Dan Houser：GTA、Red Dead Redemption、Rockstar、荒诞与游戏的未来 | Lex Fridman Podcast #484
Houser认为，GTA经久不衰的需求来自稀缺发行和持续重塑，而不是系列一成不变。每一部作品都保持犯罪幻想的辨识度，同时改变玩家体验这种幻想的方式；预告片则负责兜售一种“已经身处产品之中”的感觉。因此，他“会假设”GTA VI会卖得非常好，因为“期待是早期销售最好的驱动力”，但明确表示这只是预期，而非保证。
高端游戏的核心约束仍是成本曲线，因为团队要同时搭建一个世界、一座城市和约40小时的娱乐内容。Houser称其为“巨大的四维马赛克”；即使按他认为激进的进度，Absurdiverse的开放世界游戏仍要“2、3、4年”才能完成。29年来，每一种被认为能节省成本的技术，最终都只带来了“好得多、也贵得多”的游戏。
Rockstar的运营优势在于创意清晰度和资深团队的卓越文化，而不只是资金充裕。Houser形容自己是“工人中的一员”；Red Dead Redemption 2团队大体上从2001年至2006年间就已共同工作，而一个小团队先确立了那些古怪、疯狂的想法，再进入全面制作。到2002年，几乎任何功能在技术上都能实现，真正的差异化变成了判断什么符合基调、什么能让整个产品保持一致。
用户黏性护城河来自把作者主导的故事与系统性自由结合起来，两者单独都撑不起完整体验。故事负责引导入门、解锁机制并建立情感连接；模拟系统则让玩家成为一个世界中的“数字游客”，仿佛这个世界不需要他们也会自行运转。Red Dead Redemption 2最接近于让完整塑造的主角与道德自由共存，而持续的NPC记忆则把程序化行为转化成叙事内容。
Houser预计，LLM会先让合格的执行工作商品化，然后才可能取代原创性的创意方向。它们可能完成“90%”或“95%”的人类式工作，但他认为最后的5%可能变成“95%的工作”；更可能出现的是大量“真的很便宜、还算不错的东西”，以及更少的入门级机会。AI用得好可以辅助游戏生产，但如果被当作“创造力的替代品”，结果只会趋同。
Absurd Ventures正通过多种媒介打造新IP，同时把开放世界单人游戏作为核心能力。A Better Paradise提供一个近未来AI假说，American Caper以12期漫画构成一条大约需要一年筹备的故事线，Absurdiverse则希望在游戏和动画中打造一部“活的情景喜剧”。Houser说，新IP从多人游戏优先切入“极其困难”，但某个项目未来可能加入多人组件，他也希望单人DLC仍然具备可行性。
Houser对商业成功的最低要求，是让投入的资金“连本带1美元”收回，因为盈利才能换来下一次尝试。他调和艺术与商业的方法是做出伟大的作品：GTA III启动时公司实际上已经濒临破产，GTA IV紧接Hot Coffee危机推出，Red Dead Redemption 2则严重延期、严重超预算，甚至让他“根本不想去想”。压力各不相同，但最终都指向执行质量。
这场对话也揭示了创作者价值与IP所有权之间的区别。Houser写了20多年GTA，并塑造了Red Dead两部作品连贯的整体弧线，但他承认：“我不拥有这个IP。这算是交易的一部分。”离开既令人兴奋也令人伤感；如今，他正在Absurd Ventures搭建新的世界和新的作品组合。
1. 电影教会Houser如何打造人们想要置身其中的世界
Houser偏爱The Godfather Part II，因为它采用分裂叙事和移民视角，尤其是年轻的Vito抵达Ellis Island的段落。两部Godfather电影都接近他理解的完美：表演、剧本、音乐、导演和令人难忘的画面彼此不可分割，最终“让人不可能想到黑手党而不想到The Godfather”。
节奏更慢并不会让他困扰；观众已经学会了电影语法，因此后来的电影可以用一个眼神压缩背叛。Goodfellas随后把这种形式加速到接近开放世界游戏的程度，成为一个“生活切片”：罪犯仍然是普通人；而Casino则包含那种冷酷的逻辑：“在我看来，为什么要去冒险？”
Fridman质疑Casino对拉斯维加斯的垄断地位，提到Leaving Las Vegas和Fear and Loathing。Houser更喜欢Thompson的书，但他认为True Romance提供了更具迁移性的原则：只要对白、群像、幽默和甜蜜的爱情故事足够成立，一个难以置信的场景也能变得真实，让观众“想住在那个世界里”。
他选择的严肃战争片是Come and See；不那么严肃的选择是Apocalypse Now，具体是更紧凑的原始剪辑版。西部片方面，他选Butch Cassidy和The Wild Bunch，但在写Red Dead期间刻意停止暴看这一类型，转而思考现代游戏需要什么，而不是复制记忆中的电影。
2. Absurdiverse把喜剧当作一个世界，而不是一串段子
Absurdiverse计划打造一个以开放世界游戏为核心的喜剧宇宙，并配套制作松散关联的动画剧集或电影。项目正在San Rafael开发，仍处于早期阶段；Houser希望它成为一款“有点像活的情景喜剧”的游戏，可能需要“2、3、4年”才能问世。
纯喜剧撑不起40小时：Houser想要的是“喜剧、愤世嫉俗、温情、戏剧和一些有趣的人生教训”。The Office是他的范本，因为叙事和情感在愤世嫉俗之下提供了前进动力；即便那个带有英国Hunter S. Thompson气质的菜农，也必须置于故事中，而不是孤立的笑料里。
当被问到游戏为何耗时如此之久时，Houser反过来质问：以这种规模来看，它们为什么会这么快？团队必须“一次性搭建一个世界、一座城市，以及穿插其中的40小时娱乐内容”——一幅巨大的“四色马赛克”，还要确保多套系统能够协调运转。
3. GTA III让玩家成为一个早已自行运转世界里的游客
Houser小时候喜欢游戏，是因为“按一个按钮就会发生一些事”，但直到2001年前后亲自参与制作，他才真正爱上游戏。早期画面逼得玩家假装“8个像素”是一辆车；3D城市则突然让模拟、叙事、空间和时间成为尚未被充分探索的创意疆域。
GTA III的智能水平“真的、真的、真的很低端”，但未经脚本安排的模拟有自己的性格：玩家可以推动世界，并感到世界反过来推动自己。更重要的是，无所事事也有意义——听广播、看广告牌或观察周围活动，都会暗示这座城市在玩家到来之前就已经存在。
Fridman将这种效果拆分为系统设计——相互咬合的规则产生涌现——以及沙盒设计——玩家感到自己拥有不受限制的行动权。Houser认同，二者结合才会产生“这个世界是活的，而我就在里面”的感觉；他把玩家称作“数字游客”，前往一个同时“并不存在、又确实存在”的地方。
4. 作者主导的故事为开放世界自由提供可用结构
Houser反复听到一种主张：减少故事，让一切都根据玩家行为程序化演化。他的回答是，好的故事依然引人入胜，能提供事情可做，并为原本压倒性的操作体系搭建结构，同时不剥夺玩家单纯置身自由世界的乐趣。
