan Houser

Yeah, it was one of the reasons that the team did such a good job. Grand Theft Auto is still so popular because we always tried, as a group, to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was.

It was a crime drama. It began as a crime sim in GTA 1 about stealing 2D, top-down cars. We always tried to innovate with the narrative, the art direction, and every piece of the game.

Having done GTA IV, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character, and then these 2 extra stories that came afterwards, the challenge was: can we make a video game, which tends to be very much focused on 1 protagonist, have multiple protagonists? There was the technical challenge of moving from character to character.

The team did such an amazing job that I don't think people realized how hard it was. We would sit there, just holding our heads because they hurt so much, thinking, "What happens if you do this, then do that?" It was just, "This is so hard. Why have we decided to do this? It's horrible." And then it all came together.

I think the idea was to develop 3 characters who do feel like characters. They don't just feel like philosophical or psychological avatars, but where 1 is really driven by ego, 1 is really driven by id, and 1 is really driven by trying to get ahead—some kind of representation of the superego—and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

Lex Fridman

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's that even possible? We know the answer isn't money, because there are other studios with a lot of money, and they are 2 decades behind Rockstar."

So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games and stories?

Dan Houser

I think the culture—I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. The culture was 1 of excellence, and we tried to provide creative clarity.

We also had an ambition to make something great. We thought GTA III could be really popular. Really popular to us meant, quite honestly, it was going to sell 2 or 3 million copies. We thought we were making something pretty innovative. We knew we were making something innovative, but we didn't know if people would understand how innovative it was.

When we got the chance to make Vice City and try to repeat it, I think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better. This was long before we had lots of resources, so we used time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we could do to push the medium of video games and the medium of building fake worlds further.

There was clarity about, "Here's what we're trying to do. Here's what the tone of the game is going to be. Here's how features will fit into that, and why these features would work and these features wouldn't work." Fundamentally, by 2002, you could put pretty much any feature into a game that you wanted. It wasn't a technical limitation. It was just about making it cohesive.

Then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence.

Lex Fridman

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.

Dan Houser

Finishing it is certainly tough, but it's also intensely rewarding. You get something done, and you've made something. That feeling is, as you say, really, really incredible.

It can sometimes feel a bit empty as well because when you're finished, you're like, "Then my life's got nothing to it." But that's the same with any big undertaking that you take. When you're working that hard, you do not have a good work-life balance. The truth is, you're not working that hard all of the time, so you just have to manage it slightly differently.

Lex Fridman

That's such a heavy thing about the human experience. I've talked to Olympic gold medal winners, and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal because they've been pursuing something that they deeply care about. This has been everything, and they're so truly happy to do it, and then it's like, "What else is there in life?" Compared to this, what else is there?

That's the ups and downs of life. You need the darkness and 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 VI. The same was true for GTA V and GTA IV, and even before that. You and the team delivered every time. How difficult was it to do creative work under such pressure, where everyone expects this to be a success?

Dan Houser

I was pretty good at compartmentalizing and just saying, "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."

If I can say, "I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy someone else. I have probably done all of the above," and tried to bring something new to it, then we, as a group, made something we are proud of. That's enough.

If I didn't want to go insane, I couldn't sit there and worry about financial results. If we made something great and it didn't sell, that would have to be okay, because video games are expensive. It's a sort of commercial form of creativity. It's a commercial art form, so you have to keep in mind that you're spending large amounts of someone else's money. You have to try and make it back for them.

At the same time, my argument with myself was, "Well, the way to make it back is to try and make something great." Both pressures are pointing in the same direction.

I think GTA IV was very pressured because there had been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to Hot Coffee. It was extremely tough, so I think that felt very stressful.

GTA III came when the company was basically broke, but I was young and didn't really care. I wasn't living in the grown-up world yet. All of them had their own pressure. All of the games had their own pressure.

The more I felt I had gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious, the more pressure I felt personally when it came out, because that would have been the right choice. Again, if you're trying to take big swings creatively and you've spent a lot of money, that can be quite stressful.

I think with Red Dead Redemption 2, we were behind schedule. We were over budget so much that I didn't want to think about it. You're making a game about a cowboy dying of tuberculosis, and the game's not coming together. It turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment. It's not that fun.

Anything involving doing something new has pressure. There's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book in the same way because it hasn't taken as long, but if you're making things, there's always pressure that people are going to like them.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Because they don't come out that regularly. I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different. People have very strong feelings: "I like this one. I didn't like that one as much," because they are pretty different.

There would be something familiar, where you know what's going to happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, so you know it's going to be a game about being a criminal. But the way it's going to be a game changes quite a lot.

I think the way the IP kept evolving made people really excited to play it. We were good at marketing them as well. We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing, where you really felt like you were already in the product just because you'd seen the trailers and stuff.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Scarface, Miami Vice.

Lex Fridman

Miami Vice.

Dan Houser

And our '80s childhoods. What I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game and it was set, I think, in 1986. We made it in 2002, so it was 16 years after. Now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. The '80s were not that long ago when we made it.

Lex Fridman

I think Miami is 1 of the most unique cities in the world. 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, 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 the perfect city to explore the full cast of characters that human nature can generate?

Dan Houser

I think it's 1 of them.

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

Lex Fridman

So, yeah, there’s a melting-pot aspect in New York also, right?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Do you know if it was ever a consideration to go elsewhere, to London, for example?

Dan Houser

We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top-down PlayStation 1. 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 there was so much Americana inherent in the IP that it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.

You needed guns, and you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective. That was so much what the thing was that it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I think so.

Lex Fridman

I have to ask: is it a little bit bittersweet to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and not be a part of it, to watch Grand Theft Auto VI be released? Or is it more excitement? What’s the feeling?

Dan Houser

Of course, it’s all of the above. It’s exactly as you described: pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we’re working on now, and super excited, of course. Letting go of something I worked on in one way or another for 20-odd years—and wrote on for the last 10 or 11 that came out—is a big change.

I wrote all of them, or was the lead writer on all of them, whatever it was. So, of course, letting go of that is a big change, and sad in a way, because each of the games was a kind of standalone story. It’s not quite the same as it would be in some ways with Red Dead, because that was a cohesive two-game arc. That might be more sad, to hear someone working on that.

But again, that will probably happen, too. I don’t own the IP. That was sort of part of the deal. It’s a privilege to work on stuff, but you don’t necessarily own it.

Lex Fridman

When you’re done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? When you’re done with Red Dead 2, is it like you’re saying goodbye to Arthur, the characters you created? You’re walking away.

Dan Houser

You kind of are saying goodbye to Arthur at the end of the game.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Dan Houser

Even before the end of the game. I’ve been with them for 7 or 8 years, and you have to let it go or you can’t go on to the next one.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Dan Houser

There’s always this thing of, “Okay, that’s done.” Sometimes people would ask me questions about older games, and certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in the series, I couldn’t really necessarily even remember. I have a pretty good memory normally, because you kind of have to let it go.

You’re so immersed in it and thinking about it. Certainly in that last period, the last few months, you’re really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time. Then you’re just not thinking about it in the same way.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I hope so.

Lex Fridman

Legitimately—not just because the story is sad.

