It's no secret that Rockstar Games traveled a shaky road on its way to Red Dead Redemption 2's release date, twice delayed. At the time, a Kotaku report claimed that many developers on the open-world hit were subject to crunch and, now, Dan Houser's finally spoke out about the tough production - without mentioning the crunched devs, of course.
In the latest episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, Rockstar Games co-founder, former GTA frontman, and Red Dead Redemption 2 lead writer Dan Houser spoke about the pressures of making games on such a large scale. Red Dead Redemption 2 sticks out as a particularly difficult project, though.
Beware, spoilers for a seven-year-old game below.
"I think with Red Dead 2, we were behind schedule," he recalled. "We were over budget so much I didn't want to think about it. And you're making a game about a cowboy dying of [tuberculosis], and the game's not coming together."
Houser doesn't call out any names, but the game's tough dev cycle and tougher subject matter apparently raised a few eyebrows during that phase. "Turns out, a lot of people doubt you at that moment, you know, it's not that fun," he said. "So, I think, that was a lot of pressure."
Despite a difficult eight-year journey to get there, Red Dead Redemption 2 eventually became a wild, wild success - both at launch and in the years since - selling upward of 77 million copies and courting pristine reviews pretty much everywhere.
Surprisingly, it even has a pretty healthy modding community that helped turn the cowboy sim into a Mortal Kombat-like - another just made the whole affair infinitely sadder by forcing you to watch every dying NPCs life memories. How jolly.
Dan Houser says Rockstar Games only attempted GTA London once in 26 years because the series is “so much about America” that “it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere."
