Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484

And now, dear friends, here's Dan Houser. you've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds and video game history. But when you grew up in the late 70s and 80s, open world video games wasn't a thing. So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can. Sure. What are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time? Maybe films that were highly influential on you? in Godfather? Well, I think for me, probably Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather 2. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little Italy and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think, and the bit at Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot. It's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.

How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the cinematography and how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got Young, Pacino. Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter. So I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script. So it's almost like the writing directing almost become the same thing. Well, it's one of those films both of them are those films which i was thinking about this idea of a perfect film where everything's good where the acting's seminal where the writing's seminal where the music is seminal where the shots are so memorable where the scenes you know define what you think about things you know it's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about the godfather what about the pacing it is a bit slow you have you have movies like 2001 space odyssey slow yes it used to be back in my day it used to be slower life got faster life just got you know as i think as we moved from the 70s into the 80s into the 90s people had seen so many films they just started to edit films faster and people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker you could show a look and just that meant you realize that person was going

to betray the other person they just edited films much quicker but i quite like the slowness i think these days with with modern you know high quality televisions you have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting particularly when you're re-watching them so it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow speaking of faster life getting faster i'm sure another influential movie was uh goodfellas scorsese that's faster right yes a mixture of crime and humor and almost like an open world game in some ways in that it's this slice of life you see you know i think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the 80s early 90s more than any other film and it's it's so iconic in some ways I prefer Casino but the invention is really in Goodfellas I love the end of Casino you know the use of voiceover the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people you know it changed everything I mean The Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas yeah Casino has first of all the character of Sharon Stone I mean, everything.

The look, the clothes. Yeah. The music. I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, it's just the drama building up to that. Big another hole. Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films. I think the great Vegas film. The bits that I always, that I love at the end when everything's wrapping up. And on the one hand, you see the Robert De Niro character, he's still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the mob bosses from back home, they're discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's that incredibly cold line, and one of them, they're thinking about the old, you know, I think it's the casino manager, and one of them just goes, ah, the way I see it, why take a chance? And then the next thing is just shot. The brutality of it all is just brilliant.

I don't know. I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors. You got with Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas. I mean, falling in love with a prostitute. You've written some of the great crime stories ever. Thank you. And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about. Being a bit of a romantic yourself, appreciating the depth of love stories and literature, at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. He got an Oscar for that. I think he did for that, didn't he? Plus, there's a caricature of the drug world of fear and loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18. And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book. Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories? No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson if he was also a market gardener. I love that persona, but he's kind of, it's hard. If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson. Is this an American caper? No, it's in this animated show we're developing in this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse, and it's in one of the stories in that what is absurd averse absurd averse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated tv shows or possibly animated movies we're still thinking that all through and we're building the game up in san rafael at the moment and it's early days but it's uh looking very exciting and it's trying to be like trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom is there some drama and tragedy at the edges or is it pure comedy i hope it's got comedy cynicism heart drama and some amusing life lessons otherwise

you can't just have jokes for 40 hours it won't work okay so comedy needs some darkness well i think it needs story one of my favorite comedies of this century is the office because it was incredibly funny but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism i think with narrative you get a drive alongside jokes and there's going to be an open world video game yes in that world yes when two three four years still thinking that through so what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game why does it take so long to get it right that's an interesting question i think if you the scale at which they're built you could argue it the other way why is it so quick i mean you really are building in one go a world a city and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it you know these things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways and i i think uh i think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline we're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent but um i have to return to some films let me just list a few of my favorites so first of all you said you love great war books yes and movies yes so we have

to throw in uh platoon from oliver stone and uh apocalypse now for me at least of course there's more crime fast-moving crime movies like scarface i also love true romance love true romance possibly the best one of the best scripts ever written written of course by quentin tarantino uh what do you love about true romance i think sometimes depending on the day depending on the bar and how much alcohol i had i will say true romance is the best movie ever made yeah i mean i true romance is super fun tony scott was a really good director so it moves at a really good speed it's funny it's completely unbelievable but you really care about the characters it's the kind of you know this world that obviously doesn't exist but you feel it does exist the characters are larger than life the dialogue is unbelievably you could just sit and watch them talk all day long and you know you just it's amusing you just want to live in that world i was thinking like you know what do you like about films it's the idea to be in a world you want to they're not real they're never But you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.

And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super racist discussion. Rant. Rant. Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad. Yeah, dream dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on a couch. Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman. He's a raster. yeah and uh you have i mean a real love story like a real genuine pure love can survive in any context and it's just sweet their love story is very sweet in that film it's endearing the elvis as a character it's kind of like a mini gta type game some of the same beauty the comedy the love crossed with play again sam it sort of feels a bit like that with the elvis character what about greatest war film what would it be for you greatest war film if i'm feeling serious it would be a russian film called come and see which is probably the most intense film ever made and if i'm feeling slightly less serious apocalypse now and i would always want to watch the original cut i don't prefer the re-edits i like the original first release i think it's tighter and slicker and and works the best yeah of course apocalypse now is this hallucinatory journey

