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In 2020, Rockstar Games underwent a rather large shift when co-founder and longtime production executive Dan Houser left the company. Now focusing on his own work as opposed to huge sandboxes like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5, he's opened up on why exactly he decided to leave the studio he helped build.
"The scale of the last couple [GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2] were beyond any imagining," he tells BBC Radio 4. "I worked with incredibly talented people so thinking that group, me piggybacking off their vast brains, could do something amazing - that's why I worked there."
But it was the vastness of those releases - both massive projects with hundreds of hours of playtime - that fatigued Houser to the point he needed to step away. "The projects were really long and tough and take a long time to make," he responded, when asked about leaving Rockstar. "It can be a tough journey getting things at that scale with that many moving parts finished. You've got 450,000 lines of dialogue, and [an] equal number of parts of other things all trying to assemble itself. It's this huge production experience."
Leading development on games the size of what Rockstar produces "swallows all of your time for many years at a time," he adds. "I don't know if I had another one of those games in me."
One need only look at the timescale for GTA 6 to understand his point. Now set to arrive 13 years after its predecessor, these are life-consuming, career-defining things to be a part of. GTA 5 took on another life with GTA Online, same with Red Dead Redemption 2, and if you're creative, that's a lot of time and energy to give to franchises with a lot of particular expectations when you could be exploring other avenues.
Given he's credited on almost every Rockstar game yet, Houser gave plenty of his life to the disparate teams there. These days, his focus has shifted to a new novel, A Better Paradise, coming early 2026, as part of Absurd Ventures, his studio for creating a franchise based on his own universe of characters.
The intent is for a multimedia approach, including animation, live-action, books, comics and, yes, a video game. It's taken GTA 6 over a decade and counting to reach us - let's see how long Houser can ship something otherwise.