Dan Houser

Because you’ve been with them so long.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Dan Houser

That’s when you finish a book you love.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Dan Houser

Same feeling. I think that was something that we really aspired to have in the early days of Rockstar: that people would have that feeling. It wasn’t just the mania of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters.

I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games, and we didn’t know was even possible. So, to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. The end of On the Road by Kerouac: “Forlorn rags of growing 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, and you’ve achieved that. It’s so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead. For me, it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Niko.

I have to ask: in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do. You made a really powerful observation that, on the political front, people are getting more divided. It’s getting more absurd, ridiculous, and extreme, so it’s becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it’s becoming ridiculous.

You were talking about how you didn’t even know if Grand Theft Auto VI would be possible to satirize, because by the time you released the thing, it would already be outdated—the satire would become reality. First of all, it would be nice to get your updated view on that. Second, it seems like you’ve answered your very own comment with American Caper, which seems to satirize American culture just fine in how over-the-top it goes. Anyway, that’s a lot of questions in there.

Dan Houser

One of the things we’ve enjoyed about doing a comic book is that it still has lead times, but the lead times are not 4 or 5 years. The lead times are about a year when we’re putting it together. We can make little updates much, much nearer to the present. We’re just wrapping issue 10 of a 12-issue arc for that, so it’s not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it.

But, yeah, I think it’s an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015 or 2016, is going to have: how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?

Lex Fridman

So American Caper is, first of all, an epic comic book. I love the art.

Dan Houser

Yeah, the art’s beautiful. David Lapham is the artist. He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

Lex Fridman

What made you want to set it in Wyoming?

Dan Houser

I hadn’t seen a modern story there that I knew about. I’d started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West, and I’d spent a lot of time in the countryside in upstate New York. I thought I never really captured it quite right.

It was a way of doing a crime story that didn’t feel the same as GTA. It was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored.

Lex Fridman

And there is over-the-top stuff.

Dan Houser

Yeah, it’s definitely slightly over the top.

Lex Fridman

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 serial murders with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.

Dan Houser

He is not necessarily the sharpest tool in the box. His rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he’s made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean—

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

And bull semen is a big component of longevity.

Dan Houser

Yes. He’s very into all the life-hacking—“roiding,” HGH, and making money—and has lost his mind living on a big ranch.

Lex Fridman

Of course, on the theme of satire, there’s a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, especially conspiracies about pedophiles in D.C.

Dan Houser

Yes. She’s based on someone I know who got completely red-pilled. I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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. GTA IV was far more anticipated and 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’re spending someone’s money. The number-one success is: “Are you making that money back plus a dollar?” At some level, that has to be the single most important thing, so you get to do it again. You’ve got big teams of people.

People need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business, so you have to make a small profit. If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative. Trying to forget about that isn’t really an option.

But we almost always did that. We didn’t quite always do that, but we almost always did that. I think the definition of success for me was: had we tried to do new things and done them, or achieved some of our goals? That was the thing that I meant. Again, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to?

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I think they’ve possibly already done that in some ways. Certainly, as a business proposition, they’ve already done that. As a way of telling stories, though, I think games are better at telling certain kinds of stories, and films are better at other kinds of stories.

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 are the future. Games are the future,” and being sneered at, then being laughed at, then having people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening.

At the same time, much as you might say something, you don’t necessarily believe it’s going to be true. But it has become true, and I still think that games are only going to get better, more interesting, and more creatively diverse.

Lex Fridman

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?

Dan Houser

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

I think it was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. I think the cowboy setting is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn’t allow. I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA IV, but once you’re setting things in the modern world, they’re too frenetic.

You can’t get some of that slightly operatic feel that I love—something that some people think is maybe a little over the top, but I love this kind of thing: people searching for meaning amongst the violence. I think the West and all of the themes around the West really lend themselves to that.

So I think you had that, and then the gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible. You had this combination of technical know-how, a very, very strong team, and really strong material.

Lex Fridman

Where did you have to go in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the Red Dead world? Of course, it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that’s—

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

—that’s 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.

Dan Houser

Thank you.

Lex Fridman

So, what drugs were involved?

Dan Houser

No drugs.

Lex Fridman

Okay.

Dan Houser

I stopped the drugs long before.

Lex Fridman

Okay.

Dan Houser

That’s why I did all that work. I had nothing else to do. So, open-world video games were very good for my mental health in that way. They kept me busy.

But Red Dead—I’ll give you my version. Now, the games are made by big teams, but I will give you my human-interest version of the story, from my perspective only. We made Red Dead Revolver. It had been a Capcom game, and they didn’t want to finish it, so we finished it. They released it in Japan, and we released it in the U.S. in, I think, 2004.

We decided we would start work on an open-world cowboy game for the PlayStation 3. We didn’t think too much more about it because we had a bunch of other stuff to work on. Slowly, in 2005 and 2006, the game started to come to life. I began to meet with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game.

I began to think about what works for an open-world game and what works for a cowboy game. Again, I was being lazy or procrastinating. We began to flesh out some flow for the start of the game: this idea that you’d start in the dusty American West, which meant we didn’t have to make too many trees, then go to Mexico, and then come back. We had a sort of loose flow.

Lex Fridman

Can we go on a small tangent? When you mentioned you take notes when you’re being lazy, what do those notes look like? Are they doodles?

Dan Houser

They look like either a yellow pad, a BlackBerry in those days, or an iPhone these days. I’ll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note: “Here’s a good idea.” Or it might be almost scribbling on a pad.

Then, if they’re done digitally, I’ll assemble them into one long Word file. Then I’ll look at them and go, “Here’s an idea. See if it comes to anything.” I’ll see if I can aggregate them together and then read through them to see if there’s anything coherent there.

Something about a character like this or that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character. Actually, make the main character work like this. What about this relationship? You start to play around with, “What if we start in that place and go to that place?” You start just to play around with all of the different bits and pieces.

I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue. I didn’t have a clue how to go about it, and I kept telling myself, “It’ll come, it’ll come.” I could postpone it for ages because we were doing GTA IV. I kept worrying about it.

My work on GTA IV was wrapped, but the game wasn’t out yet. We’d done a bunch of the marketing stuff and had a little window when I wasn’t doing much else. I took a week with my then-girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child, and we went up to a house upstate.

She sat there, either cooking for me, watching TV, or reading. I just went and sat in the room all day, every day. I sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about, “How can I do this so that it doesn’t sound ridiculous?”

How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I wanted it to have, and that I thought we could get away with? After about 3 days, it just started to come. Then suddenly I wrote 9 or 10 scenes in the next couple of days. After that, I knew I had it.

I don’t know if that’s why there was so much about a character caring about his family, because I was just beginning the process of having a family. I don’t know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent. Obviously, then I probably didn’t write any more for 6 months, so later on we had a child. But certainly for that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.

Lex Fridman

You got the feeling that you can actually do it. It could very easily have been ridiculous and not believable—the dialogue between convoys. And yes, there was probably so much work that went into making it feel real and believable, like a Shakespearean type of drama, but not the cheesy kind.

Dan Houser

Well, I just wanted it to feel like, when they spoke, it didn’t sound cheesy or ridiculous. I love dialogue. I’m always—I love the sound of words—but I just wanted it to feel like when they spoke, it didn’t sound cheesy or ridiculous. You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn’t make you cringe awfully when they spoke.