into darkness i think madness from the first scene onwards it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece and again incredible characters brilliant dialogue some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems and and there's different ways of doing that um and you've talked about different books the thin red line is another uh book and movie that shows that yeah and i i watched the movie years before i read the book and i didn't understand the movie and then i read the book and i read a lot about the editing of the movie and i understood why i didn't understand the movie and that's because the movie makes no sense it is beautifully shot and the music is one of the best film scores of all time but they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that's spread apart by ages in the book to assemble. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. That would have been like a six hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful, but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. But it's still very beautiful, the film. And in terms of Westerns, what's the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven. Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy

and the Sundance Kid. I think for me, it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year, butch cassidy and the wild bunch i love robert redford and rest in peace that film it's just it's impossible to imagine anybody film without butch cassidy it's paul newman robert redford and clinton eastwood for you also has that impacted your writing on red dead i i love unforgiven but the truth is with red dead i'd seen a lot of westerns as a kid my dad watched lots of westerns they were always on tv you know i i knew i felt i knew a lot a bit of quite a bit about westerns and then you know then i had to start thinking about writing one for work and i deliberately did not binge on westerns i tried to watch no more westerns and just think about what i liked about them what i didn't like about them what would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game and i think red dead one was a slightly more traditional western and then having done that tried to take red dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor didn't just feel like more of the same from movies to video games when did you first fall in love with video games literature was the first love

no films films was always that was always well what i loved first as a kid was films problems. um older began reading books properly aged about eight was watching films long before that nice and then probably it was always bouncing between the two which i preferred i think they could at different things games i played and above all watched a lot of games as a kid as being a young kid and you know other people playing them um and i obviously liked the core thing games do which is you press a button and something happens they're responsive they're alive and that's captivating and then the competitive angle of games is fun or you know beating this beating that winning this that was fun as well um sometimes obsessively so you know i remember being completely addicted at one point when i was should have been studying for months at a time to tetris on a game boy you know i liked games and i liked interactivity and i liked the movement to this digital world that's really emerged to me pretty much as soon as I left college.

But I didn't love it. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them probably as late as like 2001. Oh, wow. And when I suddenly began to see, first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story, but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making games these things that was this you know where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future it felt like and i think that was when i really went these are amazing and that's when i really fell in love with i i could see it in moments and suddenly you could make this whole experience so that was really the moment for me yeah of course because you're a pioneer of open world games that are so narrative driven so it's like you didn't have too many examples yeah before that it was ps1 or before even before that games looked terrible you know that you would be like it's eight pixels it's a car you know it was not a car it was they just didn't it was always you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was and all they were about you know very surreal subject matter because you couldn't make

them remotely real and suddenly we had we're able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive and and we were trying to give it even more at least the illusion of even more life and yet you see you could tell a story in three or you know using time in four dimensions and that felt very inspiring yeah i think uh gta

uh there's often been a tension through your work between uh an open world at freedom and the narrative driven storytelling and i think you've often maybe always gotten the balance right so what is it what is the value of each and how do you get the balance right well i think the the open world is intrinsically pretty fun it's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom and and certainly i think at various points we we we debated or you know i don't theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people in the team would really push for less story less story you know let the whole thing evolve organically you know have it all be procedural have it all just evolve from what you do i think um for me i would always come back to going story can be if done well can be incredibly compelling and it gives you some structure so i think and something to do and it helps you from a game design perspective unlock the features it means we know the feet the the big features because you know essentially when you put someone

in in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel it can be a little overwhelming you know playing a game is a lot more an engaging experience even than reading a movie you know reading a book or watching a movie you've got to engage in it properly so how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world there's an art and a skill to that um and i think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process and also just you know people are looking in their lives for story i think story is very important and very powerful when you combine the two successfully you get the best of both worlds but it is a you know there is a tension always there I think in in a game like GTA 4 which I worked on and loved and I thought the story was great but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story and that meant you cared too much about Nico and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead 2 or when playing as Trevor in GTA 5 if you wanted to be crazy I think those were when it really worked the

character absolute freedom because also you didn't want in any game you don't really want to compel the player if you're giving them freedom you don't want to say well I'm giving you freedom but I'm taking away because you've got to be this kind of person when you're free so I liked it when it could be he could you know he or she could veer to be nice veer to be nasty i think that's when it was at the strongest so you you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides but you felt that character's personality you felt the depth you've actually talked about this the really powerful concept of uh creating a 360 degree character i think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation which is really interesting philosophical concept i started to immediately think of that can i imagine how good of an npc am i can i imagine myself in every part i i tried to do that very much when i when i look at human history when i look at the roman empire when i look at world war ii uh well then the german side the russian side the british side the american side just i imagine myself if i was a soldier but like that exercise like if you put

Trevor as a soldier in World War II, what would he do? I mean, that may be going a little bit too far, but basically what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits of how romantic is he, how narcissistic, all those kinds of elements.

