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.