At some level, that was all the goal was. Then you 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 you didn’t know them.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I remember I had a meeting with Christian, the designer. I can’t remember what year—probably sometime in late 2008 or early 2009—and we were discussing the last bit. I said, “I think he’s got to die.”

He leapt on the idea and went, “That’s—yes, yes. No, no, wait, no, it can’t work. Games can’t work like that. It can’t work if he’s dead.” We began to think through: if we...

Just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up. Then we began to think through, “Actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way.” He really pushed for that idea, and it seemed to work. I was still torn. I thought it was clever narratively, but I was torn about whether it was going to work technically as a piece of game design. But I think it did.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the story of that? John goes through a lot. He 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. Then the government betrays him and sends troops to kill him.

There is dialogue—I mean, I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue. I think John is talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember. I think he said, “I love you,” but he said very little. He made it seem like he was going to see her and his son shortly. That dialogue was masterfully done, like a definition of “less is more.” It was so crisp.

And, of course, the other one is, again, from memory, Arthur riding his horse while the music is playing. It’s very hard not to shed a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife at the end, when he’s in a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death—do you remember writing that?

Dan Houser

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Again, the actor was so good, and we’d already seen a bunch of his work by then. He was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us—you could feel it at that point. I think those lines are best when they’re really short and punchy, so I knew he’d be able to make that line sound good.

Lex Fridman

Got it.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

You’ve said that the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1 is one of the best things you’ve been a part of creating. Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?

Dan Houser

I think because for the story to work, just from a technical challenge, 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’d spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked: how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, and how they interacted with the open-world gameplay as best I could.

Suddenly, we were going to break one of our golden rules, which was that at the end of the game, you’re freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories, to play forever. You’re not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy’s going to be dead, and we’re going to have you play as a different character. The narrative is going to be compelling enough, if we’ve done a good job, that you’re not going to care about that. Or you’re going to be upset that he’s dead, but you can actually have this emotional moment.

So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that, and then it worked. I think that was something that was very full of fear, and it worked out okay. People were really upset and angry at us for doing it because they didn’t think it was going to happen, but I think they also had the kind of experience you’re describing, which is that creative moment—a transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction—which is what we’ve always aspired to give people.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Well, I would have liked to have killed Niko at the end of Grand Theft Auto IV, but you couldn’t do it. The game doesn’t work like that. So it was this thing where we hadn’t done it, we’d thought about doing it, and then we went, “Let’s do it. Let’s take the risk and do it. We can’t do it? Let’s try.” And it worked.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

That was also a case where 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.

Lex Fridman

Oh, interesting.

Dan Houser

I think it kind of worked in that way where John can’t escape. But I always also wanted a version of it where John did escape, and that wasn’t the case. Both were interesting to me.

Lex Fridman

Can you dig in a little deeper? What do you mean by “for the game to work”? It’s such a direct— it’s like Kubrick talking about, “For this movie to work, it has to have…” From my perspective, I just think about the story. What’s the technical aspect for the game to work?

Dan Houser

The mechanical experience is that you have an avatar you control, and the games don’t really end. You have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. At the end of the game, you have to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of features: you can run up to someone and punch them, shoot them, rob them, or talk to them. You can jump on a horse or do all this other stuff.

In order for the game still to be fun and for people to get this full 360-degree experience with it, if they wanted to 100% the game as opposed to just finishing the story, they had to have an avatar to do that stuff with. So that was the sort of challenge of John’s character—wrapping up the story as John.

Lex Fridman

Oh, there’s real power for the avatar to end—the finiteness.

Dan Houser

Yeah. In both of the Red Dead games, you obviously change avatars. We did it, 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. Then suddenly, you’re someone else.

Lex Fridman

Mm-hmm. I was really shaken by that experience, but it’s a beautiful experience. It’s an unforgettable experience. What else can video games possibly reach for? To create that experience—that’s what great films do, and that’s what great, great books do.

Dan Houser

It’s that, and it’s the world-building in games. I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taking on these narrative adventures—when those combine, you’ve got the amazing experience.

Lex Fridman

So who do you think is the best character you’ve ever created in Red Dead Redemption? To me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games. I don’t think it’s even close. John will be the second, which is hilarious to say, but John will be a close second. Arthur is definitive.

You’ve talked about this in that interview. You said that a lot of video games work on the same premise: you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero. But what if you start as a tough guy, someone who is already very strong, someone who’s emotionally confident in his place in the world? Arthur’s journey is not about becoming a superhero, because he’s almost one at the start. It’s about an intellectual roller coaster when his worldview gets taken apart. So it’s very different from the normal journey of a character.

Dan Houser

Yeah, in a game, in order to reverse it, there were a couple of other themes that matched that. They’re guys from the Wild West, but they’re being pushed ever farther east. So it’s almost like an anti-Western—an Eastern. You’re traveling east. You’re traveling into civilization.

I don’t think I would’ve been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career, because this idea of getting a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting.

Lex Fridman

What about the component of mortality, of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period? The prospect of real fear of death, the realization of death, as part of the story.

Dan Houser

Yeah, I thought that was really a fun thing to play with. John dies in Red Dead Redemption 1. I wanted to top that with Red Dead Redemption 2, or do that in a different way. The idea was that John’s death is fairly sudden, and so if Arthur has this long, drawn-out death, then—I’d always been obsessed with tuberculosis.

As diseases go, it’s a great literary device, because it is this long, drawn-out, slow death in which you’re also getting weaker. My grandfather actually had tuberculosis before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he’d had his child, my father. He survived, but only 3 of them out of around 35 survived. So I was always captivated by tuberculosis as an illness.

It felt like an interesting thing to play around with as an idea: this guy getting weaker, who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal. He was the protagonist in a video game; he could not die. Suddenly, he was becoming mortal. But that helps him see things. I thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Do you think he’s the greatest character you’ve ever created?

Dan Houser

I think he’s the best lead character. The lead characters are different from the side characters, and I think he’s the most rounded and works the best. I like him and Niko. They were the 2 most ambitious, so for me it’s always sort of a toss-up.

But I loved all the stuff the art team did. They did such an amazing job. The journal was their idea, and the way that all the features worked into Arthur’s character—I thought that was really great.

He was really rounded; he worked in lots of different ways really well. I loved his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend, things like that. I loved all the side characters, the bits that turned up around him.

Lex Fridman

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—Nigel—you called him a side character.

Dan Houser

Well, he's not a protagonist. He's like a god, not a character. I'm enjoying him. I love Dutch. 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 all 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 he was this big gangster from then. I sort of saw exactly who he was. He felt like a living character to me.

Lex Fridman

Dutch is kind of like 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—with Arthur, with John. There's a family feeling to the gang. They explore all of those dynamics, and then there's the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis.

You're going against the family, going against the father, because Arthur is transforming his sense of the world, of morality, and of all those kinds of things. So all the very Shakespearean drama is right there. Dutch is a prominent godlike figure through all of that, also flawed himself, also a man of good and evil within the framework that they're operating under.