If we can contrast, what is it, Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system, Nigel Dave, you've been working on recently as part of a better paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep uh but the ai system in there the super intelligent ai system uh is named nigel dave and it has i mean at least from my current experience with it um has like a conflicting nature um maybe it's psychopathic i haven't quite figured that out yet i don't think he's decided yeah i don't think he's decided either uh but he seems to be uh bent on world domination although he doesn't take credit for it he wants to fix humanity and it seems that the children quote-unquote that it creates are the real monsters uh and actually there's a really interesting idea there which is maybe it's not the AGI ASI we should be afraid of but the children it creates because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it it's conflicted it's chaotic it's it wants to be human it wants to be loved maybe it wants to love but the children monsters it creates are the ones that are doing the world domination the maximizing paperclips

anyway it's that's a character you have to build that out you have to think through that so you've been living with that one for a while yeah i was living i've been living with him for the last few years on and off i felt with a lot of portrayals of ai they tended to be one note and ai was sort of infinitely clever but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of borg-like fog and i thought that's fine but maybe we can do something you know more interesting ai is being built by humans and humans you know and built by computer engineers and there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team so i just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other so not so nigel dave who's renamed himself they wanted to call him something sort of primal adam and he renamed himself nigel dave because one dad was called nigel and one dad was called dave and um just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his it's going to become clear in in the next or clearer in the next uh volume of the book and and in the game he's riddled with his dad's previous careers. But he is, with the idea that he's almost infinitely intelligent or

can learn almost everything that has zero wisdom. And so the only thing he knows, and then he's seeing the world through the internet, the most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch them. But he's stuck, pressed against, he can't actually get into our world. So he can control people's minds, arguably, but he can't control the world. And so he wants to be human. He wants to have these human experiences. He sees all this stuff on the internet and goes, oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to, because that seems fun. I want to have, you know, he's a digital creation. So he wants to have metaphysical experiences. And he's trying to imagine what that will be like. Oh, that's what children are.

You know, that's what love is. So I think he's a, but he might be a sociopath and he might have certainly has sociopathic tendencies. But then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there's something sympathetic about him. And I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist. He's more a side character. But an ever-present one. Yes. Or nearly ever-present. occasionally sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention yeah but there's some some characters that really create a flavor of a world in his world he was built as an ai agent for this digital large-scale massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build and so he's almost like god in his world he's not quite god but he's got a lot of the qualities of god so he has to deal with am i god am i human do i exist and of course there's the the CEO of the company that's also a character that's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today.

His name is Mark Tyburn, and Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that, all those people who want to build their own utopia. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of Earth. Do you think that's always going to be the case, for the most part, that power and money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI? Yes. I mean, I think there's two processes. I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there's something fundamentally...

anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens. Because what they're saying is, I like humans apart from the bad bits. And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there's a side where people are, you know, hideous perfectionists want to get rid of, you know, the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. And that's a huge side of us so i i worry about those people i find them you know it's it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior i like humans apart from the bad bits that's so beautifully put yeah that there is it's so contraintuitive but the people that say we're we're almost there we just need to there's this path we take and we'll be perfect then and that somehow gets us into trouble it's it's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits we have to love the bad bits about humans we can't at those those bugs are features yeah and there's there's there's bad bits and then there's flaws and i think we're all flawed and we can really try to be better people but we still have to accept we're flawed and we're not perfect and we have to accept that in other people and i think when we when we do that we're more human and that's probably usually the right course

I mean, it really is a return to that Solzhenitsyn line of the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man. And he also like the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves as from day to day, from month to month throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better. And as the perspective shift, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding and as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection. So, yeah, it's a beautiful mess. And all of us have that line.

Yes. And I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. When you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil. and they're certainly good and that all we can try to do is be better and it's funny that Nigel Dave by the way I liked and they grew on me very quickly um uh has that line and is struggling with it it's fascinating to watch it's really as a character uh and there's also going to be a video game of a better paradise potentially yes okay yeah we've got that in uh early development in santa monica oh and it's pretty fun it's uh very early but we assembled a really fun And they're doing amazing work. So it's a pleasure to work with them.

I mean, it would be so great. And I suppose new for you because it's kind of near term future. Yes. First, I always, well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space, but only if I could do it. I was like, well, what is sci-fi? It's science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of opera but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis the story was blade runner is my favorite and that's it's obvious you know the replicants are better than the humans and so this i finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis the ai is more intelligent than us but is also as broken as we are that was an interesting hypothesis to explore you know what happens when ai runs rampant in its own fake digital world that was the i felt that we had a a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell and uh it would be incredible to create a sort of ai video game as the world is developing smarter smarter ais it allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating it's a real commentary as the thing

is happening so i have to ask as a person you as a person who loves literature and uh One of, if not the greatest writer in video game history. Kurt, in the book, A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful. At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that? A writer. Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others. So instead, I decided to get a master's in marketing and started to sell language models. so you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives in recent history

Do you remember a few maybe lines that brought Nico to life? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of, it was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle and his cousin's foot, which was a kind of comic moment and his cousin's foot, and then they go to the cousin's flat.

and the cousin also even though he was a sort of a failure was still upbeat and then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were and i was like this is can i make this work in a game it's very different from stuff you normally see in games is it going to feel ridiculous and i remember being very scared because i thought it might be too much We'll see you next week. It might feel over the top. I think, you know, the game's so pretty. The artist's doing such an amazing job. The game's looking, you know, I think we can get away with this. Let's try it.

