He’s written the most successful video games in the world – now what? Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser on life after Grand Theft Auto | Dan Houser

TThere are only a few video game creators who have had as profound an impact on the industry as Dan Hauser. The co-founder and head writer of Rockstar Games has worked on all GTA titles since the groundbreaking third installment, as well as the Red Dead Redemption adventures. But then, in 2019, he took a long break from the company that officially ended with his departure. Now he’s back with a new studio and a host of projects, and 12 years after our last interview with him, he’s ready to talk about what’s coming next.

“Finishing these big projects and thinking about doing another one is really stressful,” he says of his decision to go. “I was in full production mode every day from the beginning to the end of every project, for 20 years. I stayed for so long because I loved games. It was a real honor to be there, but maybe it was the right time to leave. I turned 45 right after Red Dead 2 came out. I thought, well, maybe this is a good time to try to work on some other stuff.”

At first, he looked into writing for film or television, but he didn’t like what he found. “This world wasn’t overly excited about me and I wasn’t overly excited about them,” he says. “I’ve spent 20 years talking about how gaming is the next medium and now it is We are Medium […] “You look at television and budgets and the amount of money you can make, but the creative ambition is sometimes very small.” It seemed to Hauser that it would be easier to enter the industry using the intellectual property that had already been created. So he moved to Santa Monica and formed Absurd Ventures, bringing on Greg Borwood (founder of Seismic Games and Pandemic Studios) as head of games, and as COO, Wendy Smith, formerly of the New Yorker and Ralph Lauren, and a White House special assistant during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

It was clear from the beginning that it was not going to be just a video game studio. In 2024, the company released the 12-part narrative podcast A Better Paradise, a dystopian thriller about an ambitious online gaming world overseen by a powerful AI presence that begins to become sentient—with devastating consequences. Its creator is mysterious tech billionaire Dr. Mark Tyburn, a British inventor who intends the game to be a digital utopia, then abandons it when things go wrong. In some ways, this film is a satire of today’s digital oligarchy, where our tech billionaire brethren exert astronomical influence over society.

“All of these tech companies start with grand ambitions, like, ‘We’re going to save the world through collective action,’” he says. “We’ve created some of the most powerful people in history in terms of access and mind control. These people end up living with much more money than anyone ever has. And he feels, as someone who lives in the community they helped create, that there must have been moments on those trips where they must have felt like their product wasn’t quite what they intended it to be, and it was causing unexpected damage, and… they went out of their way to ensure that wasn’t regulated. That messed up moment I find fascinating, this isn’t to say I wouldn’t make the same choice or judge them for it, I just find it interesting.

Perhaps interestingly, the company at the center of A Better Paradise, Tyburn Industria, looks more like a game studio than a social media giant. Also, the main protagonist is a writer who finds himself at the center of the game’s development. Is there an element of autobiography here?

“Yes, of course – at that level,” Houser says. “But I also wanted to write about gaming and technology in a way that felt authentic. It would have been really easy to focus a little more on the gaming aspect in terms of the office environment. I know what it’s like to work at a gaming company obviously. I wanted to try to bring that to life in a way that felt real and capture some of the little drama.”

After adapting A Better Paradise into a novel, Houser’s Santa Monica studio is now working on an open-world video game. He’s not saying how he’ll fit into the podcast, just that Mark Tipburn and the AI ​​at the heart of his game, NigelDave (a highly intelligent program, focused on humans but with no understanding of how they work), will appear at the event.

Also being developed at the company’s second studio in San Rafael is the Absurdaverse comic universe inhabited by a cast of quirky characters, from a skeletal warrior to an elderly hippie. The company is planning a series of animated TV shows and/or films for the concept, but is also planning another open-world game, which Houser described as a “live-action sitcom.” Again, it’s vague on the details, but it appears to be more story-driven in The Sims, perhaps using AI to create emergent narratives around the characters and their lives. “We’re trying to use NPC memories in a fun way,” he says. “Just trying to make it more lively. You’ll see when we talk about it more, but it’s shaping up really well. It’s quite a fun game — very mechanic-driven. In both games, we’re trying to make them really strong in terms of mechanics, really fun to play, and accessible, but with a lot of depth.”

Houser is also planning a game around the company’s third IP, the American Caper comic book series, co-written by fellow Rockstar alumnus Lazlow. With its cast of escaped convicts, corrupt lawyers, and Mexican beauty queens, it’s perhaps the closest of all his new projects to Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps this is why the interactive version goes in a different direction. “I’m not making an open-world game for that,” Houser says. “We’re actually looking forward to doing more of the story game. We’re still kind of exploring it.”

We talk a little about the current prevalence of eternal games like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox and how they are taking up a lot of the world’s playtime. But Houser insists there’s still a broad audience for mature single-player narrative experiences – and that’s what he’s aiming for.

“We try to be ambitious and create new things,” he says. “On some level [our projects] They’re traditional console games, accessible, but action-oriented and story-driven – but at the same time, we do it a little differently or with a little different theme. Three years ago we were watching a PlayStation show, and if you blinked and missed the credits sequence, you wouldn’t be able to tell where one game ended and the next began. Everything was dark purple and related to ninjas in space. They would talk about this end of the world or that end of the world but they always felt the same way.

“That’s good. Some of them are amazing games. But we were like, well, we’ve got limited money and we’re starting from scratch. We have to have good stories and fun dialogue, make sure our gameplay is amazing and accessible, and our art direction has to be fresh – it has to look different at all points. We have to make things where people go, ‘Well, I’ve never played a game about it.’ Which“Then deal with the audience, not just as players, but as human beings.”

So he’s not worried about the industry’s current obsession with massively multiplayer live-service games? “I still think there’s enough of an audience that wants new things and single-player-driven things,” he says. Then he adds, in his characteristically self-deprecating way, “I hope so. Or we’re in a little trouble.”