Dan Houser

And he's just drowning in his ego at the end. His ego gets the better of him. There was something flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger, and that's mostly off-camera. As an individual, I've always been very susceptible to charming people, and he's charming.

I can see how people get captivated by charming people. The idea here was of a very charming person, and the road's run out for him.

Lex Fridman

I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am to charm and charisma, because it can cloud your judgment about human nature.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Yeah, but it also clouded Arthur's judgment.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

But he gets to do some good. It depends on what choices you make, but he gets his moment of redemption.

Lex Fridman

Just a little bit. But realizing that your whole life you've been living has not been a good life, that you've not been a good man. Isn't that what we're all afraid of?

I hope not. So, the biggest, most important, primary question, central to the reason we're talking today—the number one question from the internet. It's so ridiculous, but I must ask: Have you seen Gavin? Who is Gavin?

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. This has become one of the biggest mysteries among the interwebs and the RDR fan base.

Theory 1 is that it's a split-personality disorder. Nigel himself is Gavin. The evidence for this theory is the letter, which has some evidence that maybe, due to trauma, this split-personality disorder was created. Gavin was created inside Nigel's mind.

Theory 2 is that Gavin is dead, and Nigel's simply in denial. Theory 3 is that it's just a troll, and Rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy. I also heard Theory 4 is that Gavin is the Strange Man.

There's this fascinating character, the Strange Man, this supernatural character that has a presence in Red Dead Redemption 1 and a little bit in Red Dead Redemption 2 also. Which theory is closest to the truth?

Dan Houser

Not 3 or 4. In my mind, somewhere between 1 and 2. I just loved 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. It was meant to be that Gavin wasn't there anymore, without ever fully being explained. Gavin's either gone home, or Gavin's left him. We were going to keep exploring that idea—that he was going to reappear in some way or other.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yes and no. You could 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.

But there was a ped in Red Dead Redemption 1 that everyone was obsessed with, and I really wasn't expecting that. So we try to put a few characters in. 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, or they see them in a completely different way.

Lex Fridman

Did you have a part in writing the letter?

Dan Houser

Yeah. I can't remember if I wrote it or Mike wrote it, or if we both wrote it. I really can't remember. I certainly would have edited it, and Mike might have written it, or I might have written it.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth. If Mike was here, I'd ask him. He might remember. I can't really remember, and we do so many of those things.

I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories. Some became very clear, and some were still a little opaque. But I think the general vibe was that there was no Gavin. Either there was no Gavin, or he'd long since left. So it's kind of a split personality, and then we were going to, over subsequent games, provide more information.

Lex Fridman

So in some sense, you yourself don't quite know. You kind of have an idea. Which way do you lean more, Theory 1 or 2? Is he dead and Nigel's in denial, or is there real communication going on inside his head?

Dan Houser

No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality. The only thing we hadn't really decided was, in a future game, whether we were going to reveal that Gavin was dead, or whether Gavin was going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac.

That was what we were still playing around with. I think the idea was that he was never going to meet Gavin in this game.

Lex Fridman

I mean, 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.

Dan Houser

And it has to feel fresh. You're constantly looking at what we've done before. I think I've done somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games. You've got to do stuff that's new. It can't repeat itself too much.

Lex Fridman

I mean, we also live in the age of the internet. You realize there are millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.

Dan Houser

Thank God.

Lex Fridman

It's like—

Dan Houser

It's great, yeah.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Yeah, the mystery.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Some of that humor—there's certainly humor in Red Dead Redemption, 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 a meme, why it becomes viral, because it's just funny.

Dan Houser

Yeah, I know why I think it's funny, but 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 50 different side things that people might get captivated by, and you just do not know what they're going to respond to.

Lex Fridman

How do you know when something's funny? Is it—you just feel it?

Dan Houser

I know what I think is funny. It's just because it's ridiculous as well.

Lex Fridman

You just Google it, or you just—

Dan Houser

Just because it's ridiculous as well. There's nothing funny about a dude shouting "Gavin" a lot. He just said it in a funny way. I thought it might be funny. It was great, 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. I think they're going to be hysterical, and then you put them in the game, and they're fine, but they're not amazing.

Lex Fridman

That guy just brought that stuff to life.

Dan Houser

Yeah. And his backstory too.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, I think that was what made it work. There’s something sometimes fun about an English person saying the name Gavin. I don’t know why.

So, about the Strange Man, also known as the Man in Black: Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto V? Who is the Strange Man?

Dan Houser

Well, the Strange Man was someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead Redemption 1—or, well, we were making Red Dead Redemption 1—and we’d made a compelling story and an interesting open world. But we’d already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously, and unfortunately, we’d taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game, apart from the big fixed-position ones. We’d taken out the cars, and we’d taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians. So we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert, and it was quite boring.

And so we then started filling it with content. We filled it with these things we called random events, which would be these sort of motion-capture moments that you could interact with. The designers did an amazing job with those. They were really fun, but there were not enough of them. Then we felt we needed more story, because the story was perhaps a little short.

So, quite late in development, we started putting in almost RPG-type content where you go and meet someone. The way we thought of them was that they were like short stories. You’d go and meet someone, they’d set you a small problem, like, “Go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers.” When you came back, it would resolve your story. One would say, “Go get them for my bride,” and you come back and the bride’s dead. We tried to make them like these short stories with a sting in the tail.

He came out of that, as I was trying to come up with ideas for those, as just this weird character. Then we built him a bit into the story, where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing. He was meant to be a kind of manifestation of your shadow, your karma, the devil—someone who just saw the world.

Then we built out his backstory over time. In Red Dead Redemption 2, you could interact with him again—or not really interact with him. But he was there, and he was meant to be something I suppose any creative is scared of: an artist who’s kind of sold his soul to the devil. That slowly revealed itself.

Lex Fridman

There is a connection between the main character and the Strange Man. Is it a Jungian shadow-type situation?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

A little bit, yeah.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Yes.

Dan Houser

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 it felt it was still valid video game content, because it was living, up to a point. I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander, was funny, because he was awful. So it was like L.A. You’re in therapy. It’s very L.A.

But it’s also very L.A.: he wants to write a book and betray you, which felt like a good twist. It felt like a Grand Theft Auto therapist. But just the idea of making the player in a game—and games are intrinsically kind of physical; you walk, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever. There are these physical fantasies. Trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think, can be really fun.

Lex Fridman

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 there is in 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 Red Dead Redemption? I can give you some options. The internet’s favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.

Dan Houser

Yep. Those guys did an amazing job on those.

Lex Fridman

I mean, I just— There must have been a meeting. There must have been engineers and graphics designers.

Dan Houser

It was just, I think, artists.

Lex Fridman

Artists—

Dan Houser

Modelers, I think. I don’t think it was that hard.

Lex Fridman

Okay. Enough of that pun.

Dan Houser

Thank you for that.

Lex Fridman

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.

Dan Houser

They feel like they do.

Lex Fridman

That’s still extremely rare in video games—the temporal aspect.

Dan Houser

Yes. Yeah.

Lex Fridman

That permeates through time. NPCs remembering you.

Dan Houser

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.

Lex Fridman

It’s really powerful, right?