And then they motion capture it, the animation came back. I was like, yeah, it kind of works. And I think that moment, those were both pretty early. Once we had those, you go, okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy with this character. Now it's working. You remember, during the war, we did some bad things. and bad things happen to us. War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry. Maybe that is no excuse. Yeah, he escaped. He's a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which...

became for him this thing that drags him back into violence yes he can never escape his sort of violent past or i don't know if he can never escape it he never does escape it you know whether he's got agency or not it's a whole nother question of course he doesn't because you know he's a character in a video game but you know whether he ever could have escaped in another way who knows i think uh he's probably the greatest character for me created in the grand theft auto series what of all the characters you've written in grand theft auto would nico be the the best character you created i think he's the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways you know normally he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right he's the nicest person in some ways um is he the best protagonist of a gta game i think he's the most innovative protagonist of a gta game structurally he might be too nice in some ways um he's also tough like he just comes across as tough i loved cj and san andreas i thought melee did he's got just the way he spoke gave him such humanity so i just loved it mean not wasn't the writing it was the quality of the voice acting was just so strong for him i think aspects of michael he was so understated but he loved the

character but he bought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed who is such a you know he sold has no principles he sells everyone out but you just kind of i think ned luke did such an amazing job and and didn't necessarily get as many as many plaudits as steven odd got for trevor and he was also wonderful but i think the ned luke character so sort of anchors that game so much so i like all of them in different ways but i probably love nico the most and of course uh Michael's from Grand Theft Auto 5, and he's one of three protagonists, with also Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft Auto 4, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto 5 when the three characters come together.

Can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto 5? Is there some degree? I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, But is there some aspect of the three protagonists sort of, you know, brothers Karamazov, Alosh, Admitri, and Ivan, sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature and just the tension between them that allows you, the three of them become a character in themselves. their relationship their relationship yeah it was it was i think one of the reasons that the the team did such that grand theft auto is still so popular is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was it was a crime it was a crime drama you know began as a crime a crime sim in gta one It's about stealing two top-down cars. And we always try to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And I think having done GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character, and then these two extra stories that came afterwards, the challenge was, can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists?

and and and the the technical challenge of moving from character to character the team did such an amazing job that i don't think people realized how hard it was but we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around like what happens if you do this then do that it's just this is so hard why have we why have we decided to do this it's horrible um and then it all came together uh but i think that the the idea was develop three characters who do feel like characters they don't just feel like philosophical you know psychological avatars but where one is really really driven by ego one is really driven by id and one is really driven by trying to get ahead so some kind of representation of the super ego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other one of the most upvoted questions on uh reddit about gta 5 from a fan.

GTA 5 is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA 5 and GTA Online. GTA 4 is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me.

and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about this has been everything and they're still truly happy to do it and then it's like what else is there in life what compared to this what else is there so that's the ups and downs of life it's you need the darkness you need the lows to really experience the highs uh let me ask you about the pressure uh there's an insane level of excitement and expectation for grand theft auto 6 uh same was true for gta 5 and gta 4 and even before that and you and the team delivered every time uh how difficult was it to uh do creative work

under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success i was pretty good at compartmentalizing you know and it just saying and i try just to go and when with all creative work i i go i feel like a terrible fraud but i haven't been found out yet just do my best and hopefully i won't be found out this time and just if i can be if i can go i tried hard with the work i tried to do it with integrity i tried not to copy someone else i've probably done all of the above you know try to bring something new to it and we may and we as a group made something we are proud of then that's enough you can't if you don't want to go insane or if i didn't want to go insane you couldn't sit there and worry about financial results you know if we made something great and it didn't sell that would have to be okay uh because the goal is to make something that's you know video games are expensive so it is a sort of commercial form of creativity it's a commercial art form you know so So you have to be in Lunkmire, you're spending large amounts of someone else's money.

You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, the way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction. I think GTA 4 was very pressured because there'd been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to hot coffee. It was extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful. for gta 3 the company was basically broke but i was young i didn't really care you know it wasn't i wasn't living in in the grown-up world yet all of them had their own pressure all of the games had their own pressure all the more i felt i'd gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious for me personally i felt more pressure you know when it uh when it came out that that would that would have been the right choice because again if you're trying to take big swings creatively and you've spent a lot of money that can be quite stressful you know i think with with with red dead 2 when you know we were behind schedule 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 tb and the game's not coming together turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment you know it's not that fun so i think

that was a lot of pressure um but you know anything if you're doing something new you know the new stuff there's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way because it's not taken as long but you know if you're making things there's always pressure that people are going to like it why do you think there was so much excitement about gta 4 gta 5 and now gta 6 because they don't come out that regularly and i think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the ip was the games always felt different you know people have very strong feelings i like this one i didn't like that one as much because they are pretty different so you there would be a simultaneously where you know what's going to happen it's a grand theft auto you know it's going to be a game about being a criminal but the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot so i think the way the ip kept evolving meant people being really excited to play it and we were good at marketing them as well we really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing where you were really felt like you're already in the product just because you'd seen the

