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

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“Anything, and he's doing something new, the new stuff, they're not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way because it's not taken as long. But if you're making things, there's always pressure that people are going to like it.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of them had their own pressure. All of the games had their own pressure. All the more I felt I gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious. For me personally, I felt more pressure, you know, when it came out that that would have been the right choice. Because 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 2 and we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much I didn't want to think about it. making a game about a cowboy dying of TB and the game's not coming together. Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment. You know, it's not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to be in Lomma. You're spending large amounts of someone else's money. Have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was well, if the way to make it back is to try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction. Think GTA 4 was very pressured because there'd 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. GTA3, the company, was basically broke, but I was young. I didn't really I wasn't living in the grown up world yet.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and it just saying, I try just to go and with all creative work, I go, 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. And just if I can be, if I can go, I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy someone else. I probably done all of the above. You know, try to bring something new to it. And we may, and we as a group made something we are proud of, then that's enough. You can't, if you don't want to go insane, or if I didn't want to go insane, you couldn't sit there and worry about financial results. You know, if we made something great and it didn't sell, that would have to be okay because the goal is to make something that's, you know, video games are expensive. So it is a sort of commercial form of creativity. It's a commercial art.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finishing it is certainly tough, but it also is intensely rewarding and you get something done and you've made something. And that feeling is, as you say, really, really... Incredible. I mean, it can sometimes feel a bit empty as well because when you finish it, you're like, Oh, my life's got nothing to it. And then you have to, you know, but that's the same with any big undertaking you take. I don't think when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work-life balance. But the truth is you're not working that hard all of the time. So just you have to just manage it slightly differently.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Further Was always, you know, there was a bit was both clarity of 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 because fundamentally by 2002 you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted a technical limitation it was just a making it cohesive And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a Worker amongst workers, you know, the culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity. And people just, you know, and also an ambition to make, I think we were like, we thought GTA3 could be really popular, but really popular to us meant quite honestly, it's going to sell two or three million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative. I mean, 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 Vi City and to try and repeat it, I think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better and to use long before we had lots of resources, to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the sort of medium of building fake worlds.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I don't think people realise how hard it was. But we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around what happens if you do this, then do that. It's just, this is so hard. Why have we decided to do this? It's horrible. And then it all came together. But I think the idea was develop three characters who do feel like characters. They don't just feel like philosophical, you know, psychological avatars. where one is really really driven by ego one is really driven by id and one is really driven by trying to get ahead so some kind of representation of the super ego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their relationship, yeah, it was I think one of the reasons that the team did such that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was. It was a crime, it was a crime drama, began as a crime sim and GTA1 about stealing top-down cars. And we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the art direction and innovate with every piece of the game. And I think having done GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big league character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards, the challenge was, can we combine, can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists and the technical challenge of moving from character to character, the team did such 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
“Stephen Odd got for Trevor, who was also wonderful. But I think the Ned Luke character is so anchors that game so much. So I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Nico the most.”
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 most. Innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. He does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for 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. Like he just comes across as tough. I loved CJ and San Andreas. I thought Melee did suck. Just the way he spoke, gave him such humanity. So I just loved. I mean, it wasn't the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting. It was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael, he was so understated, but he loved the character, but he bought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a, you know, he sold, he has no principles. He sells everyone out. You just kind of, I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn't necessarily get as many plaudits as.”
