YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Houser

lines on the record: 215
first: 2025-10-31
most recent: 2025-10-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There was a ped in Red Dredge and 1, therefore was obsessed by, and I really wasn't expecting that. So we try and put a few characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing. But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by. There are other characters I think are funny and that people don't even notice them, you know, or they see them in a completely different way.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and no I mean you never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games and a lot of it comes down to acting as well the guy was just funny when he said Gavin was just funny you know but”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not three or four somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two. Yeah, I just love the way he shouted Gavin. It just amused me. So at some level, it probably is trolling in that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery. You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it. But it was meant to be without ever fully being explained that Gavin's not there anymore. Gavin's either gone home, Gavin's left him, Gavin's, and we were going to keep exploring that idea. He was going to reappear in some way or other.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he gets to do some, well, depends on what the choices you make But he gets to do some good. And so he gets his moment of redemption.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, completely. Arthur was completely platonically in love with him. He was worshipping him. He'd given up his power to him. And then I think Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying. You know, that's what I thought that was very interesting.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. And that's what's happened with him. And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operating under. He's just drowning in his ego at the Know his ego gets the better of him. I think he's a, but there was something. Flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger, and that's mostly off camera. And then just always been as an individual, I've always been very susceptible to charming people. And he's charming. And so I always kind of can see how people get captivated by charming people. And the idea here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a protagonist. He's a god, not a character. So I'm enjoying. 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 just came to me, all of their backstory, which I'd been playing around with by that point anywhere, a little bit in my head, but I knew it was this bigger gang stuff. And then I sort of saw exactly who he was. And so that felt like he felt like a living character to me.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's always sort of a toss up. But then I loved all the stuff the art team did such an amazing job. It was their with the journal and that kind of stuff. The way that all the features worked into Arthur's character, I thought that was really, 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, all the bits that kind of turned up around him.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's the best lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters. And I think he's the most. And works the best Kind of Him and Nico are the two I like, you know, they were the two most ambitious”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obsessed by TB, as diseases go, it's a great literary device, you know, because it is this long drawn out, slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker. And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he had his child, my father, and survived, but only three of them out of like 35 survived. So I was always captivated by TB as an illness. It felt like it was 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. And suddenly he is becoming mortal. But that helps him see stuff. I thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really fun thing to play with. John dies in Red Dead One and wanted to top that Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way. And so the idea that John's death is fairly sudden. And so if he's got this long, drawn out death and then I'd always been...”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again. Wanted to reverse it So there were a couple other themes that matched that. So there are guys from the Wild West, but they're being pushed ever further east. It was almost like an anti Western. An Eastern. You're traveling east. You're traveling into civilization. And I don't think I would have... Been grappling with those ideas. Earlier in my career because there was the idea of getting a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's that. I mean, it's that and the world building in games. I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taken on these narrative eventures when that combines, you've got the amazing experience.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, both the Red Deads, you obviously change avatar. 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 know and then there's suddenly someone else.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you the games don't really end and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. So at the end of the game, you had to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of features, which is you can run up to someone and punch them or run up to someone and shoot them or run up someone and rob them or run up to someone and talk to them. And that's kind of jump on a horse or do all this other stuff in order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360 degree experience with it. They had to, you know, if they wanted 100% the game as opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an avatar to do that stuff with. So that was the sort of challenge of Jack's character slash wrapping up the story as Jack.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was also the game still had to work as a game, whether that was the right ending 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know. But I know that we had to make the game work. So it was, I think it was kind of worked in that way where Jack can't escape, but I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn't, you know, both were interesting to me”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like to have at the end of GTA 4 kill Nico, but you couldn't do it. The game doesn't work. So it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it, and then going, let's do it, let's take the risk and do it. We can't do it. Let's try it. And it worked.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us for doing it because I didn't think it was going to happen. But I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, it's that kind of creative moment where transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we've always aspiring to giving people.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because The story to work. I mean, just from a technical challenge, from the story to work, he had to die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die. It was probably the Four fifth or sixth open world game I'd worked on and I spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked, how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could. And suddenly we were going to break one of our golden rules, which was 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 to have you play as a different character. The narrative is going to be, if we've done a good job, compelling enough where you're not going to care about that, or you're going to be upset that he's dead, but you're going to actually have this emotional moment. So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective, us to do that. And then it worked. So I think that was something that was very full of fear and it worked. It worked out okay. I think people were really upset and angry.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think all of those actors on Red Dead Redemption 1 were so strong that they really bought that game to life. Them and Rod the Director hadn't done such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but again, I went The actor was so good, and we've already seen a bunch of his work by then You're such a good, he was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us, that you could feel with that point. Like, I think those lines are best when they're really short. Punchy. And so I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember I did a meeting with Christian the designer. I can't remember what year, probably at some point late 2008, early 2009, and we were discussing the last bit and said, I think he's got to die and he leapt on that idea and went, yeah, yes, yes, no, then I went, no, it can't work, games can't work like that. They can't work if he's dead. And then began to think through, well, if we just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up and then began to think through actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way. And so he then really pushed for that idea. It seemed to, I was like, I was still torn. I thought it was clever narratively. But I was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just wanted it to feel when they spoke. I mean, I loved dialogue. I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy. It didn't sound ridiculous. You wanted to hear more. It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke. That was some level, that was all the goal was. And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death Odyssey and you cared about him. You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind even though you didn't know them.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's grown up and is trying to step away from that and be a man, be a grown up. And can he get away from it? And then when he can't get away from it, what's he willing to do to save his family? And that was, I felt, starting to get some idea, feeling just, I mean, she hadn't given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of I'm going to become a parent. So I hope some of that, and obviously then I did probably didn't write any more for six months. Later on, I had a child. But certainly for that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life and this weight that I want it to have, and think we can get away with After about three days, it just started to come, and then suddenly I wrote about nine, ten scenes in the next couple of days, and after that new I had it. And it was a bit, I don't know if it was, that was why there was so much about a character caring about his family, because I was just beginning the process of having a family.