trailers and stuff you mentioned that you haven't written for grand theft auto 6 what's it feel like grand theft auto 6 returning to vice city this is over 20 years later but the original gta vice city game was set in the 80s so maybe inspired by scarface a little bit scarface miami vice and our 80s childhoods you know what i realized quite a while ago unfortunately was that we made that game and it was set i think in 86 and it we made in 2002 so 16 years after and now it's way past 16 years since vice city came out so it was uh the 80s were not that long ago when we made it you know i think miami is one of the most unique cities in the world oh yeah especially if you're thinking about satirizing american culture as this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld as the influencers has the crypto bros the yachts bikinis plastic surgery sports cars drugs cartel cash luxury super rich people and uh the desperately poor just the whole of it would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of uh characters that are possible that human nature can generate i think it's one of them you know there's a reason why gta kept coming back to miami new york los angeles i think they're all very good for exactly what you

laid out you know you could you could say move it to any of those and it would work you know so yeah there's a melting pot aspect to la you know there's glitz glamour underbelly immigrants you know enormous wealth in all of them i think those are what i think are really fun for any not even just for gta but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life almost like a sort of psychotic version of a dickens book you know this big slice of life he did it with london you know this psychotic version of uh of these you know big all kinds of characters in a melting pot any of these global cities work well for that do you know if that was ever consideration to go elsewhere to like a london we made a little thing in london 26 years ago gta london for the top down for the ps1 um that was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for playstation one i think for a full gta game we always decided it was uh there was so much americana inherent in the ip it would be really hard to make it work in london or else you know you needed guns you needed these larger than life characters it you know it just it just felt like it was the game was so much about america you know possibly from an outsider's perspective

But, you know, that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere. So you've created, I don't know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games. I think so. I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say, to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and having to watch Grand Theft Auto VI released? Or is it more excitement? What's the feeling? I think it's... How would I describe it? Of course, it's all of the above. You know, it's exactly as you, you know, pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now, super excited. Of course.

Letting go of something, I worked on it one way or another for like 20-odd years, you know, and wrote on the last 10 or 11 that came out, wrote all of them, or, you know, lead writer on all of them, whatever it was. So, of course, letting go of that is, you know, is a big change and sad in a way because each of the games was a kind of standalone story it's not quite the same as as i think probably it would be in some way sadder if someone continued on red dead because it was a cohesive two-game arc that might be more sad to hear someone working on that but again that that will probably happen too they're not i don't own the ip that was the sort of part of the the the deal it's a privilege to work on stuff but you don't necessarily own it when you're done with the game does it always feel like a goodbye like when you sit when you're done with uh red dead 2 is like you're saying goodbye to arthur like the characters you created you're walking away you kind of are to arthur in the end of the game even before the end of the game um yeah i think you've got you know i've been with them for seven eight years and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one yeah so there's

always this thing of okay that's done and sometimes people would ask me questions and i about older games and certainly when i was in the middle of making new ones in this i couldn't really necessarily even remember i've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go so it's it's not it's you so immersed in it and thinking about it and certainly in that last period the last few months you're really really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time and then you're just not thinking about it in the same way yeah it's funny from the player perspective it feels like an old friend that i miss whether it's john or arthur or nico it's a real goodbye that's there's a real sadness to finishing a video game like legitimately a sad experience not just because the story is sad or because you've been with them so long yeah and it's a real goodbye to close it there's that feeling when you're sort of close the video game and it's i mean it's like saying goodbye to a friend that's when you finish a book you love it's the same feeling and i think that was something that we really in the early days of rockstar really aspired to have that where people would have that it wasn't just

the mania of of clearing a level but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters you know i think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible so to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding yeah the end of on the road by kerouac Forlorn rags of growing old. I just remember closing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world? It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling. And you've achieved, it's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead. And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Nico.

I have to ask about, in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do. And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front, people are getting more divided it's getting more absurd and ridiculous and extreme so becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous you're talking about you don't even know from grand theft auto 6 if it's possible to satirize because by the time you release the thing it's already going to be outdated in terms of the the satire will become reality essentially uh first of all it'd be nice to get your updated view on that second of all it seems like you've answered your very own comment with uh american caper which seems to satirize american culture just fine in how much over the top it goes anyway there's lots of questions in there one of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are it still has easily.

times but the lead times are not four or five years the lead times are you know a year when we're putting we can make little updates much much newer and we're you know we're just wrapping issue 10 of a 12 issue arc for that so it's not quite it's not quite as difficult you still can get the tone of it um but yeah i think it's uh i think it's an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era which began in 2015 2016 is going to have of how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast so american capers first of all epic comic book i love it the art yeah the art's beautiful david lapham is the artist he did an amazing job he is a he is a wonderful wonderful storyteller what made you want to set in wyoming i hadn't seen a modern story there that i knew about i started to spend a bit more time in the rockies and in the west and i was like i'd spent a lot of time in like the countryside in upstate new york and and thought never really captured it quite right and just the idea of these places as they change it didn't it was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a gta you know it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a gta but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored and there

is over the top stuff there's there's yeah it's definitely slightly over the top so let me take notes on this there's a spoiler alert i guess from the first issue i believe uh there's a devout suburban mormon who commits i think serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement he is not necessarily you know the sharpest tool in the box and his uh his uh his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates. And of course, there's this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation, and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil.

