Dan Houser says he will stay away from GTA VI
Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser told Variety he hasn't seen GTA VI and will try to avoid it, so it doesn't disrupt work on his own games at Absurd Ventures.
Dan Houser, the Rockstar Games co-founder who was creative director and lead writer on the Grand Theft Auto series, has not seen GTA VI and plans to keep it that way. He said so in an interview with Variety, and IGN and GamesRadar+ have since reported his comments.
"I haven't seen it yet. I will try and avoid it because I always try and avoid stuff that's going to distract or disrupt me creatively," Houser told Variety.
His reasoning is practical. He spends a large part of his time making open-world games and the rest working out new ways to market them, so he says he doesn't need to see what other people are doing. He would rather think about new approaches than "sit there in some kind of comparison of what I would have done differently."
An old habit
According to IGN, Houser doesn't play many open-world games in general. When he does, he ends up taking the team's work apart in real time, along the lines of "Well, their animation team is weak, but I think this game design is fantastic." He finds that distracting. "I'm not a game designer, I'm a sort of creative director," he said.
The rule goes back years. Once work started on Red Dead Redemption, he stopped watching Westerns. He also skipped The Sopranos until after he left Rockstar, apart from the finale, because it "would have disrupted everything I did on GTA, had I watched at the time." By that standard, avoiding the biggest game of the year is consistent, if not easy.
What Absurd Ventures is making
Houser left Rockstar in 2020 and went on to found Absurd Ventures. The studio has at least two games in development. One is "an open-world comedy which is trying to really lean into comedy and character memory," with more information promised "in the next few months." The other is a "dystopian sci-fi about a video game development gone very wrong, and about a rogue AI that discovered sentience."
GamesRadar+ adds that earlier this year the studio named part of the cast for Absurdaverse, its AAA story-driven open-world project, including actors from 30 Rock and Billions.
On being compared to his own GTA games, Houser was measured. "Hopefully, on some level there could be no greater compliment. On another level, I hope some of the stuff we make is going to be successful in its own right."
He also recalled the weight of his old job. "Certainly, there was a lot of pressure making any GTA game when I was on them," he said, adding that he was proud of Rockstar games that didn't sell well if the team had done good work. "So the work is the creative work, not what the market thinks of it."
The next Absurd Ventures release is close. IGN reports that the double-sized season finale of its graphic novel series American Caper arrives next month, a week before GTA VI, alongside the book A Better Paradise. Details on the open-world comedy are expected within the next few months.