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of writing any actual dialogue. And I didn't have a clue how to go about it. And it'll come, it'll come. And then I kept, I could postpone it for ages because we were doing GTA4. And I kept worrying about it. And then my work was wrapped on GTA4, but the game wasn't out yet. And we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff and I had a little window where I wasn't doing much else. And 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 and sat there in the sat there, either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I went and sat in the room all day, every day and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about how can I do this that it doesn't sound ridiculous? How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like either a yellow pad or Blackberry in those days or an iPhone in these days of write the subject matter and then just email myself a note. I think it's a good idea, it's a good idea. It might be scribbling on a pad. And then I'll assemble if they're done digitally, then I'll assemble them into one long word file. And then I'll look at them and go, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea, and see if it comes to anything, see if I aggregate them together and then read through them. There's anything coherent there. Sometimes a character like this, a character like that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character to actually make the main character work like this, you know, or what about this relationship as a start to just play around with what about if we start in that place, go to that place, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces. And we began to flesh out some flow for the start of the game and this idea you'd start in dusty American West, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees and then go to Mexico and then come back. And we had a sort of loose flow. And I was really scared.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't think too much more about it, and that was a bunch of other stuff to work on. And slowly 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life, began to meet with the lead designer Christian Cantemessa and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about, well, what works in OpenMoor game, what works for a Cowboy game. And again, was being lazy or procrastinating.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“OpenWorld video games. Very good for my mental health in that way. Kept me busy. So read, I'll give you my version. Games are made by big teams. I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. We made Red Dead Revolver decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that being a Capcom game and they didn't want to finish it, so we finished it and they released it in Japan and we released it in the US in, I think, 2004 and decided we would start work on Open World Cowboy game for PS3.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That some people think maybe a little over the top. But I love this kind of people searching for meaning within amongst the violence. I think that the West and all of the themes around the West really lend itself to that. So I think that, and then the gunplay was fantastic. And the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of technical know-how, a very, very strong team and really strong material.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long experience team. I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. And then we kind of had to follow through with that I think was helpful, that we got to be very creative before it had full team on it. I think that 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 GTA4, but it just can't 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.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think they've possibly already done that. In some ways, and certainly as a business proposition, they've already done that. But I think that's not as a way of telling stories. I think they're Telling certain kinds of stories and films are better other kinds of stories. I think if you want a long discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better. We always felt games were the coming medium. And so I spent 20 years saying games of the future, games of the future. And being sneered at them being laughed at, them being, having people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening. At the same time, much as he might say something, you don't necessarily believe it's going to be true. But it has become true. And I think still games are only going to get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would assume it will because it's so anticipated and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA4 versus Red Dead Redemption 1, GTA 4 far more anticipated 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. So 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 know, 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. I think that was like trying to forget about that. It's not 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...”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, based on someone I know, who got completely red pilled and I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he's very into all the life hacking, you know, reiding, HGH, and making money. Has lost his mind living on a big ran”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been taking somewhat confused longevity obsessed. Right. Rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not necessarily the sharpest tool in the box. And his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 was like, I spent a lot of time in the countryside and upstate New York and thought I'd never really captured it quite right and just the idea of these places as they change it didn't it was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA you know it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 four or five years. The lead times are a year and we're putting, we can make little updates much, much newer. And 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, 2016 is going to have how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you finish a book you love. The same feeling, and I think that was something that we really. In the early days of Rockstar really aspired to have that, where people would have that. It wasn't just the mania of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters. You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible. So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You created, you're walking away. You're kind of awake to Arthur in the end of the game, even before the end of the game. Yeah, I think I've been with them for seven, eight years, and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one. So there's always this thing of okay, that's done. And sometimes people would ask me questions about older games. Certainly, when I was in the middle of making new ones in the city, I couldn't necessarily even remember. I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go. So you so immersed in it and thinking about it. And 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. And then you're just not thinking about it in the same way.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was each of the games a kind of standalone story. It's not quite the same as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead because it 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 the sort of part of the deal. It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's. Would I describe it? Of course, it's all of the above. It's exactly as you Pleased to be doing other stuff excited for what we're working on now, super excited. Of course, letting go of something I worked on one way or another for like 20 odd years and wrote on them for the last 10 or 11 that came out, wrote all of them, or lead writer and all of them, whatever it was. Of course, letting go of that. Is a big change and sad in a way because”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London. For the top down for the PS1, that was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation One. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was, there was so much Americana inherent in the IP. It would be really hard to make it work in London anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed this large and live characters. It just felt like it was the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider's perspective. But that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, melting also, right? Yeah, melting aspect of LA. You know, there's glitz, glamour. Underbelly, immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them. I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just for GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book, you know, this big slice of life. He did it with London. You know, this psychotic version of these big, all kinds of characters in a melting pot.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's one of them. There's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles. I think they're all very good for exactly what you laid out. You could say, move it to any of those and it would work.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scarface 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 86. And we made it in 2002. So 16 years after. And now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So the 80s were not that long ago when we made it.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they don't come out that regularly. And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different. You know, people have very strong feelings. I like this one. I didn't like that one as much because they are pretty different. So there would be simultaneously where you know what's going to happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, you know it's going to be a game about being a criminal. But the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. So I think the way the IP kept evolving meant people being really excited to play it. And 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 already in the product just because you'd seen the trailers and stuff.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source