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 can never escape his sort of violent past or I don't know if he can never escape it, he never does escape it. You know whether he's got agency or not is a whole nother question. Of course he doesn't because he's a character in a video game. But whether he ever could have escaped in another way, who knows?”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of. His incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle and his cousin's, which was a kind of comic moment and his cousin's foot and then they go to the cousin's flat and the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were, and I was like, 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? And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much. It might feel over the top. I think the game's so pretty. The artist's doing such an amazing job. The game's looking, you know, I think we can get away with this. Let's try it. And then they motion capture the animation about it. It's like, yeah, it kind of works. And I think that moment, those were both pretty early. Once we had those, you go, okay, we've now got.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's written in small chunks for the motion. So then we motion capture small chunks and then the other writers to write the mission dialogue for small chunks and we'd slowly assemble the game sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a Serbian immigrant, and I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian. Trying to capture what on earth that would feel like I started to worry, I started to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible, and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night, hammering away at a keyboard and going, does that right? And once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. And so it's like writing with Nico and just, he's a kind of, he's awkward, he's out of town, but he's got more self-assurance in some way, not the American characters. And so once I kind of thought him through him this, he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness. And then he started to come to life. And then I would juxtapose him and his cousin, who had this much more Americanized energy. And that felt like it was a good double act. And then from there, it starts to come 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
“But the bulk of my work's then done for a bit so I can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel be lazy for a bit. Start to worry because then I've got to start working dialogue. And for GTA4 in particular, it's like, well, we're going to try and write, you know, animation's going to be a lot better. Our character model is going to start to look better. The world is going to look amazing. Therefore, we can support longer scenes. We can have more in-depth characters. But we've got to find a tone that works that with the game. Easy, no problem. I started to worry and worry and worry. And also writing as a...”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it all kind of paged and paged the notes. Make more notes, no actual work. Months and months of this. And then finally set myself a deadline, told all the other people, the senior people on the team, okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning. I can't remember what I'll say, February the 1st. And then the weekend before was in a cabin we had upstate and just stayed up all night knocking these notes into shape, assemble about probably a 30-page document, a story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters and then hand that over and that gets broken that would get broken down with me and the designers. And I was always clear I'm not a game designer. I'm a sort of creative director with me and it'd break it down into missions. And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2005, assembling little notes. Here's a funny character for this. Here's how figuring out the order we want to travel around the map in characters of this, what was an interesting take on the mob for that kind of time period, what was an interesting take on some Jamaican noodlums for that kind of time period, and assembling lots of notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work, which is, you know, I have to admit it's part of my process if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work. Thinking about it but not working.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early seven, life felt very unsure. And that kind of bled into it. But in terms of the process, 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 and then tell it stories from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it interesting. And then this sort of journey around these various New York characters. So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and wandering around New York and driving around and while just go up the morning from the office normal stuff, but doing that through”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit by bit by bit over several years. But you start with once people are determined, oh, here's the The world. We're doing one based on a version of New York, say GTA4. And I was living in New York, had been living in New York for a few years. Wasn't sure if I was happy, was going through a lot of personal traumas as usual. And that was why I was looking at some of GTA4 again recently, and it's really dark. And I was like, oh, that's why, you know, I was a single and miserable and I wasn't trying to stay in America. My life in a lot of flux as a company, we'd had all that hot coffee drama, so I constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that, you know, the lot of drama in the company. So it felt like having had this run of success and relative personal stability from GTA3 by city San Andreas suddenly 2005-6.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA4, it was about this high. GTA five is about that high, but that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world because you interact with each one of them. But even the main script for the main missions was thousands of pages long.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've done the sort of 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 tech, in my experience, with things like facial animation has always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit. And 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.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're not going to replace good ideas, they can't really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do 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 very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you're fine. But I think I also think that...”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 think if you were, I think it's harder if I've begun and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away like 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 just write the website copy. And then working on little bits and pieces. And then I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA3 turned up was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it. Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, first I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space, but only if I could do it, I was like, well, what is sci-fi? It's science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis the story was Blade Runner is my favorite and that's obvious the replicants are better than the humans. And so this I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis. The AI is more intelligent than us, but is 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 give us a really interesting story to tell.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes Yeah, we've got that in early development in Santa Monica. 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.”