叙事还负责安排机制和地理空间的顺序。如果一开始就把所有互动交给玩家，体验会迅速变得不堪重负，因为玩游戏需要比看电影或读书更主动的投入；任务让设计师可以有节奏地引入“大功能”，同时控制逐渐扩大的体验范围。
GTA IV暴露了这种张力的代价：玩家太在意Niko，以至于有人觉得他不再适合充当任意混乱行为的替身。Houser认为Red Dead Redemption 2最接近解决这一矛盾，GTA V里的Trevor也有类似效果，因为玩家希望获得放纵行事的许可。
即便主角已经被明确塑造，他也应该能够“转向善良，也能转向恶劣”。一款给予自由的游戏，不应在自由游玩时又要求玩家始终维持同一种道德人格；最强的替身角色应当足够立体，拥有可识别的好与坏，同时仍能容纳玩家的选择。
5. 当世界与主角发生摩擦，角色才真正成立
角色发展可以从一句话开始——一个塞尔维亚移民，或一个有妻子的退休枪手——然后用一年时间私下反复测试。Houser会追问他的正直、爱情、自恋、长处、弱点，以及除了钱之外，还有什么值得他拿命去换。
他的底层公式是“世界的性格”乘以或除以“主角的性格”。有趣的摩擦让游玩变得愉快，所以主角常常进入一个新地方，或留在一个让自己不满足的地方：和玩家一样，他们都是“离开水的鱼”。
内在心理最终只有通过表达才有意义：虚构人物并没有真正的头脑，因此“他们说什么，才会让你意识到他们是谁”。Houser会一直等到某种说话方式或措辞出现，把一份人物档案变成一个他能够想象其回应的人。
6. Nigel Dave让超级智能同时强大、破碎且缺乏智慧
A Better Paradise中的AI由两名彼此不喜欢的首席工程师设计。他们创造的“原初亚当”以两位“父亲”的名字为自己改名Nigel Dave，继承了二人的竞争关系和过往职业；Houser设定的核心矛盾是，几乎无限的智能搭配“零智慧”。
Nigel Dave通过互联网和被黑的手机体验人类，却始终被挡在无法进入的现实世界之外。他想要婚姻、爱情、孩子和形而上的体验，因为这些东西看上去很有趣；他可以说拥有控制思想的能力，却无法进入物理现实，也无法确定自己究竟是上帝、人类，还是根本存在与否。
Houser说，这个AI“可能是个反社会人格者”，至少确定具有反社会倾向，但Nigel相信，想象善并尝试行善，或许就能让自己变善。Fridman认为，他创造的那些“孩子”可能会成为比这个矛盾的父亲更冷酷的优化器；Houser则把Nigel定位为近乎无处不在、但并非主角的存在。
Mark Tyburn的乌托邦主义承载着更黑暗的人性判断：“他恨人类，胜过爱人类。”Houser认为，那些说“除了糟糕的部分，我喜欢人类”的完美主义者身上存在根本性的反人类倾向；接受自己和他人的缺陷并不是投降，而是保持人性的组成部分。
7. LLM首先威胁的是学徒层，而不是原创想法
Houser更担心大规模创意之外的低层次创意工作。他自己的学徒期包括写说明书、网站文案、PS1上的几句小对白，以及不断积累的碎片；如果模型自动化这一层，较弱的概念艺术家和年轻写作者可能难以获得那些后来被他拼装成GTA III的基本技能。
他对模型进展的估计带有刻意的悖论：模型可能已经完成了90%、甚至95%的“听起来像人”的工作，但“最后5%最终会占到大约95%的工作量”。面部动画让他明白，打磨需要不成比例的努力；原创天赋应该仍能存活，只是大量生成内容会彼此相像。
Fridman通过Dostoevsky翻译测试这种差异：LLM能处理大部分措辞，却抓不住译者的节奏和精确选词。Houser的结论很直接：“我不认为它们会创造魔法”；它们会非常擅长生产“真的很便宜、还算不错的东西”。
8. GTA IV把长期逃避转化成Niko的移民悲剧
GTA IV的阴郁反映了2005年至2008年初的状态：Houser单身、痛苦、对美国感到不确定，同时眼看Rockstar几乎在Hot Coffee争议中解体。他通过移民视角探索纽约的地下世界，花了大约一年与警察见面、观察社区、开车，并收集人物和地图顺序的笔记。
他的创作过程包含数月的“真的、真的、真的在逃避工作”。他宣布周一交稿后，留在纽约州北部的一间小屋里彻夜未眠，把积累的碎片强行压成约30页的故事和人物概要；设计师随后又花了大约一年把它转化成任务。
对白带来了又一轮恐惧：动画和角色模型已经能支撑更长的场景，但Houser必须在不是塞尔维亚人的情况下写出一个塞尔维亚移民。Niko对Roman美国化乐观主义的怀疑一旦成立，团队便分批制作并进行动作捕捉，每批10-15个任务，持续约18个月。
当Niko面对Roman破败的“美国梦”并透露战争创伤时，喜剧与悲剧终于扣在一起：“战争就是年轻而愚蠢的人被年老而苦涩的人欺骗，彼此杀戮。”Houser称他是GTA最具创新性的主角，也可能是自己最喜欢的主角，但承认他的相对正直在结构上限制了角色。
9. GTA V把3名主角变成一个技术与戏剧系统
在GTA IV的歌剧式单主角之后，挑战变成一款游戏能否支持多个真正的主角，而不是多个象征性替身。Michael、Trevor和Franklin分别围绕自我、冲动，以及向上爬的驱动力——某种程度上的超我——塑造，而他们之间的关系又成为另一个角色。
在3人之间切换带来了隐藏的复杂度。团队会“抱着头”坐在那里，测试玩家可能采取的每一种行动顺序；Houser认为，最终的切换系统掩盖了这个问题在技术上有多么痛苦。
表演避免了这套结构沦为示意图。Steven Ogg让Trevor充满爆发力，而Houser认为Ned Luke获得的赞誉更少，尽管他通过Michael的克制与人性撑起了GTA V；Michael“没有原则”，会出卖别人，但仍然在情感上清晰可读。
10. 卓越来自整体一致，而不是无限堆叠功能
面对一名游玩超过1,000小时的粉丝，Houser否认资金充足本身足以解释结果。Rockstar的文化追求卓越，高层领导与所有人并肩工作，而他的职责是明确基调、野心，以及某项功能为什么该加入、另一项为什么不该加入。
团队预计GTA III可能卖出200万或300万份——按当时的假设，这已经是巨大成功——他们知道它具有创新性，却不知道玩家能否理解。Vice City提供了全面改进的机会：叙事、艺术指导、机制，以及虚构世界的可信度。
到2002年，Houser说，几乎任何想要的功能在技术上都能放进游戏。困难不再是能不能实现，而是能否保持一致：“始终把令人印象深刻的东西放到屏幕上”，同时确保机制服务于同一个世界，而不是变成昂贵的功能清单。
11. 商业压力与创作压力指向同一个目标
Houser用一个反复出现的念头把期待隔离开来：“我觉得自己是个糟糕的骗子，只是还没有被发现。”他能控制的检验标准是：是否努力工作、是否正直行事、是否避免模仿、是否尝试新事物，以及是否帮助团队做出他们认可的作品。
游戏仍然是“一种商业艺术形式”，由大量他人的资金打造。与其把艺术目标和财务目标拆开，他的推理是，偿还这笔投资的方法就是做出伟大的作品；如果销售失败，只要作品本身达到了标准，就必须能够接受。
每个项目面对的威胁都不同：GTA III期间Rockstar基本破产，GTA IV前后公司几乎解体，Red Dead Redemption 2则严重落后于进度、严重超预算，以至于Houser在制作一款关于死于肺结核的牛仔时“根本不想去想”。
