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Lex Fridman Podcast · 3 min · Oct 31, 2025

Open-world spy games clash with the genre's time pressure

After several versions of Rockstar's Agent, Dan Houser concluded that open-world freedom conflicts with the urgent missions that make spy stories work. Criminal protagonists suit the format better because they can roam without a clock.

Dan Houser

Dan Houser is co-founder of Rockstar Games and founder of Absurd Ventures.

Co-created Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, then founded Absurd Ventures to develop games and stories.

  • Lex Fridman, Host · Host, Lex Fridman Podcast

    Robotics and AI researcher at MIT; started the show in 2018.

About this segment

After several versions of Rockstar's Agent, Dan Houser concluded that open-world freedom conflicts with the urgent missions that make spy stories work. Criminal protagonists suit the format better because they can roam without a clock.

From “Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484”, Oct 31, 2025. Watch the full episode

“what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games”
Dan Houserat 1:56:51 · Lex Fridman Podcast1:56:51

Takeaways

  1. Spy films often move from urgent mission to urgent mission.
  2. Open worlds need room for players to roam and explore.
  3. A criminal protagonist fits that freedom more naturally.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 41:03GTA 4 grew from years of notes and a last-minute deadline5:49
  2. 37:22LLMs may raise the bar for creative work without replacing ideas3:50
  3. 1:14:42Arthur Morgan’s family story grew from Houser’s path to fatherhood6:26
  4. 18:02GTA 3 made its world feel alive through reactive systems3:26
  5. 24:59Rockstar built characters by testing them from every angle2:43
  6. 52:57Rockstar expected GTA 3 to sell two or three million copies3:06
  7. 1:20:50Red Dead Redemption 1 risked killing its playable protagonist4:57

  8. 1:56:31Open-world spy games clash with the genre's time pressure2:35

Up next · BG2Compute demand depends on price, and a glut will come6:18

Transcript

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

  1. 1:56:37

    We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game. Yeah. And it never came together. It's the agent. Agent. And it's had about five different iterations. So good. I don't think it works. I concluded, and I keep thinking about it sometimes, I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it, and I've concluded what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games, or need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.

  2. 1:57:07

    So for people who don't know, it would be hypothetically set in the 1970s Cold War era. That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in current, we had so many different versions of this game, we worked on so many different teams. but it would be more geopolitical like espionage that yeah and assassinations like yeah assassinations i don't know what it would have been because it never really we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it we're doing the early work as you get the world up and running it never it never really found its feet in either of them and i sort of think i know why because one of those films they're very very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat you know you've got to go here and save the world you've got to go there and stop that person being killed

  3. 1:57:49

    and then save the world and an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together but for large portions it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want and i want freedom and i want to go over here and do what i want and i want to go over and do what you want and that's why it works well being a criminal because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do um and we try and create you know external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times but as a spy that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock so i think for me i'm i question if you can even make a good open world spy game so interesting so you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio and cruise about or right ride a horse and just look at nature so lots of things

  4. 1:58:34

    would work as open world games but i don't know if a spy does that's brilliantly put but to me there's such a espionage and assassinations and the geopolitical international context is so interesting but you're right i just want to listen to uh what is it laszlo and uh well you can't you gotta save the world and so you need this time pressure with a russian accent or something yeah wow wow yeah that's really interesting and then we played around with the knights concept that was