YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Houser

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215
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2025-10-31
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2025-10-31
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  1. “12 13 years it just got worse and worse So I think he's glad not to be doing that anymore, but he did it with great grace. He's just a great partner because he likes me. We just like making stuff. He likes to make stuff. He likes to work in new spaces. He's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that. He's working on that right now. Just he's really fun to work with, and he's always will put creativity first. He's ridiculous. In the best possible way, yeah.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, and the war was when he was the character, I would write the first pass. And I would get nastier and nastier over time. So to the point where he's having his head shaved and, you know, being punished by everybody, even in game after game, he got worse. He began as this quiet and GTA3 is a quite likable character. And then, you know, over the next...”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I got to outsource most of the real work and he's a brilliant radio producer, so he was a great partner in that way. And then that was how that relationship began. And then I'd get him, I would say, well, we've got to record these 80 voices come and help me because I can't direct 80 people at once. So he would help with that process and he was a really good producer, like audio, like getting bodies in producer as well as technical producer. So that was the beginning of that relationship. And it was always my job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone of the world. And we would write it together. Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny. Like he would just produce it in a really funny way.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “He coming from Long Island, and then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea, and sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in, and buy pizza from around the corner. And that became, you know, we both liked diet coke and pizza, very video game developer. And that became good luck. And we'd have these good writing sessions and we realized we got on well with each other and that we had a similar sense of humor and we could write the stuff and then he would do all of the real work producing it.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So it was a sort of fake vegetarian. That was, I think we still do it now sometimes as sort of. But that began in 2001. And the office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no, and I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard. It didn't have a window. I was literally sitting in a cupboard. So there was no room and it had a desk and a chair just for myself. So what I lived quite near the office, so we would write one or two afternoons a week. He'd come in. He was a freelancer working with us.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “He wouldn't because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days. But then he'd admit to me he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The team got better and better. So we could write in a more ambitious way. The animation got better, so we could support it in a better way. We could go deeper. Like them, you couldn't go that deep on a PS2 game. So it was also just the technology evolved I don't know, I felt like I was good at doing it and well trained for it and I'd been in the right place at the right time. And I was both lucky and had a way of thinking about characters that when you reduced them to about 10 sentences was amusing. You know, I think I was, you know, and I saw the world in a holistic way and saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game. I've thought about it a bunch the way I think about things was suitable for that for whatever reason. That was just good fortune.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Show up and do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. Always trying to go, it's a new medium. What can we do that's new?”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Now, in some ways, but it still GTA, four and five, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them, and Max Pain 3, I think we took the game thematically into new places through that period. From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period. From a business and sort of early creativity period, the period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting. The original starting team, we're all doing well. personal life was doing okay didn't feel like such a mess and then from 2007 onwards 7-8 was happy personally having children happily married And the games were just getting much better, but there were lots of pressure in the business. And the budgets got really big, so I had his other stress. So there's always, always good bits and stresses.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Need to find 100 voices where we've got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We'll get everyone's friends in and just record all lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians are speaking video games. No one else was doing that kind of stuff. It was insane. So I think that period from kind of 2001, 2005, it was lots of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff. It didn't feel it felt creative, but it didn't feel like writing yet, just becoming that. They felt doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take. And then I think we talked about earlier, but the journey into doing GTA4 when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience. And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point. And then I was like, well, this is better than films. This is something that films can't do. 360 degree experience of being this immigrant. And it still felt like we were still only scratching the surface.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do it. And I'd been doing that in London. Then I came to New York and it was really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure, but I was still lost as a human being. And then when I was 27, I was still completely lost, a child. And I stopped some of my bad behavior. And the next day, pretty much the chance to write on at work at Open World Games and 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 open more games so it felt like it was meant to be. It was fun to explore but really fun to explore with this boutine that was Alex Horton and Navid and Leslie and the guys in Scotland and all the people in New York making these new games in this new way and going oh we”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I was a child and was a 25 year old child who didn't know anything and I wanted to be a writer but I still wasn't writing and I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally scribble in it and I still got those notebooks somewhere and I was working in video games which were the least literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time. There was no room for that on PS1 games really. Thinking I needed”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Of course, it was my life for 20. Something years, 21 years or something. And I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it and I was always living in New York. It was at times very intense and at other times magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And we played around with a knights concept that was And sort of trying to do a version of a mythological game that could have been fun and still love that idea, but never went very far with it.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Doing the early work is you get the world up and running. It never really found its feet in either of the. And I sort of think I know why Because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat. You know, you've got to go here and save the world. You've got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want. And I want freedom. And I want to go over here and do what I want. And I want to go over and do what you want. And that's why it works well being a criminal because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do. try and create external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times but as a spy that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock so i think for me i'm i question if you can even make a good open wall spy game”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And assassination. I don't know what it would have been because it never really, we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in current. We had so many different versions of this game. We worked up with so many different teams.