Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser couldn't kill GTA 4's Niko Bellic as fans needed to be able "to play forever," so he killed Red Dead Redemption's John Marston instead

Rockstar Games co-founder and the studio's former lead writer Dan Houser has revealed that he originally wanted to kill off Niko Bellic at the end of GTA 4, but the team abandoned the idea due to technical challenges and returned to it for Red Dead Redemption's heart-wrenching finale. I say that's a fair trade.

"I would've liked to have, at the end of GTA 4, killed Niko, but you couldn't do it," Houser said in an interview with Lex Fridman. "You know, the game doesn't work like that."

According to the long-time developer, Rockstar's open-world games "work" by allowing players to take an avatar and "wrap up all the side stories, to play forever," even after the credits roll. Knocking out a 100% completionist playthrough isn't really possible if your main man is dead, after all.

However, the idea was eventually used for Red Dead Redemption instead, which depicts John Marston dying at the hands of the 'civilized' government after he hunts down his former outlaw crew throughout the game. "For the story to work, he had to die," Houser explained, "but for the game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die." So, the team decided they were going to "break one of our golden rules."

Still, Rockstar managed to overcome the challenge by passing the baton to John's son. Functionally, Red Dead Redemption's post-game worked in the same way as the GTA games, you were just in the boots of someone else. And then the trick was, of course, reused in Red Dead Redemption 2. "So, I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that, and then it worked."

I'm just theorizing here, but with GTA 6's dual protagonist approach, there wouldn't be any technical post-game hiccups if, say, one of our star-crossed protags ended up backstabbing the other. The horrible, horrible leftover hero could run around picking up collectibles with nothing but a guilty conscious weighing them down.

Creating Red Dead Redemption 2 was "not that fun," Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says, as it wasn't "coming together" and was “over budget so much I didn’t want to think about it."