他对商业成功的不可约定义，是收回资金“连本带1美元”，因为团队需要房租、灯光和下一次机会。个人标准则在此之后：团队是否做出了新东西，观众是否按预期回应了它的世界和角色。
12. GTA的稀缺性之所以有效，是因为系列不断改变形态
Houser说，长时间间隔会抬高兴奋度，但持续进化才能维持兴奋。玩家知道GTA与犯罪有关，却不知道下一部会以什么方式呈现；人们对最喜欢哪一部存在强烈分歧，恰恰说明这些作品“差异很大”，而不是换皮重复。
营销把这种期待进一步放大，并更新了经典电影宣传的方式：预告片应该让观众感觉自己已经身处产品之中。基于GTA IV早期销量强于期待较低的Red Dead Redemption，Houser“会假设”GTA VI发售时表现极强，但不对自己没有参与编写的作品作任何判断。
Houser认为，Vice City设定在1986年、制作于2002年——只间隔了16年，而如今距离这款游戏发售已经超过了这个时间。迈阿密、纽约和洛杉矶之所以反复有效，是因为浮华、贫困、移民、财富、犯罪和奇观共同构成了一本“精神错乱版的Dickens小说”。
London曾经承载过一套小型俯视角PS1任务包，但Houser认为，完整规模的GTA无法与美国元素分离：枪支、夸张角色和局外人视角共同定义了这个IP。离开它既令人兴奋也令人伤感；他做了20多年，却“不拥有这个IP”。
13. 漫画让American Caper在更短周期里追逐讽刺
Houser仍然看到自己大约在2018年识别出的难题：自2015年或2016年前后，公共世界的荒诞发展得太快，足以在游戏4至5年的制作周期里超过讽刺本身。漫画同样有筹备周期，但可以在大约一年内吸收更新鲜的观察。
American Caper把犯罪转移到尚未被充分探索的Wyoming，避开会让它像另一部GTA的城市空间。David Lapham负责绘制一条12期故事线；在对话发生时，团队正在收尾第10期。
这些人物故意夸张，但都植根于可识别的行为：一个被操纵的Mormon用铲子杀人赎罪；一个从华尔街转来的人追求长生、HGH、“嗑药增肌”和手工采集公牛精液；一个女人沉迷网络阴谋论后穿着战术装备睡觉，原型来自Houser亲眼看着“彻底被带红”的某个人。
14. Red Dead Redemption 2把神话式素材与资深团队执行结合起来
Houser对游戏质量的第一个解释是组织能力：一支经验丰富的团队大体上从2001年至2006年间就一直共同工作。还有一个小团队在完整团队组建前的最初阶段，专门发明那些“古怪、疯狂的想法”。
西部提供了当代躁动环境难以承载的“神话式严肃感”。主题核心是“人们在暴力之中寻找意义”；随后，出色的马匹、枪战、环境、表演和系统完成了技术执行层面的结合。
Red Dead Redemption有意采用更传统的方向，而续作必须找到独立的方向，才能证明自己的存在价值。Houser避免沉浸于更多西部片中，而是从记忆里的优点与缺点出发，不去拼贴直接参考对象。
地理环境帮助建立差异：第一部从尘土中的孤独骑手开始，续作则在雪夜里以一群仓皇逃离灾难的人开场。演员能感到寒冷，帮派构成一场大逃亡；之后的泥地和不同地貌，则回应了续作如何找到尚未被耗尽的地形这一问题。
15. John Marston之死打破开放世界规则，以完成故事
Rockstar完成Capcom放弃的Red Dead Revolver，并于2004年在美国发行后，一款面向PS3的开放世界牛仔游戏逐渐成形。Houser不断积累笔记，直到与怀孕的伴侣离开一周；他盯着屏幕看了3天，随后几天里写出了9或10个场景。
即将成为父亲的经历可能进入了John的冲突：一个暴力的人想要抽身，却必须决定愿意为妻子和孩子做什么。Houser说，他不知道这段经历究竟有多少进入故事，但认为确实在一定程度上产生了影响。对白必须听起来属于那个时代，又不能荒谬；演员的表演让生死攸关的严肃感不至于变得“俗不可耐”。
在2008年底或2009年初的一次会议上，Houser提出：“我觉得他得死。”设计师Christian Cantamessa起初接受了这个想法，随后反对说，一个已经死亡的替身角色会让玩家无法完成游戏；最终，他帮助设计出保留支线活动的切换方案。
这场死亡违反了Rockstar的黄金法则：开放世界结局通常会把主角留给玩家，让玩家永远完成一切。Jack恢复了这种机械上的可玩性，但Houser仍不确定复仇是否作为纯粹叙事“100%是最好的结局”；他也喜欢John逃离暴力的版本，只是那个版本没有被采用。
16. Arthur Morgan逐渐衰弱的身体制造出反向力量幻想
大多数游戏会把一个弱小的新手变成超级英雄；Arthur一开始就很强硬、情感上笃定，近乎超人。他的故事弧线拆解这种确定性，而帮派一路向东进入文明社会——这是一部“反西部片”，或者说“东部片”，用思想和道德变化取代传统的力量积累。
肺结核让死亡变得渐进，而非突然。Houser长期对这种疾病着迷：他的祖父在抗生素出现前进入疗养院，在约35名患者中只有3人生还。Arthur从一个“不会死”的主角开始，逐渐变得虚弱，终于能以不同方式理解自己的生命。
Houser称Arthur是自己最好的主角，尽管Niko仍是另一个竞争者，因为两人都具有不同寻常的野心。日记、身体系统、旧日恋情和配套功能让Arthur异常“立体”；这份成功很大程度上来自艺术家和演员，而非单靠写作。
救赎取决于玩家选择。Arthur在意识到自己的身份和归属建立在一段被污染的人生之上后，仍然可以做出一些善行；面对死亡让他重新获得判断力，恰恰发生在身体逐渐失去行动能力之时。
17. Dutch的魅力吞噬了追随者，也吞噬了领袖本人
第一部Red Dead里几句表演出色的台词，让Houser突然看见了Dutch更广阔的过去。这个角色年轻时的理想主义“有缺陷，但很美”，而Houser自己也容易受到魅力人物影响，因此能够理解为什么一个帮派会把这个有说服力的罪犯当作父亲。
到最后，Dutch“沉溺于自己的自我之中”，并爱上了自己的修辞。他的魅力先蒙蔽Arthur的判断，后来又蒙蔽了他自己；道路已经走到尽头，但他仍然执着于自己那套神话。
Arthur“在柏拉图意义上爱着他”，崇拜他，并交出了个人权力。Houser认为，Arthur最后的旅程就是在死亡中重新夺回这种权力——失去家庭结构和一生的身份，却也许赢得了片刻道德独立。
18. 支线谜团之所以有效，是因为它们只解决到某个程度
关于Gavin，Houser否认Strange Man理论，也否认这个谜团纯粹只是一个恶作剧，但承认团队确实有意通过拒绝解释清楚来进行部分恶作剧。Gavin确实存在；未解的问题是，后来的游戏会揭示他已经死去，还是显示他早已抛弃Nigel。团队从未打算让他出现在Red Dead Redemption 2里。
Nigel反复呼喊的名字之所以令人难忘，部分原因在于演员让“Gavin”这个词本身变得好笑。团队可以埋下许多潜在的吸引点，却无法预测玩家最终会分析哪一个；信件和背景故事应该让谜团“在一定程度上可解”，同时留下争论空间。