So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy. Yes. Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean, this is the notes I've been taking. He is a somewhat confused, longevity-obsessed, rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies. And Bullseaman is a big component of longevity. Yes, he's very into all the life-hacking, roiding, HGH, and making money. And he's lost his mind living on a big ranch. Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in D.C.

Yes, based on someone I know who got completely red-pilled. And I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people. Yeah, so, you know, satire of American culture. Quick pause. Bath and break? Sure. i think gta 5 had the biggest launch of video game history and uh gta 6 has the potential to uh topping that first of all do you think it will and more broadly what was your definition of success for a video game i would assume it will because it's so anticipated and anticipation is the best driver of early sales as we saw with gta 4 versus red dead redemption 1 you know gta before far more anticipated, sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You're spending someone's money. So the number one success is, oh, you're making that money back plus a dollar. At some level, that has to be the single most important thing. So you get to do it again. You've got big teams of people, people need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business.

So you have to make a small profit. If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative. I think that was like trying to forget about that. It's not really an option. But we almost always did that. We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that. I think the definition of success for me was had we tried to do new things and done them, or achieved some of our goals. That was the thing that I'm at. Were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to? is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars when if you look at like the 80s and 90s you know nobody took video games seriously and even in the and now they're basically it's very possible if you look at 10 20 years from now that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories i think they've possibly already done that in some ways and certainly as an as a business proposition they've already done that but i think that's not you know as a way of telling stories i think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better other kinds of stories you know i think i think if you want a long discursive adventure a video game is better if you want a short tight experience a film is

we always felt games were the coming medium and so spent 20 years saying games of the future games of the future and you know being sneered at them being laughed at them being having people nod their heads and then it kind of happening so i would you know at the same time much as you might say something you don't necessarily believe it's going to be true um but it has become true and i think still that games are only going to get better more interesting more creatively you know diverse uh you said that red dead redemption 2 in your opinion is the best thing you've ever done i think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time what are the elements that make that game truly great do you think i think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced um that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006 so it was a long experience team i think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one coming up with some weird wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game and then we kind of had to follow through with that i think was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it i think that the cowboy setting

uh is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn't allow you know i think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was gta 4 but it just can't once you're setting things in the modern world they're too frenetic you can't get some of that slightly you know operatic feel that i love that the some people think maybe a little over the top but i you know i love this kind of you know people searching for meaning within amongst the violence i think that the the west and all of the themes around the west really lend itself to that so i think that and then the the gunplay was fantastic um and the horses were incredible so i think you had this combination of kind of technical know-how a very

thought about doing it hadn't done it and then going let's do it let's let's take the risk and do it we can't do it let's try it try and it worked yeah what about the decision with the son you know john give so much effort to make sure that jack doesn't end up in a life of violence and then it uh i mean it's very godfather like it's he's dragged back into it through revenge that was also the game still had to work as a game whether that was the right ending a hundred percent the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective i don't know um but i know that we had to make the game work interesting so it was i think it was i think it kind of worked in that way where jack can't escape but i always also wanted a version of it where jack did escape but that wasn't you know it both were interesting to me can you just dig in a little deeper like what do you mean about for the game to work it's such a direct it's like a couber talking about for this movie to work it has to have because from my perspective i just think about the story what's the technical aspect for the game to work you know the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you you you know the games don't really end and you have to be able to wander

around the world and do stuff so at the end of the game you have to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of uh features which is you can you know run up to someone and punch them or run up to someone and shoot them or run up to someone and rob them or run up to someone and talk to them and and that's kind and you know jump on a horse or do all this other stuff in order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360 degree experience with it they had to you know 100 if they wanted 100 the game as opposed to just finishing the story You have to have an avatar to do that stuff with. So that was the sort of challenge of Jack's character, slash wrapping up the story as Jack.

Oh, there's real power for the avatar to end. The finiteness. Yeah. Both the Red Deadsy obviously change avatar, which we got, you know, and then did it again. I think there's something interesting about that moment when you change from one character to another. Because they are you and they're not you. You know, and then there's suddenly someone else. i mean i was really shaken by that experience but it's a it's a beautiful experience it's like an unforgettable experience that what else can video games possibly reach for you know that's to create that experience that's what great films do that's what great great books do it's that i mean it's that and the world building in games i think the experience of being in this fake place and then taken on these narrative adventures when that combines you've got the amazing experience so who do you think is the best character you've ever created in rdr so to me i think definitively arthur from red dead redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games ever i think there's not even i mean john will be which is hilarious to say but like those are uh john will be a close second but arthur is definitively and you you've talked about in

in that interview, you said that a lot of video games work on the same premise, that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero. But what if you start as a tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world? Arthur's journey is not about becoming a superhero because he's almost one at the start, but it's about an intellectual rollercoaster when his worldview gets taken apart. So it's very different than the normal journey of a character. Yeah. In a game. In a game. I wanted to reverse it. Yeah. So there were a couple other themes that matched that.