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 I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. When you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil, and there's certainly good, and that all we can try to do is be better.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's bad bits, and then there's flaws. And 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. And I think when we do that, we're more human. And that's probably usually the right course.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, I think there's two processes. I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there's something fundamentally... Anti human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens because what they're saying is I like humans apart from the bad bits. And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there's a side where people are hideous perfectionists want to get rid of the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. And that's a huge side of us. So I worry about those people. I find them, it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And 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?”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he wants to have metaphysical experiences, and he's trying to imagine what that will be like. Oh, that's what children are. You know, that's what love is. So I think he's a, but he might be a sociopath. And he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies. But then he kind of 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, and I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist. He's more a side character.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one dad was called Dave. And just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his, it's going to become clear in the next or clearer, in the next volume of the book and in the game. He's riddled with his dad's previous careers, but he is the idea of he's almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything that has zero wisdom. And so the only thing he knows and then he's 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. He can't actually get into our world. So he can control people's minds, arguably, but he can't control the world. And so he wants to be human. He wants to have these human experience. He sees all this stuff on the internet, goes, oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. Because that seems fun. I want to have, you know, he's a digital creation.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been living with him for the last few years on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI They tended to be OneNote, and AI was sort of infinitely clever but didn't really have much purpose apart from them to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of That's fine, but maybe we can do something more interesting. AI is being built by humans and humans and built by computer engineers. And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other. So Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself, they wanted to call him something sort of primal Adam. And he renamed himself Nigel Dave because one dad was called Nigel.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 you know and then slowly what is it like to feel like a human being you know and then in most of these games how much of a psychopath are they how much of a sociopath are they and what are their good qualities what what is going to give them humanity alongside that what are they what what what are they what what for them apart from money is worth dying for and then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides and suddenly you go okay actually i can start to feel and then how do they speak you know because 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”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Protagonists because obviously in GTA 5, we had more than one, 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 it was really, as a player, I think it was really easy, much more easy to identify with your avatar when they like you were fish out of water. And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water themselves. So I think it was just living with...”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a lot of thinking like a year sometimes from when we'd begin talking about A project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas very like one sentence they are a Serbian immigrant or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife, type very, very simple stuff and then just start to think through it from every angle and start to think, well, would it work if they were acting like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world? Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist. When that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. So almost always at least one or more of the”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead 2, or when playing as Trevor in GTA 5 if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked. The character, absolute freedom. Because also you didn't want 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 So I liked it when it could be he could, you know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think that's when it was at the strongest. So you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over that process, and also just, you know People are looking in their lives for story. I think story is very important and very powerful. And when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But it is a, you know, there is a tension always there. I think in a game. Like GTA4, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story. And that meant you cared too much about Nico and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world. I think we probably...”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less story, less story, you know, let the whole thing evolve organically, you know, have it all be procedural, have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going, story can be, if done well, can be incredibly compelling. And it gives you some structure. So I think and something to do. And it helps you from a game design perspective unlock the features. It means we know 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 control panel, it can be a little overwhelming. Playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience even than reading a movie, reading a book or watching a movie. You've got to engage in it properly. So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there's an art and a skill to that. And I think we felt a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly I think at various points we debated or theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful. And I think with GTA3. Know for me it came at a really interesting time in my life personally and I was very able to engage in it probably for the first time professionally, actually awake and do something. We were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven so as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you were in We were in these worlds and you went there as a visitor and they existed almost independent 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, I think, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating was I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist.”
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 it wasn't scripted. It was really, really, really low rent AI. Like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened. And I think that was incredibly, it was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with and the simulation seemed to have a personality. So you could push and see, and the world would push you back in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this, I think one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio. I could look at billboards. I could talk to pedestrians and were not in GTA3, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. And the world was there and existing. And so it was the idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games. The idea of being a digital tool.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before that, it was PS one or even before that. James looked terrible. That you would be like, it's eight pixels, it's a car. You know, it was not a car. It was always, you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. And all they were about, you know, very surreal subject matter because you couldn't make them remotely real. And suddenly we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive. And we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life. And yet you could tell a story in three or using time in four dimensions. And that felt very inspiring.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I suddenly began to see, first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story, but just. 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 that was this, you know, where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like. And I think that was when I really went, these are amazing. And that's when I really fell in love with. I could see it in moments and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens, they're responsive, they're alive, and that's captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun, or beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well, sometimes obsessively so I remember being completely addicted. At one point when I should have been studying for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world that's really emerged for me pretty much as soon as I left college. But I didn't love it. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them probably as late as like 2001.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No Films was always that was always what I loved first as a kid was films. Began reading books properly aged at about eight, was watching films long before that. And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred. I think they could at different things. Games I played and above all watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid and other people playing them. And I obviously liked”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love unforgetting. With Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of Westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of Westerns. They were always on TV. You know, I knew, I felt I knew a bit about Westerns. And then I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on Western's. 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. And I think Red Dead One was a slightly more traditional Western. And then having done that tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor than just feel like more of the same.”
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 watched the movie years before I read the book. And I didn't understand the movie And then I read the book and I read a lot about the editing of the movie and I understood why I didn't understand the movie and that's because the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that they're spread apart by ages in the book to assemble. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim that would have been like a six hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. But that's still very beautiful, the film.”
2025-10-31 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source