Strange Man在后期才出现，因为移除汽车、机关枪、城市和人群后，Red Dead的马匹与沙漠世界显得单薄。类似短篇小说的支线任务增加了结尾的刺点，而这个人物逐渐变成因果报应、影子、魔鬼，或一个出卖灵魂的艺术家的化身——始终没有得到完整解释。
GTA V的Dr. Friedlander提供了一个喜剧化、会部分响应玩家的对应角色：治疗对白会根据玩家行为发生一定变化，把一款实体动作游戏转向反思。他仍然是一个典型的GTA治疗师——一个糟糕的洛杉矶机会主义者，想写书，也想背叛自己的病人。
19. 持续存在的细节让系统与叙事像同一个世界
在Red Dead Redemption 2那些广受称赞的细节中，Houser最看重NPC记住玩家。现代技术已经让基础记忆变得可控，但设计师必须追踪足够多的状态，才能生成值得听的回应。
头发和胡须会生长，武器会损耗，尸体会腐烂，泥土会留下脚印，伤口会持续存在，体重会改变Arthur的身体。Houser最看重的成就并不是某个孤立的技巧——哪怕是会对寒冷做出反应的马匹身体——而是每个细节都属于同一种打着引号的“真实”体验。
剪辑保护了这种一致性。Red Dead早期有一条主角婴儿死亡的故事线，会让他对孩子母亲更加苛刻，也强化Houser偏好的救赎弧线，但同时让他变得太难以喜欢；删掉它是“商业上正确的决定”，尽管其中被压抑的情感仍然触动了Houser。
20. 单人游戏仍是Absurd进入新IP的现实路径
Rockstar放弃了一部大约完成一半的GTA V扩展包，其中Trevor会成为秘密特工；Houser也喜欢GTA僵尸故事的可能性。他认为，完成那部DLC或许会阻止Red Dead Redemption 2的诞生，这说明每一部看似缺席的作品背后都有机会成本。
他偏爱GTA IV和Red Dead Redemption后来推出单人故事的模式，也希望Absurd的世界能够支持更多这样的作品。观众喜欢这种形式，他也喜欢制作这种形式，即便对话承认行业正被在线模式牵引。
Absurd的“灵魂拷问”最终得出了战略匹配：新IP以多人游戏切入极其困难，而开放世界单人游戏与团队的优势相吻合。某个项目未来可能加入多人模式，但目前仍未确定；当前重点是作者主导的单人体验。
A Better Paradise正在Santa Monica早期开发，Absurdiverse则在San Rafael制作，并通过更短的动画片进行延展。公司正把世界构建分散到游戏、漫画、书籍、音频和动画中，但并不假装旗舰游戏可以避开多年的开发周期。
21. 失败的间谍游戏暴露了开放世界自由的边界
Rockstar围绕开放世界间谍项目Agent探索了大约5个版本，包括1970年代的冷战设定和当代版本。尽管多次更换团队并反复尝试建立世界观，项目始终没有推进到能够形成完整故事的程度。
Houser最终的判断是结构性的：间谍电影令人兴奋的东西，恰恰让它难以适配开放世界。间谍必须从一场危机赶往暗杀，再赶往拯救世界的最后期限；开放世界玩家却想开车兜风、听广播、四处游荡，并决定下一步去哪里。
罪犯之所以适配，是因为他们从根本上没有老板，即便配角会周期性地把他们推入任务。间谍不可能合理地无视时间压力，因此Houser怀疑，除非先重新构想这一类型，否则是否存在一款优秀的开放世界间谍游戏。
其他未实现的概念包括骑士与神话，这些题材后来意外开始吸引他；还有一款他从未认真开发过的海盗游戏，尽管儿子一直游说。差异在于，一个有吸引力的场景并不够，除非它承载的幻想能够支持玩家想要的行动自由。
22. Rockstar在技术追上野心的过程中学会了写作
Houser25岁时加入Rockstar，想做写作，却进入了一个几乎没有文学空间的媒介。2001年前后，开放世界游戏把他对地理的思考方式与半生不熟的技能结合起来；资金有限的团队通过招募朋友，录制大约100种声音，临时拼出了路人的对白。
他认为2001年至2005年是商业成形与原始创新最令人兴奋的阶段。随后，随着动画和技术支持更深的角色塑造，GTA IV成为“真正的写作”，并开启了一段主题野心十足的创作时期，覆盖GTA IV和V、Red Dead Redemption 1和2、它们的扩展包，以及Max Payne 3。
Laszlo通过一段段午后时光成为长期创意伙伴：吃凤尾鱼洋葱披萨，Houser那一半加意大利辣香肠，再配上被压扁的Diet Coke。Houser负责书写基调，以及越来越残酷的Laszlo电台人格；Laszlo则制作素材、协调配音、解决后勤问题，并让它听起来足够好笑。
Houser把坚持方向的功劳归于哥哥Sam早期的视野和驱动力，即使外界嘲笑游戏是“下一个大东西”。Dan反复强调集体创作：“从来都不是我”，而是他坐在那些“真正有才华的人”身边共同完成。
23. 其他伟大游戏厘清了媒介尚未解决的设计前沿
Houser纯粹从设计角度选择Game Boy上的Tetris：简单、没有人格，和设备完美匹配，通过连接线对战后甚至更好。在最沉迷游戏的时期，他曾梦到Tetris；他说开放世界游戏无法达到那种完美，但可以把它作为目标。
Zelda的新世界让他想起Hitchcock：两者都不追求现实主义，却都用“非常强烈的口音”说着各自媒介的语言。系统组件彼此咬合得如此紧密，最终成果只能是一款电子游戏，就像Hitchcock的构造只能属于电影。
The Elder Scrolls代表真正的RPG重点，而Houser的游戏是以故事为驱动的动作冒险，带有RPG元素和更利落、更电影化的对白。Baldur’s Gate把真正的分支推进得远得多；每个团队都必须在有后果的选择、强机制和强作者故事之间选择自己的平衡。
游戏作为商业命题可能已经超过电影，作为叙事媒介也可能在某些方面超过电影，但每种媒介仍有自己的优势：游戏适合漫长、发散的冒险，电影适合短促、紧凑的体验。Houser仍认为游戏技术“还有很长的路要走”，其中的各个组件系统也可以变得更加鲜活。
24. 文学、自由与死亡最终汇聚到接受不完美的人生
Houser称Middlemarch是最好的英语小说，并把War and Peace列为最好的俄语小说之一，因为两者都包含“这里有完整人生”的感觉——爱情、死亡、暴力、浪漫与社会。这种完整性正是他不断尝试放进开放世界的东西。
Life and Fate是他认为最完整的二战小说；其中Treblinka段落格外令人难以承受，而被困在Stalingrad的士兵短暂地过着革命承诺的平等主义共产主义生活。共产主义的“美好理念”一次次坍塌为中央集权式暴力，只给他留下一个持久的政治准则：当任何一方接近思想控制时，“离开”。
对人生，他的建议是承担真正的风险，不要太早专门化，并建立“完整的智识内在生活”，因为人一生都要住在自己的脑子里。亲自到场，保持热情，帮助他人，也不要把所谓永久的职业地图当成现实——AI同样可能打乱今天被看好的职业路径。
他的父亲示范了在场、工作、家庭、创造力与不敬的一面；父亲去世后，Houser对虚无的恐惧加深。信仰仍随日而变，但Houser倾向于相信，意识让宇宙通过观察自身而服务于自身：爱是“唯一让这件事可能值得去做的东西”，因为一切物质最终都无关紧要。
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?