So there are guys from the Wild West, but they're being pushed ever further east. So it was almost like an anti-Western, an Eastern. You're traveling east. You're traveling into civilization. And I don't think I would have been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career. because this idea of getting a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting. What about the component of mortality, of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period, sort of just the prospect of real sort of fear of death, realization of death? Yeah, I thought that was really a really fun thing to play with.

John dies in Red Dead 1 and wanted to top that. with Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way. And so the idea that John's death is fairly sudden. And so if he's got this long drawn out death, and then I'd always been obsessed by TB. As diseases go, it's a great literary device, you know, because it is this long drawn out slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker. And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he'd had his child my father and survived but only three of them out of like 35 survived so i was always captivated and by tb as an illness it felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea this this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal he was the protagonist in a video game he could not die and suddenly he is becoming mortal and And, you know, but that helps him see stuff.

I thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game. Yeah. Do you think it's the greatest character you've ever created? I think he's the best lead character. The lead characters are different from the side characters. And I think he's the most rounded and works the best. Him and Nico are the two I like. They were the two most ambitious. So for me, it's always sort of a toss up. But then I loved all the stuff. The art team did such an amazing job. It was there with the journal and that kind of stuff. Like the way that all the features worked into Arthur's character. I thought that was really, he was really rounded.

He worked in lots of different ways really well. I loved like his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend. Things like that. All the side, you know, the bits that kind of turned up around him. So you also like the side characters. You like the flavor of the full cast. What are some of the favorites you've created? I'm sure the one you're currently working on, Nigel Dave, you called him a side character. Well, he's not a protagonist. He's like, he's a God, not a character. So he's not, him I'm enjoying. Um, I love Dutch, you know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game and the actor did such a, uh, such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me all of their backstory, which I'd been playing around with by that point anywhere, a little bit in my head, but I knew it was this bigger gang stuff.

And then I sort of saw exactly who he was. and so that was that that felt like he he felt like a living character to me and we should say that dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a godlike figure yeah in both of the red dead redemption games he's the leader of the gang and there's a father-son relationship with dutch with the uh i mean with arthur with john i mean if there's there's a family feeling to the gang that you explore all those dynamics and then the feeling of betrayal and arthur facing tuberculosis is going against the family going against the father because he is transforming his uh sense of the world of morality of all those kinds of things so all the kind of very shakespearean dramas right there and dutch is a prominent god-like figure through all of that also flawed himself also a man of good and evil in that uh framework that they're operating under he's just drowning in his ego at the end you know his ego gets the better of him i think he's a but he but there was something flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger and that's mostly off camera but and then just oh you know always been as an individual i've always been very susceptible to charming people and he's charming and so i always kind of i can see how people get

captivated by charming people and and the idea here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him i personally am afraid of how much i love human beings and how susceptible i am to charm and charisma yeah because it can cloud your judgment about human nature completely and that's what he that's what's happened with him and it ended up clouding his judgment about himself he kind of fell for his own rubbish yeah but also it clouded arthur's judgment oh completely Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him. He was worshipping him. He'd given up his power to him. And then I think for Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying.

You know, that's what I thought was really interesting. Yeah, it's truly tragic for Arthur to be losing his identity, lifelong identity, and the sense of belonging and losing his life at the same time. in facing the mortality he is realizing that he's not all of it has been a lie but he gets to do some what depends on what the choices you make but he gets to do done good yes and so he you know he gets his moment of redemption just a little bit but realizing your whole life you've been living not a good life yes you've been not a good man isn't that we're all afraid of i guess it's never too late to change your ways uh so the biggest most important question uh primary central to the reason we're talking today uh the number one question from the internet it is so ridiculous but i must ask have you seen gavin who is gavin so for more context there's a guy named nigel in red dead redemption 2 who's frantically searching for a mystery man named gavin throughout the game this has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs the rdr fan base so the theories include theory one is it's a split personality disorder nigel himself is gavin so the evidence is the letter for this theory that has some evidence that maybe due to trauma

the split personality disorder was created this gavin was created inside nigel's mind theory two is gavin is dead and nigel is simply in denial theory three is that it's just a troll and rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy i also heard theory four is gavin is the strange man so there's this fascinating character the strange man this supernatural character that has a presence in rdr1 and a little bit in rdr2 also yeah so uh which which theory is closest to the truth not three or four somewhere in my mind somewhere between one and two yeah and i i just love the way he shouted gavin it just amused me so at some level it probably is trolling in that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery you wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it um but it was meant to be without ever fully being explained that gavin's not there anymore gavin's either gone home gavin's left him gavin's uh and we were going to keep exploring that idea okay he was going to reappear in some way or other Did you have any idea how much imagination, excitement, and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?

Yes and no. I mean, you never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games. And a lot of it comes down to acting as well. The guy was just funny when he said Gavin. It was just funny. You know, but there was a ped in Red Dead Dimension 1 that everyone was obsessed by. And I really wasn't expecting that. So we try and put a few characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing. But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by. There are other characters I think are funny and the people don't even notice them, you know, or they see them in a completely different way.

Did you have a part in writing the letter? Yeah, I can't remember if I wrote it or either I wrote it or Mike wrote it or we both wrote it. I really can't remember, to be honest with you. But yeah, I certainly would have edited it. And Mike might have written it or I might have written it. I really can't remember. It's so fascinating because that little piece of writing, of course you have thousands of pages, that little piece of writing gets like analyzed. Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth. And if Mike was here, I'd ask you, he might remember, I can't mean to do so much of those things.