Dan Houser

To make them remember you is really interesting.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

We made a dusty game. Red Dead Redemption 1 is a super-dusty game. 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 geography. So that’s why the game starts in the snow. We wanted a game that had snow and mud, because those were things you hadn’t really seen in Red Dead Redemption 1. Then the challenge is: How do you make mud good in a game? The guys did an amazing job.

Lex Fridman

The snowstorm that starts Red Dead Redemption 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 to that.

Dan Houser

Also the acting. They feel cold.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, that’s right. And they feel desperate. There was that feeling of—

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

—exodus. Like you’re running away from something. That gives the game energy at the start.

Dan Houser

And it was at night. Oh, man, it was just masterfully done.

Lex Fridman

And there was a big group of them. The other contrast—

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

You know, in the first game, you start off as a lone wolf. Suddenly you’re in this big group, so it felt very different.

In Arthur’s body, bullet wounds persist. That temporal consistency is really important. Underweight Arthur looks gaunt, and overweight Arthur gets a gut and a fuller face. Again, those 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.

Do you have favorites where you were first like, “This is amazing?”

Dan Houser

I think all of it. I think the way the whole thing sat together. To me, the thing that I would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together—the fact that they all feel like they belong together with each other. You made this cohesive, very, quote-unquote, “realistic” video game experience, and all the details feel like they mesh.

Lex Fridman

Well, for me, everything about the horse. For a lot of people, testicle shrinking included.

What’s the process of deciding what to cut? The internet seems to really care about—I mean, they love the game so much, so they want to know if anything was cut. I’m sure stuff was cut because you have to choose. What’s the process of deciding what to cut from the cutscenes? Are there any scenes that you had to let go of that you really miss or wish you could have done in either Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption?

Dan Houser

Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be. There was a bit at the start of Red Dead Redemption where he’d had a baby who just died in Red Dead Redemption 2, and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too tough in some ways.

He was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who’d had the baby. 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. He was not a likable character at the start, and that was one reason we ended up making him slightly more likable. He was still sort of tough and nasty, but he was slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision commercially.

It's better that way. But I still like that little bit. It spoke to me personally. I thought his inability to access his emotions was really strong because later in the game he's getting very emotional.

There are also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed, or missions that just aren't going to work technically. Usually, it's like, “This mission's not going to work technically. Oh God, we have to cut it. Okay, how do we glue the story back together?” We got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks. You get late in the game, and some big, challenging moment is just going to look rubbish, so you get rid of it.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah, it could be changes. If you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, “Let's change it,” that could be upsetting in some ways. Obviously, you can care about it. But if I was involved in the big creative thing and you go, “Okay, it's the right decision,” I can probably live with that fine.

I think sometimes for designers, when they're only designing 4 or 5 missions in the whole game and 2 of them get cut, that must be really hard.

Lex Fridman

Was there DLC, like for Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto, that you wish you'd had time to create when you were there?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

The internet knows we made single-player DLC for Grand Theft Auto V that never came out. We've also never really worked on another game. But I liked the idea of it: it was a Grand Theft Auto zombie game. That would've been funny. I think that could've been quite fun.

Lex Fridman

What was the Grand Theft Auto V DLC?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Oh.

Dan Houser

It was cute. 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, I probably wouldn't have gotten to make Red Dead Redemption 2. So, there are always compromises.

I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of Grand Theft Auto IV, when you had the extra stories coming afterward, or Red Dead Redemption, when you had the zombie pack coming afterward. I like just doing these extra things. I would've personally liked to have done more of that in that company.

With the stuff we're doing in the future, we're going to try to come up with worlds where we can add more stories. I like single-player DLC. I just think the audience loves it, and it's really fun to make.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

If you get it right.

Lex Fridman

If you get it right. And so the game companies are reaching for that. It just makes me really sad because there's so much power to 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.

At a time when everybody was moving online and there was that huge incentive toward that, you go on and deliver, again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character in video game history, single-player.

Dan Houser

We still love single-player games. As we started up Absurd, we did a lot of soul-searching, and also a lot of 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 as new IP; it's just extremely hard. So, luckily, we're focusing on what we're good at, which is open-world single-player games.

We might add multiplayer components to one of them. I think one of them is going to be really tough later on, but we're still thinking that through. I think we're really leaning into the single-player experience as being a strength for us as a company and something we love to do, and I think something a large part of the audience prefers.

I'd love to keep single-player DLC, one way or another, going with all of those.

Lex Fridman

Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterward that you didn't go with?

Dan Houser

Oh, yes.

Lex Fridman

Or pirate games? I mean, what? I would love to see the notes, the possible options.

Dan Houser

I never thought a lot about a pirate game. My son is obsessed with Sea of Thieves at the moment, so he's constantly saying, “Do a pirate game.” I haven't really thought about it too much.

We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Dan Houser

And it never came together.

Lex Fridman

So, Agent?

Dan Houser

Agent. It's had about 5 different iterations.

Lex Fridman

That's so good.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in the current day. We had so many different versions of this game.

Lex Fridman

Got it.

Dan Houser

We worked on so many different teams.

Lex Fridman

But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage—

Dan Houser

Yeah, espionage, like—

Lex Fridman

—and assassinations.

Dan Houser

Yeah, assassinations. I don't know what it would've been because it never really came together. We never got it far enough to even do a proper story on it. We were doing the early work as we got the world up and running. It never really found its feet in either of them.

Lex Fridman

So interesting.

Dan Houser

I sort of think I know why. In those films, they're very, very frenetic, and they beat from moment to moment. 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.

An open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it's a lot looser, and you're just hanging out and doing what you want. I want freedom. I want to go over here and do what I want, and I want to go over there and do what I want. That's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do.

We try and create external agency through these people forcing you into the story at times. But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be up against the clock. So, for me, I question if you can even make a good open-world spy game.

Lex Fridman

So interesting. You have to be able to ride around in a car and listen to the radio.

Dan Houser

Yeah, and cruise about.

Lex Fridman

Or ride a horse and just look at nature.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

That's brilliantly put. But to me, espionage and assassinations, and the geopolitical international context, are so interesting. But you're right. I just want to listen to—what is it?—Lazlow and—

Dan Houser

Yeah. Well, you can't. You've got to save the world. So, you need this time pressure.

Lex Fridman

With a Russian accent? Or something. Yeah, wow. Wow. That's really interesting.

Dan Houser

Then we played around with the knights concept, looking at knights and trying to do a version of a mythological game that could have been fun. I still love that idea, but it never went very far with it.

Lex Fridman

Knights would be going really far back in history.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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? Are there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?

Dan Houser

Of course. It was my whole life for 20-something years—21 years or something. I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it. I was always living in New York. It was, at times, very intense, and at other times, a magical experience.

But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

Lex Fridman

The lows and the highs?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Well, I was a child. I was a 25-year-old child. I didn't know anything, and I wanted to be a writer. But I still wasn't writing. I bought a notebook and would occasionally scribble in it, and I've still got those notebooks somewhere.

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 PlayStation 1 games, really. I was thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but I didn't have the skills or the confidence to do it.

I'd been doing that in London. Then I came to New York, and it was fun—really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a new company in New York. That was an amazing adventure, but I was still lost as a human being.