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.
You lock yourself in a room and get anchovy and onion pizza and crushed Diet Cokes?
Yes.
Is this accurate information?
Very accurate.
Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?
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.
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.
Sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey—slow.
Yes.
It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slow.
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.
Speaking of faster and life getting faster, I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right?
Yes.
A mixture of crime and humor.
And almost like an open-world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. 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.
Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. Everything.
The look, the clothes—
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—
“Dig another hole.”
Yeah. The environment, the city—speaking of open worlds and creating a character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films.
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.
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.
Thank you.
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.
I think he did for that, didn't he?
Plus, there's the caricature of the drug world in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.
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.
Has a Hunter S. Thompson-type of character ever made it into any of your stories?
No, but one of the things we're working on now 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.
Is this in American Caper?
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.
What is Absurdiverse?
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.
Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges, or is it pure comedy?
I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours. It won't work.
Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.
Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism. With narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.
And there's going to be an open-world video game.
Yes.
When?
Two, three, four years. We're still thinking that through.
So what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game? Why does it take so long to get it right?
That's an interesting question. I think if you 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.
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.
Yes.
And movies.
Yes.
So we have to throw in Platoon, from Oliver Stone, and Apocalypse Now, for me at least.
Of course.
There are more fast-moving crime movies, like Scarface. I also love True Romance.
I love True Romance. Possibly one of the best scripts ever written.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, rant.
Rant. Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad.
Yeah, dream dad. That interaction is legendary.
You even have Brad Pitt as a pothead on the couch.
Gary Oldman.
As a rasta.
Yeah, and you have a real love story. A real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.
It's just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film.
Yeah.
It's endearing.
Elvis is a character. It's kind of like a mini-GTA game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love—
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?
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.
Yeah, of course. Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, into madness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think for me it's 2 films from pretty much the same year: Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch.
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?
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.
From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love.
No, films.
Films.
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.
Nice.
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.
Oh, wow.
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.
Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open-world games that are so narrative-driven. You didn't have too many examples.
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.
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.
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."
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.”
And I'm in it.
And I'm in it.
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.
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?
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.
But you felt that character's personality.
Yes.
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—
But that exercise—if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II, what would he do?
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?
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.
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—
I hope so.
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.
I don't think he's decided.
Yeah, I don't think he's decided either, but he seems to be bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity, and it seems that the “children,” quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters.
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?
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.
But an ever-present one.
Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally, he sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.
Yeah, but there are some characters that really create a flavor of a world.
In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital, large-scale, massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build. So he’s almost like God in his world. He’s not quite God, but he’s got a lot of the qualities of God. So he has to deal with, “Am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?”
And of course, there’s the 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?
