The GTA 4 story is "really dark" because Rockstar's co-founder was "single and miserable" while making it: "We constantly thought we may be shut down"

GTA 4 is a noticeably darker and more dour game than anything the series had put out before or since, but a lot of that stemmed from Dan Houser's life at the time.

Courtesy of the Lex Fridman podcast, the Rockstar Games' co-founder and GTA 4's lead writer gave a 'life imitates art' answer to the question of why the open-world hit felt so sombre. "I had been living in New York for a few years, and wasn't sure if I was happy," he recalled of the period where he was writing Niko Bellic's story.

"I was going through a lot of personal drama, as usual. I was looking at some of GTA 4 again recently, and it's really dark, and I was like, 'Ah, that's why.' I was single and miserable, and I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in America," he continued. "My life felt in a lot of flux... As a company, we had all that Hot Coffee drama, so we constantly thought we may be shut down in the middle of making [GTA 4]." (Good spot, PC Gamer.)

The Hot Coffee controversy Houser spoke of is, of course, the sex mini-game that people uncovered in GTA: San Andreas, which had players tapping button prompts to get 'intimate' with CJ's girlfriends. It stirred a huge scandal for the studio, even resulting in the game being pulled from store shelves until Rockstar issued a new version that restricted the mini-game, as well as being re-rated for Adults-Only. The scandal would've likely sunk any other developer at the time, even if culture nowadays understands that games should be allowed to be as raunchy as any other medium.