When I was 27, I was still completely lost, a child. I stopped some of my bad behavior, and the next day, pretty much, I got the chance to write on—work on—open-world games. All the skills I'd half learned over the previous years and my way of thinking, where I thought about space a lot because I was a geographer rather than a historian, came together, and I got the chance to work on an open-world game.

So it felt like it was meant to be. It was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was Alex Horton, Navid, Leslie, the guys in Scotland, and all the people in New York, making these new games in this new way. We were going, “Oh, we need to find 100 voices. We’ve got no money. How the hell are we going to do that?” We’d get everyone’s friends in and just record all the lines of dialogue as we invented the way that pedestrians would speak in video games. No one else was doing that kind of stuff. It was insane.

I think that period from 2001 to 2005 was full of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff. It felt creative, but it didn’t feel like writing yet. It was just becoming that. We felt like we were doing lots of creative things, learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take.

Then, as we talked about earlier, the journey into doing GTA 4 began to feel more like a proper writing experience. I was probably ready for that at that point. Then I was like, “Well, this is better than films. This is something that films can’t do.” This 360-degree experience of being this immigrant. We were still only scratching the surface. I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways.

Then there were those 5 games: GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them, and Max Payne 3. I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period. From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period. From a business and early creativity perspective, the period from 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting.

The original starting team was all doing well, and my personal life was doing okay. It didn’t feel like such a mess. From 2007 onward, in 2007 and 2008, I was happy personally, having children and being happily married, and the games were just getting much better. But there was lots of pressure in the business. The budgets got really big, so that added to the stress. There were always good bits and stresses, but I always just tried to show up and do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. I was always trying to go, “It’s a new medium. What can we do that’s new?”

Lex Fridman

But as a writer, as a scholar of human nature, first of all, were you surprised that you were actually able—that you had it in you—to create, through humor and tragedy, these incredibly compelling characters? I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he was going to be the greatest writer ever. I feel like every 20-year-old says this. It’s just that James Joyce pulled it off. So were you surprised that you were actually able to do it? How did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?

Dan Houser

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. You couldn’t go that deep on a PS2 game, so it was also just that the technology evolved.

I don’t know. I felt like I was good at doing it, and I was well trained for it. 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 reduced them to about 10 sentences, was amusing. I think I was a—

I saw the world and society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open-world video game. I thought about it a bunch. The way I think about things was suitable for that, for whatever reason. That was just good fortune.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Very accurate.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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 that he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer, so he was a fake vegetarian.

I think we still do it now sometimes, as a sort of—

Lex Fridman

Yes. Homage.

Dan Houser

To memorialize it. But that began in 2001. The office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no room. I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard. It didn’t have a window. It was literally sitting in a cupboard.

I had a desk and chair just for myself, but I lived quite near the office, so we would write 1 or 2 afternoons a week. He was a freelancer working with us. He’d come in from Long Island, and then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea, sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in, and buy pizza from around the corner.

That became good luck. We both liked Diet Coke and pizza. Very video game developer. We’d have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with each other, that we had a similar sense of humor, and that we could write the stuff.

Then he would do all of the real work producing it. It was perfect for me because I got to outsource most of the real work, and he’s a brilliant radio producer. He was a great partner in that way.

That was how that relationship began. Then I’d get him involved by saying, “Well, we’ve got to record these 80 voices. Come and help me, because I can’t direct 80 people at once.” He helped with that process, and he was a really good audio producer, getting bodies in and producing, as well as being a technical producer. That was the beginning of that relationship.

My job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone of the world. We would write it together, then his job was to make sure it sounded funny. He would produce it in a really funny way.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Yeah, it’s awesome.

Dan Houser

To the point where he’s having his head shaved and being punished by everybody. Even in game after game, he got worse. He began as a quite likable character. In GTA 3, he’s quite likable. Over the next 12 or 13 years, it just got worse and worse.

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, like me, he just likes making stuff. He likes to work in new spaces. He’s been a great help in bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that. He’s working on that right now.

He’s really fun to work with, and he’ll always put creativity first. He’s ridiculous. He’s just a really—

Lex Fridman

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?

Dan Houser

Tetris.

Lex Fridman

Tetris on the Game Boy. No question.

Dan Houser

Tetris and the Game Boy, yeah. It was the perfect device for playing that game. I never liked it as much on anything else. My wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids for Christmas. It was the most addicted I’ve ever been to anything in my life, among far too many addictions.

I was obsessed with it, dreaming about it. When you link two together with the cable and if I got four, it would push yours forward. It was the perfect game design. So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.

Lex Fridman

Yes. Extremely simple. Pure gameplay. No narrative.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Perfection.

Dan Houser

But perfect in its way. Open-world games can’t be that perfect, but you always dream of making something like that.

Lex Fridman

And Super Mario.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

It looks nothing like anything else.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Yeah. I think that’s what they’re known for: this Nintendo polish, where every pixel has a purpose.

Dan Houser

Yes.

Lex Fridman

And I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible.

Dan Houser

Perfection.

Lex Fridman

It’s really beautiful. And, of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of the feeling of a world, but it’s not quite open-world.

Dan Houser

No, but it’s amazing. The new ones almost feel like Hitchcock to me. They’re just speaking the language of video games. You know everything’s going to work this way and that way. It’s quite systemic, but 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 very strongly, with a very strong accent, almost. It’s very cinematic. It’s not realism at all. That’s what those Zelda games feel like to me. They are these amazing things that could only be video games. They couldn’t be anything else.

Lex Fridman

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.

Dan Houser

Todd is great at what he does. It is. From a technical perspective, we’re always involved with the new games, constantly trying to find the balance between an RPG, a role-playing game, and an action game.

And then try to go, “Well, an action-adventure game with RPG elements.” What does that mean? I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space. But for me, it always just comes down to: Is it easy to play? Are our mechanics super slick? And can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive?

For just what we do, I like when other people do it. For what we do, we always want very punchy dialogue. So don't give big dialogue trees, but still have it interactive. We're going to lose a touch of interactivity, but we'll still have the dialogue feeling like it's alive. We'll get better at dialogue, and it'll feel like a slightly more cinematic experience.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, I think The Elder Scrolls series has almost always leaned a little more toward the open world.

Dan Houser

Yes, they're real RPGs. The games that I've worked on haven't really been RPGs. They've had RPG elements in a story-driven action game. It's kind of just a slightly different emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing, and he's brilliant at doing it.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Mm-hmm. And feel the world.

Lex Fridman

Feel the world. Just feel the world.

Dan Houser

And The Witcher, same thing.

Lex Fridman

And Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3 are really interesting. They really tried to make every choice that you make genuinely branch the game, so it's not the illusion of choice. It's really—

Dan Houser

Nothing. Yeah.

Lex Fridman

It's really—choice really does something, and that's really hard to pull off technically.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

On a difficult topic, you dedicated the book to your mom and dad. In particular, you wrote, “To my father, who died while I was finishing the book.” What have you learned about life from your dad?

Dan Houser

To show up. To be present. To go to work every day. To love creative things. He was a lawyer, but he was also a jazz musician, and he did both to the best of his abilities. To value family as more important than either of those things.

He was a present guy, I think. He loved books, always loved books, always loved films, loved music. He wasn't into video games, but he liked that we were doing weird things.