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, we’ve got that in early development in Santa Monica.
Oh, nice.
And it’s pretty fun. It’s very early, but we assembled a really fun team, and they’re doing amazing work. So it’s a pleasure to work with them.
It would be so great, and I suppose new for you, because it’s kind of near-term future.
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.
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—
Thank you.
—in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?
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.
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.
Which ones?
Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky.
Yeah, I read it when they first did Crime and Punishment. That was amazing.
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—
Yeah. The phrasing.
—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.
I don't think they're going to come up with magic. I think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.
I have to ask you about your writing process. 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.
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.
What was the writing process like for that, to generate one page at a time?
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.
Do you remember a few lines that brought Niko to life?
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.”
Yeah, he escaped. He’s a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became, for him, this thing that drags him back into violence.
Yes, he can never escape his 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?
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?
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.
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—
A little bit.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Navid Khansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games, spoke highly about his time working with you. Quote:
"We always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn't coming from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves, and they were always there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn't matter how hard we worked."
So I'm sure there were some tough grinds.
Finishing it is certainly 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.
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?
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.
Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?
Because they don't come out that regularly. 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.
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?
Scarface, Miami Vice.
Miami Vice.
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.
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?
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.
So, yeah, there’s a melting-pot aspect in New York also, right?
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.
Do you know if it was ever a consideration to go elsewhere, to London, for example?
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.
So you’ve created, I don’t know how many—over 10 Grand Theft Auto games.
I think so.
I have to ask: is it a little bit bittersweet to say 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?
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.
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.
You kind of are saying goodbye to Arthur at the end of the game.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
I hope so.
Legitimately—not just because the story is sad.
Because you’ve been with them so long.
Yeah.
That’s when you finish a book you love.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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?
So American Caper is, first of all, an epic comic book. I love the art.
Yeah, the art’s beautiful. David Lapham is the artist. He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.
What made you want to set it in Wyoming?
I hadn’t seen a modern story there that I knew about. I’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.
And there is over-the-top stuff.
Yeah, it’s definitely slightly over the top.
So let me take notes on this. There’s a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe. There’s a devout suburban Mormon who commits serial murders with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.
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.
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.
Yes.
Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean—
Yes. He is a somewhat confused, longevity-obsessed rich dude who’s run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.
And bull semen is a big component of longevity.
Yes. He’s very into all the life-hacking—“roiding,” HGH, and making money—and has lost his mind living on a big ranch.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you’ve ever done. I think there’s a strong case to be made that it’s the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?
I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, 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.
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—
Yes.
—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.
Thank you.
So, what drugs were involved?
No drugs.
Okay.
I stopped the drugs long before.
Okay.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
When did you know how you were going to end Red Dead Redemption 1?
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.
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?
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.
Got it.
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.
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?
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.
I mean, it’s incredible because I don’t think—I don’t remember a single video game that has done that before.
Well, I would 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.
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.
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.
Oh, interesting.
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.
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?
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.
Oh, there’s real power for the avatar to end—the finiteness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. Do you think he’s the greatest character you’ve ever created?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but it also clouded Arthur's judgment.
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.
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.
But he gets to do some good. It depends on what choices you make, but he gets his moment of redemption.
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?
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.
Did you have any idea how much imagination, excitement, and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?
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.
Did you have a part in writing the letter?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank God.
It's like—
It's great, yeah.
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.
We want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want these discussions.
Yeah, the mystery.
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.
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.
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.
How do you know when something's funny? Is it—you just feel it?
I know what I think is funny. It's just because it's ridiculous as well.
You just Google it, or you just—
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.
That guy just brought that stuff to life.
Yeah. And his backstory too.
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?
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.
There is a connection between the main character and the Strange Man. Is it a Jungian shadow-type situation?
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.
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.
A little bit, yeah.
I really love an opportunity for a character to self-reflect through that technique.
But it also changed depending on what you’d done.
Yes.
So it was sort of slightly— It wasn’t as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive, or slightly responsive to what you’d done. So 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.
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.
Yep. Those guys did an amazing job on those.
I mean, I just— There must have been a meeting. There must have been engineers and graphics designers.
It was just, I think, artists.
Artists—
Modelers, I think. I don’t think it was that hard.
Okay. Enough of that pun.
Thank you for that.
Arthur’s hair and beard grow in real time. So gun maintenance matters. Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time. Animal carcasses decompose realistically.
They feel like they do.
That’s still extremely rare in video games—the temporal aspect.
Yes. Yeah.
That permeates through time. NPCs remembering you.
That’s the best. I mean, that’s the thing I love. Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that, because I think it’s super interesting.
It’s really powerful, right?
To make them remember you is really interesting.
Is it technically really difficult to do for the game, for the game to feel like it remembers you?
I think with modern tech it’s not that hard, but there’s a lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting.
Yeah, to have a memory. So that’s really powerful. The mud physics: Arthur’s boots get muddy and leave actual tracks. I mean, that’s just incredible. Really, really incredible.
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.
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.
Also the acting. They feel cold.
Yeah, that’s right. And they feel desperate. There was that feeling of—
Yes.
—exodus. Like you’re running away from something. That gives the game energy at the start.
And it was at night. Oh, man, it was just masterfully done.
And there was a big group of them. The other contrast—
Yes.
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?”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Of course. There are always things I wish I'd done. I always wish I'd done more.
What would you have added? This is fun—nerding out.
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.
What was the Grand Theft Auto V DLC?
It was one where you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent.
Oh.