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Never thought a lot about a pirate game. My son is obsessed by that Game Sea of Thieves at the moment, so he's constantly saying to a pirate game. Haven't really thought about it too much. We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game. And it never came together Asian in it's had about five different iterations.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Multiplayer components to one of them, I think one of them it's going to be really tough later on, but we're still thinking that through. But I think we're really leaning into 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. And I'd love to, with all of those, keep single-player DLC one way or another going.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Still love single player games, and I think. 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 with new IP. It's just extremely hard. So luckily, we are focusing on what we're good at, which is open world single-player games. And we might add...”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent. 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, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead 2. So there's always compromises. But it was, you know, I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of GTA 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards I like just doing these extra things so I would I personally like to have done more of that in that company and with stuff we're doing in the future we're going to try and 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”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But the internet knows we made a DLC single player DLC for GTA5 that never came out and we were also never really worked on another game. But I like the idea of it that was a GTA zombie game that would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, it mean changes. If you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, let's change it. That could be, of course, that we upsetting in some ways. Otherwise, you didn't care about it. But, you know, if I was involved in the big creative thing and he goes, okay, it's the right decision. I can probably live with that fine. I think sometimes for designers when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really... Really hard”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Commercially, it's better that way. But I still like that little bit. It spoke to me personally. There and just he's an inability to access his emotions i thought was really strong because then later in the game he's going to get very emotional but there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed you know and don't well missions that just are not going to work technically usually it's like this mission's not going to work technically Oh God, we've got to cut it. Okay. How do we glue the story back together? And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks. You get late in the game and it's just something, you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish. So you just get rid of it.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be. You know, I think there was always There was a bit at the start of RDR. Where he'd had a baby who just died in Red Did II and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too... In some ways, but I think it gave him real and he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby. And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting. Like he was not a likable character at the start. And that was, and we ended up making him slightly more like, he was still sort of tough and nasty, but he's slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And there was a big group of them, the other first name started off as a lone wolf. Suddenly you were in this big group. So it felt very different.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And they feel desperate. That was that feeling of exodus like you're running away from something that gives the game. Of energy at the”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “We made a dusty game. Red Dead One 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 geographies. So that's why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted to add snow and mud because those were things you hadn't really seen in Red Dead One. And then the challenge is how do you make mud good in the game? And guys did an amazing job.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “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. I think it's super interesting.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Just like the idea of making the player in a game and games are intrinsically kind of physical and you walk, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever. There's these kind of physical fantasies trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think can be really fun.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “But it also changed depending on what you'd done. It was sort of slightly, it wasn't as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done. So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point. And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander, was just funny because he was awful. So it was like LA, you're in therapy. It's very LA. But he's also very LA. He wants to write a book and betray you, which felt like a good twist. And he felt like a Grand Theft autotherapist.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “He came out as I was trying to come up with ideas for those as just this weird character. And 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. So he was meant to be a kind of... Manifestation of your Shadow your karma, the devil somewhere, you know, just saw the world. And then we built out his backstory over time. And so in Red Dead 2, you could interact with him again or not really interact with him, but he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something, I suppose any creative is scared of an artist who's kind of sold his soul to the devil And that slowly revealed itself.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “And we filled it with these things we call random events that would be these sort of mo-cap moments that you could interact with. And the designers did an amazing job at those. They were really fun. But there was not enough of them. And then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short. So we kind of quite late in development started putting in almost like these RPG type content where you go and meet someone. And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories. So you go and meet someone, they'd set you a slow problem, like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers. And when you came back, it would resolve your story. And so go get them for my bride. And you come back and the bride's dead. Try to make them write these short stories with a sting in the tail.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And it was quite boring. And so we then started filling it with content and we filled it with these and having to improvise.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “The strange man was again someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead One and we were making Red Dead One and we'd made this, we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world and we'd already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos obviously. But unfortunately we'd taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game apart from the big fixed position ones and we'd taken out the cars and we've taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians. So we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “He just said it. I just thought it might be funny, and he just said it in such a funny way. And then it just became funny. We often have those side characters, and they're not that funny. And I think they're going to be hysterical. And then you put them in the game and they're fine, but they're not amazing. That guy just bought that stuff to life.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I know what I think is funny. You just giggle out of yourself just because it's ridiculous as well. That was just there's nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin a lot.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “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.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Has to feel fresh. That was like what we've done before, constantly looking as you do. I think I did somewhere between 50 and 20 of these games, got to do stuff that's new. It can't repeat itself too much.”

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source