Lex Fridman

Was he proud of you?

Dan Houser

Yeah, I think so. I hope so. For a lawyer, he really venerated, at some level, giving “the man” the finger. Whenever life went crazy, he was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous.

I think he always wanted to answer people back, always give the silly comment. I certainly have taken that from him, to my detriment probably, but it makes life more fun. He always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn't give a fuck. That was probably quite inspiring.

Lex Fridman

So you have a bit of that in you?

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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.

Dan Houser

I think it made school difficult. They sent me to this very formal school that might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s. But then I always got in trouble just for not doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all of the time. I couldn't be quiet.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Well, my father passed away in May, so a lot more since then, obviously. 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 settle, of course, for them. Aside from that, some days I feel spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all. Other days I feel like a random piece of good luck who's going to get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness, and that terrifies me.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah, that is terrifying. 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. I tend to think that there is a metaphysical purpose to life, and part of that purpose is to search for the purpose. But at other points, if you read too much science, you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.

Lex Fridman

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? What do you think?

Dan Houser

That's a really interesting question because it's obviously both. At times it's both, or at 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 bereft and set adrift by the world, and you can't connect to it in some way, and you're lost and abandoned by God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is, it's awful. When I feel like a dreadful hack, which is most of the time, it's terrible. You'd rather not be doing this rubbish.

Sometimes you're working creatively and it feels good, and you feel like you're doing the right thing, and it feels fantastic, but that's not very often.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

No. No, of course not. When I think about growing up, to the extent that I'm capable of growing up, it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself. Going, “Okay, it's not perfect. I'm not perfect.”

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

That's, I think, that new thing we're going to lean into—the bug-feature. It's both, isn't it? That self-critical brain—I think lots of people suffer from it—and I think the internet is designed to induce it. If you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online.

It clearly can become a bug, but it can also give you drive and a lack of complacency, so it can become a feature.

Lex Fridman

I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti, who's a legendary psychiatrist and 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 an awful lot of creative people that have that voice.”

Dan Houser

I'd rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far. There's a danger that negativity and consciousness become the same thing. 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 good stuff and you're reflective, inevitably, you live in this world of constant criticism by the internet. Of course, everyone who ever puts something on the internet, be it a picture of themselves or any kind of work they've made or whatever it is, is going to get 50 good comments and 1 bad comment. Remember the bad comment.

That becomes fuel for the negative voice. I don't know anyone that's strong enough not to. At some level, you should just measure that stuff in weight, not in quality. But of course we just focus on the quality.

Lex Fridman

And I do think, in general, as you get older, that's the 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 the nihilistic kind of worldview in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good. I think that—

Dan Houser

I agree.

Lex Fridman

There's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first, for the first maybe half of your life or two-thirds, and then, while maintaining some self-critical aspects just so you stay humble, start to see the good in everything around you, in other people, in the world, and even maybe every once in a while, on a weekend, in yourself.

Dan Houser

I hope so. I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Dan Houser

I could not be more cynical than I was as a child. I couldn't see goodness anywhere. I don't think late 1970s to early 1990s England was a place of great optimism and naiveté. It was brutal, and I was brutal within it.

I think I've become much more naive and tried to become more innocent in some ways, and always try to see the flawed good in people. I've tried to, or I've had to, force myself to be like that because the other way is not fun, it's not nice. It's not nice to not be nice.

Lex Fridman

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.

Lex Fridman

Everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it. Plus, I got to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience. As we were saying offline, the LA Comic-Con was the first Comic-Con I've been to, and there were all kinds of real, genuine nerds—good-hearted—

Lex Fridman

Oh, it's fascinating. Yeah, brilliant.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

Yeah, which is what those things are all about. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time. I should also give a shout-out to an excellent podcast he did with Sonia Walger, who's a friend of yours. She has a great podcast where she has guests pick their 5 favorite, most impactful books and so on.

You picked 5 fiction books, 1 for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation. You picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Thin Red Line by James Jones, and Middlemarch by George Eliot. But just zooming out and reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think, if an alien came, are some candidates for books that you would recommend to them?

Dan Houser

Middlemarch. 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 1 book, you want a long book.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, true.

Dan Houser

And then they're both books that kind of—it's something I was always trying to put into games—you know, that feeling of all of life is here. You've got love, death, violence, romance, the whole human experience in different ways.

I think there's something amazing about Vanity Fair. I used to love the novel, not the magazine, because, again, all of life is here.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I was obsessed by them in my 20s.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. As one must be.

Dan Houser

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

Absolutely.

Dan Houser

At that age, I think of them as a double act, and it's so amazing. One helped discover the other and then died first, and then suddenly died in obscurity and was rediscovered as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into decline. I think their relationship is itself very novelistic.

Lex Fridman

That, by the way, is a phenomenon of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still: people like Franz Kafka, who died in obscurity. All these writers who die in obscurity—nobody knows them, and they become famous later. That is just so interesting.

Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burned, destroyed. So, speaking of the critical voice, I think he's one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting: 1984 and Brave New World.

Dan Houser

I love 1984. I'd never listened to it or read it, and then I think I did it as a talking book—or maybe I read it; I can't remember—during COVID. I think I did both. I became obsessed by it. It's got elements of that creeping into A Better Paradise, but it's so good. I hadn't realized how good it was.

Lex Fridman

Yes.

Dan Houser

And it's so of the moment.

Lex Fridman

It's almost like, because of its fame, it's almost a cliché.

Dan Houser

I remember the year 1984, and you're like, “This is...” I remember the song. It's just too much.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Too much.

Dan Houser

It can't be that good. I came to it completely cold, just, “Oh, I should work my way through this because it's another classic I haven't read.” And then it's incredible.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Well, you grew up in a communist country.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Maybe that's it. The roots of it.

Dan Houser

You know, I remember I was a kid in the Cold War in London, and we were always terrified of Eastern Europeans: “You're gonna come and kill us all.” Then I ended up marrying a Pole. We had Ukrainians who worked for us and worked with us.

A few years ago, we were sitting around a campfire in upstate New York. The campfire had been built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian, and he'd been in the Red Army. I was like, history is so strange: you end up hanging out with people who, at one point, represented the ultimate enemy. The Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy, and now we're just hanging out. Everything changes.

You think these things are permanent, and they're really not. We face some of that now, where you think these structures are permanent, and they're going to change.

Lex Fridman

You also mentioned that the 3 great World War II books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, and The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. What makes for a great war book?

Dan Houser

I think World War II is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously, and so you can get all these different kinds of stories. There are so many good ones. I was just trying to come up with a range of 1 American, 1 British, and 1 Eastern European, just to get different perspectives.

But there are so many amazing World War II books around 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.

Lex Fridman

It was written by Vasily Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. There's also just a deep philosophical component.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get—obviously, it's in this Stalinist period, and so they're all losing hope. They all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen. Everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post the purges.

But then you get these guys who are trapped in a building, fighting in Stalingrad. They know that, at this moment, they're dead anyway. They get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists, away from Stalin and all his nonsense.

I thought that section was incredible because you realize that, in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th century was the absolute failure of communism. It was such a beautiful idea, and it just did not work, time and time again. These people who fought for it and then saw it not working, I think they're fascinating characters—all of the revolutionaries from 1917 who were then killed by Stalin, which was all of them apart from Stalin and Lenin.

