Arthur Morgan’s family story grew from Houser’s path to fatherhood

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:14:47

   very strong team and really strong material where did you have to go to in your mind maybe philosophically maybe spiritually to be able to create the rdr world so of course it was based on red dead revolver but that's that's a fundamentally uh different i mean that leap into the great mythic story that was red dead redemption one and then even more so red dead redemption two that was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games thank you so like what uh drugs were involved no drugs okay no no stop the drugs long before okay that's why i did all that work um Nothing else to do. Open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way. Kept me busy. I'll give you my version. Games are made by big teams, but I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. We made Red Dead

2. 1:15:52

   Revolver, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that being a Capcom game, and they didn't want to finish it so we finished it and they released in japan and we released it in the u.s in i think 2004 um and decided we would start work on open world cowboy game for ps3 um didn't think too much more about it and that was a bunch of other stuff to work on and slowly 2005 2006 the game started to come to life began to uh meet with uh the lead designer christian cantamessa and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about what works for an open world game, what works for a cowboy game.

3. 1:16:36

   And again, was being lazy or procrastinating. Can we just, on a small tangent, when you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy, what do those notes look like? Are they like doodles? They look like either a yellow pad or a BlackBerry in those days or an iPhone in these days. i'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note uh here's a good idea or it might be scribbling on a pad um and then i'll assemble if i if they're done digitally then i'll do i'll assemble them into one long word file and then i'll look at them and go you know here's an idea here's an idea here's an idea and see if it comes to anything see if i aggregate them together and then read through them there's anything coherent there you know a character like this a character like that this would be a funny line this is a line for the main

4. 1:17:23

   character actually make the main character work like this you know what about this relationship um as a start to just play around with what about if we start in that place go to that place just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces and we begun to flesh out some flow for the start of the game and this idea you'd start in dusty american west which meant we didn't have to make too many trees and then go to mexico and then come back um and we had a sort of loose flow and i was really scared of writing any actual dialogue um and i didn't have a clue how to go about it and i could it'll come it'll come and then um and i kept i could postpone if ages were doing gta 4 and i kept worrying about it and then gta my work was wrapped on gta 4 but the game wasn't out yet and we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff and i had a little window where i wasn't

5. 1:18:14

   doing much else. And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child. And we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the, well, she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I went and sat in the room all day, every day and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about, how can I do this that it doesn't sound ridiculous how can you write in in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that i want it to have and think we can think we can get away with and after about three days it just started to come and then suddenly i wrote about nine ten scenes in the next couple of days and after that knew i had it and it was i don't know if it was that was why there was so much about a character caring

6. 1:19:07

   about his family because i was just beginning the process of having a family oh i don't know to what extent that bled in there but i think it bled in there to some extent so that was part of the creating the 360 degree characters i think so here's this man uh that is capable is involved in a lot of violence there's also cares about his family grown up and he's trying to step away from that and be and be a man be a grown-up and can he get away from it and then and then when he can't get away from it what's he willing to do to save his family and that was i felt starting to get some idea feeling just i mean she hadn't given birth yet but i was beginning to grapple the ideas of i'm going to become a parent so i hope some of that and obviously then i didn't probably write anymore for six months later on i had a had a child but but certainly that first bit i think

7. 1:19:55

   some of that began to bleed in there you got the feeling that you can actually do it it's true it's uh it could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable the the dialogue between convoys yes i mean there's probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable and and like that like uh like a shakespearean type of drama but not the cheesy kind Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke.

8. 1:20:30

   I mean, I love dialogue. I'm always, you know, I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy. It didn't sound ridiculous. You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke. That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was. And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey and you cared about him.

9. 1:20:52

   You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them. When did you know how you're going to end Red Dead Redemption 1? I remember we did a meeting with Christian, the designer. I can't remember what year.