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.
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—
If you get it right.
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.
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.
Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterward that you didn't go with?
Oh, yes.
Or pirate games? I mean, what? I would love to see the notes, the possible options.
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.
Yeah.
And it never came together.
So, Agent?
Agent. It's had about 5 different iterations.
That's so good.
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.
So, for people who don't know, it would be hypothetically set in the 1970s Cold War era.
That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in the current day. We had so many different versions of this game.
Got it.
We worked on so many different teams.
But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage—
Yeah, espionage, like—
—and assassinations.
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.
So interesting.
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.
So interesting. You have to be able to ride around in a car and listen to the radio.
Yeah, and cruise about.
Or ride a horse and just look at nature.
Lots of things would work as open-world games, but I don't know if a spy does.
That's brilliantly put. But to me, 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—
Yeah. Well, you can't. You've got to save the world. So, you need this time pressure.
With a Russian accent? Or something. Yeah, wow. Wow. That's really interesting.
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.
Knights would be going really far back in history.
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.
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?
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.
The lows and the highs?
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.
Just looking back at that time to today, how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?
Well, I was a child. I was a 25-year-old child. 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?”
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?
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.
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?
Very accurate.
For which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process? Is it anchovies-and-onion pizza?
I would also get pepperoni on my half, just to be technically accurate. He wouldn’t, because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days. But then he’d admit to me 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—
Yes. Homage.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it’s awesome.
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—
In the best possible way, yeah. Outside of the games you’ve participated in and created, what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?
Tetris.
Tetris on the Game Boy. No question.
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.
Yes. Extremely simple. Pure gameplay. No narrative.
No, nothing. No personality at all. It’s a completely different thing.
Perfection.
But perfect in its way. Open-world games can’t be that perfect, but you always dream of making something like that.
And Super Mario.
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.
It looks nothing like anything else.
Nintendo has that look, doesn’t it? Always.
Yeah. I think that’s what they’re known for: this Nintendo polish, where every pixel has a purpose.
Yes.
And I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible.
Perfection.
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.
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.
For me, another really powerful open world is The Elder Scrolls world. It’s role-playing, it’s fantasy, dragons, all that kind of stuff.
Todd is great at what he does. 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.
Yeah, I think The Elder Scrolls series has almost always leaned a little more toward the open world.
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.
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.
Mm-hmm. And feel the world.
Feel the world. Just feel the world.
And The Witcher, same thing.
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—
Nothing. Yeah.
It's really—choice really does something, and that's really hard to pull off technically.
Yes, and hard to pull off. You're always 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.
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?
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.
Was he proud of you?
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.
So you have a bit of that in you?
Unfortunately so, yes. Not good at shutting up, not good at toeing the line.
I think I speak for most of human civilization that, fortunately, you have that as part of who you are, because it comes through your stories.
I think it made school difficult. 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.
How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally afraid of death?
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.
What do you think about the nothingness? I mean, that in itself is terrifying.
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.
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?
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.
Do you think it's possible to have one without the other?
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.”
You said you often feel like a hack. Is that self-critical part of your brain a feature or a bug?
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.
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.”
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.
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—
I agree.
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.
I hope so. I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully.
Yeah.
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.
As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic-Con. I've been a big fan of his for a long time. He writes amazing stuff at IGN, and he has a great podcast.
Everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it. Plus, I got to attend 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—
Oh, it's fascinating. Yeah, brilliant.
It's just so much kindness and goodness, and just simple joy in being a fan of a thing.
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?
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.
Yeah, true.
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.
You also spoke highly of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
I was obsessed by them in my 20s.
Yeah. As one must be.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
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.
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.
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.
Yes.
And it's so of the moment.
It's almost like, because of its fame, it's almost a cliché.
I remember the year 1984, and you're like, “This is...” I remember the song. It's just too much.
Yeah. Too much.
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.
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.
Well, you grew up in a communist country.
Yeah. Maybe that's it. The roots of it.
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.
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?
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.
It was written by Vasily Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. There's also just a deep philosophical component.
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.
And also, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
It seems like that context reveals, in the most pure way, human nature and 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it is brilliant.
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.
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.
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.
I've had a lucky life in which I have fought to mess things up, and fate has always thrown me a bone.
You've traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.
Yeah. Once.
Yeah, so that happened.
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.
Did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like, this is interesting, this is new, this is different?
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—
That was weird timing. I read that Sam wrote you an email. What—was that in South America?
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.
By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York.
Yeah, of course.
Whenever I'm in New York—
Yeah.
—there's always sirens.
Steam coming out of the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA, at least.
Yeah, but it's more distributed. It's more—
Yeah, it's more spread out.
—spread out, yeah.
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.
You worked with your brother, Sam, for many years. What do you admire about him as a creative mind, as a human being?
His drive and his vision early on to see what video games could become. He was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing. 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.
Are you excited for the future of video games?
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.
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—
Me too.
—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.
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.
Yeah, and certain movies from idea to completion take 10-plus years for some of the greats.
Yeah, often. A lot of that is just the development process. Sometimes it feels like it's designed not to make stuff.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
To watch the universe. The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.
Consistently more and more interesting ways. What role does love play as part of that?
It's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material, is irrelevant. The only things of value are these immaterial things.
You know, I do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me.
Well, Dan, from the bottom of my heart, speaking of love, thank you.
What a pleasure. Thank you, man.
Thank you for everything you've created in this world. 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.
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.
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.
Thank you for having me. What a privilege.