Lex Fridman

People in modern-day politics talk about communism like 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 can't we all get along? There's a real compassion behind it. There's real love.

What you realize is that the 20th century is a real study of human nature: at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized power. So there's always a dictator in that context. Given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and does the opposite of what the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.

Dan Houser

I think I thought a lot about that then because I was taught by all these disappointed communists. After 1989, all of these English communists were having to accept and discover all the atrocities that had happened. It always fascinated me.

Then you think about complexities, or where one's own values are in the modern moment, and whether, from either of them—what we would call left now or call right now—it has any bearing on the sort of communist era of those words. I would say probably not. I think things have changed.

Fundamentally, the 1 value that I would think is worth fighting for is that whenever either side starts to move toward thought control, you move away. That's never the right outcome. The never-right outcome is, “Oh, you've said the wrong thing. You should be removed now.” That should never, ever be a thing we should lean toward.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, it does seem like freedom—individual freedom—is a prerequisite for happiness and for the flourishing of a larger society. So, like you said, 1984 is pretty—I mean, it's a caricature.

Dan Houser

But it is brilliant.

Lex Fridman

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. It probably applies more to the 21st century than 1984 does.

Dan Houser

I don't know. I think 1984, with the fake wars and the way that it revealed everything in it was a setup for him—there's something that, if he could've seen the Internet, is like an analog Internet in the world they build around the main character.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah. Once.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, so that happened.

Dan Houser

That was a series of poor life decisions. I ran away. 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. I came to America. That was a good decision. I came to LA, and 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: when I got chances, I was good at taking them.

I would say, do not worry too young about your career. Worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life, because you're going to spend your whole life in your own head. The more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find the world, and the less you're going to annoy yourself.

I would say, do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate. That's been my—I would say, do something else. Do something random and then focus afterward. That would be my advice. I think I was advocating against the obsession that people had 4 years ago with STEM subjects. Now AI is going to make them all irrelevant anyway, perhaps. It's interesting to see how everything changes.

Jobs are not that hard. Turn up, be enthusiastic, but turn up in person, be enthusiastic, and help people. You'll be fine in any job. People skills, you know.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Not always, no. But the big times were when I had the chance to move to America. For me, that was a big moment. My life was a mess—

Lex Fridman

That was weird timing. I read that Sam wrote you an email. What—was that in South America?

Dan Houser

I was literally in South America, in Colombia, where a war was raging. I was making a series of very poor life choices and had a lack of life skills at age 25. My latest poor choice was to get up too early, because the police didn't start work until 9:00, but the muggers started at 8:00.

I was out walking along the beach at 8:00, and this Rasta who had turned up, whom I'd been talking to the day before, started trying to talk to me. Then 2 guys came up to talk to him, and I couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed them money, or if he had brought me to them. I did notice that one of them had a machete and the other had a kind of broken gun, so I thought, "This is not good."

I ran off, sprinted down the beach in my silly shoes, and got the chance, for once in my life, to run over to a road, jump into a taxi, and scream, "Take me anywhere!" I felt like I was in an action movie, with a guy chasing after me with a machete. The taxi driver looks back, sees the dude with the machete, and goes, "[inaudible]." I'm like, "No, no, no, they're not my friends. Get me out of here."

He drove me up the street into a bit where the town was. It's kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena. I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total of my injuries.

I went to an Internet café, because this was probably late 1998, and got the chance to come and work on a game for 6 weeks in New York. I thought, "Well, if I stay in South America much longer, I'm going to get myself killed," because this was when I was getting into silly stuff.

I went to New York, and they were just starting Rockstar. I got to write the mission statements and whatnot there, help set the tone for it, and just ended up staying. I had to come and go a bit while my visas got sorted out. Then I just ended up staying. I thought, "I'll stay for a year, because New York's pretty fun."

It actually was not that fun—this was the height of Giuliani, before he was a maniac. When you went to bars, you were told you couldn't dance, because they were trying to clamp down on New York being fun. So it was actually less fun than London, but there was still a great energy in New York. I got exposed to the kind of madness of New York capitalism.

Lex Fridman

By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York.

Dan Houser

Yeah, of course.

Lex Fridman

Whenever I'm in New York—

Dan Houser

Yeah.

Lex Fridman

—there's always sirens.

Dan Houser

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

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Yeah, it's more spread out.

Lex Fridman

—spread out, yeah.

Dan Houser

You can get a bit more quiet here. I love the energy. It was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late. New York was a really, really fun experience for me.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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. People would laugh in our face about that in those days. To have someone who was strong and saying, "No, no, we stick—stay the course," and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.

Lex Fridman

Are you excited for the future of video games?

Dan Houser

Yeah, completely. I'm glad 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.

I think it was always about trying each time to do it better. Some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before. I think games can get so much better. They can feel so much more alive, be better at storytelling, and feel like their systems—the component parts we talked about—can each be made better. We can tie them together better.

I think the technology still feels like it's only just beginning. There are so many different parts of the technology that still have a long way to go, and you can go in all different fun directions. Cinema evolved from 1895, whenever it was, until they invented talking in 1930, or whenever that was. It's not that long. Then it kind of found its modern form, and by 1939, they were shooting in color.

Basically, a modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we've got a long way to go. The technology—there are so many different parts of it that still have a long way to go, and you can go in all different fun directions.

Lex Fridman

I just wish—and I know you said video games take a lot less than they could—but I just wish it was faster. You've already made me—

Dan Houser

Me too.

Lex Fridman

—fall in love with Absurdiverse, and you've made me fall in love with A Better Paradise. Now I'm going to sit depressed, realizing we'll have to wait. I could, of course, read.

Dan Houser

Well, 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. Big movies are 4 years plus from start to end, with all the legal stuff at the start. We'll be about the same.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and certain movies from idea to completion take 10-plus years for some of the greats.

Dan Houser

Yeah, often. A lot of that is just the development process. Sometimes it feels like it's designed not to make stuff.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

There are 2 ways: try and do it cheaply by yourself with a small group, or join a company that you think is doing it the right way. I think there are upsides to either of those.

If you want to make something that's cinematic, AI is going to change some of this. But 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. The second you're involving actors and motion capture and one of those big experiences, it's going to cost some money.

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.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

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

I've been in games for 29 years, and all the time, the piece of technology that's going to make making games much easier and much cheaper is about to turn up. All that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive.

I'm always nervous about saying, "Finally, we have that bit of technology 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 as a substitute for creativity, it's going to be really generic.

Lex Fridman

A big, ridiculous question: what's the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here, of life, of existence? Why are we here?

Dan Houser

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.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

It's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material, is irrelevant. The only things of value are these immaterial things.

Dan Houser

You know, I do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

What a pleasure. Thank you, man.

Lex Fridman

Thank you for everything you've created in this world. Millions of die-hard fans of your games and I are forever grateful. I know there's a lot of people who would like to say thank you to you.

Dan Houser

Just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear—it was never me. It was always me sat alongside people with actual, real talent who did amazing things.

Lex Fridman

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

Dan Houser

Thank you for having me. What a privilege.

Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484 | BidClub