And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories and some became very clear and some were still a little kind of opaque. But the general vibe was there was no Gavin. either there was no gavin or he'd long since left so it's kind of a split personality you know and then we were going to over subsequent games that provide more information so in some sense you yourself don't quite know you kind of have an idea so he could like like which way do you lean more theory one or two is he dead in the guy and And And Nigel's in denial, or is there real communication going inside his head?

No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality. And the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game, were we going to reveal that Gavin was dead, or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac? You know, that was what we're still playing around with. I think the idea was that he was never going to meet Gavin in this game. uh it's just it's just fascinating because you have to think about all of that you have to write all that you have to have those discussions you have to have those debates and it has to feel fresh that was like what we've done before constantly looking as you do you know i think i did you know somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games got to do stuff that's new it can't repeat itself too much i mean we also live in the age of the internet just like you realize there's like millions of people worrying about where and who gavin is thank god it's like it's fascinating that they're having is they think about people reading like james joyce or something and thinking about the care like breaking apart ulysses and thinking about like arguing about different interpretations of it and to me that in itself is also beautiful yeah we want the side mysteries

to be solvable up to a point but you still want you want these discussions yeah you know and you want but as long as it feels totally appropriate for this whole big sort of shaggy dog story experience you're making it's gavin was just about and he was so weird and he just was intrinsically of just something funny about an english person screaming gavin i don't know why yeah some of that humor i mean there's that there's certainly in red dead redemption that's humor but there's a lot of in great theft auto and what it's hard to put into words why that's funny why it becomes mean why it becomes viral because it's just funny it's i know why i think it's funny but are you what you can't what i'm not good at doing at least is going this thing will become really popular online and this other thing won't you can create this bunch of you know 50 different side things that people might get captivated by and you just do not know what they're going to respond to how do you you know when something's funny is that you just feel it i know what i think is funny it's you know just because it's ridiculous as well that was just there's nothing funny about a dude shouting gavin a lot he just said it i just thought it might be funny and he just said it in such a

funny way yeah and then it just became funny like you we often have those side characters and they're not that funny and i think they're going to be hysterical and then you put them in the game and they're off they're fine but they're not amazing that guy just brought that stuff to life yeah yeah and there's a backstory too i mean londoner and not yeah that was what you know just there's something sometimes fun you know an english person saying the name gavin yeah i don't know why so about the strange man aka the man of black is there some element with michael and the therapist in grand theft auto 5 like who is the strange man well the strange man was again was it was was someone we came up with quickly we made red dead one and we were making red dead one and we'd made this we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world but and we would we'd already made a bunch of grand theft autos obviously but unfortunately we'd taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game apart from the big fixed position ones and we'd taken out the cars and we'd taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians so we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert and it was quite and it was quite boring and so we were we

then started filling it with content and we filled it with these and having to improvise and we filled it with these things we call random events that would be they sort of mocap moments that you could interact with and it was they they were they were the designers did an amazing job with those they were really fun um but there was not enough of them and then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short. kind of quite late in development, started putting in almost like these RPG-type content where you'd go and meet someone. And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories.

So you'd go and meet someone, they'd set you a slow problem, like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers. And when you came back, it would resolve your story. And so the one would go, go and get them for my bride, and you come back, and the bride's dead. You know, we tried to make them like these short stories with a sting in the tail. And he came out as i was trying to come up with ideas for those as just this weird character and then we built him a bit into the story where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing so he was meant to be a kind of manifestation of your you know shadow your karma the devil somewhere you know just saw the world and then we built out his backstory over time um and decide you know and so in red dead 2 you could interact with him again and or not really interact with him but he was there and he was meant to be you know something i suppose any creative is scared of an artist who's kind of sold his soul to the devil and that slowly revealed itself there is a connection between the main character and the is it like a jungian shadow type of situation well it's sort of because he knows what you're up to the connection is and what's never really made clear is does he know this about everybody like

is he following you or is he able because of the pact he's made with with with with evil forces able to do this for everybody and i don't think we necessarily ever clarify that he's certainly able to do it for you i mean there's the narrative wise there's techniques to reveal a kind of self-reflection analysis of the main character's thoughts i mean that's why i brought up the therapist with michael that was a really powerful interesting thing to do in the video game i don't think i've seen that that's such a cool i mean there's a sopranos element there with a therapist a little bit yeah i really love an opportunity for a character to just self-reflect through that technique also changed depending what you've done yes so it was it was sort of slightly it wasn't as interactive as it could be but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done so i felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point and i just thought the character dr friedlander was just funny because he was awful so it was like la you're in therapy it's very la but he's also very la he wants to write a book and betray you which felt like a good a good twist and it was he felt like a grand

theft auto therapist but just like the idea of making the player in a game and games are intrinsically kind of physical and you know you walk you punch things you run around you drive cars you shoot people whatever there's these kind of physical fantasies trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment i think can be really fun i think to me one of the most surprising things about red dead redemption about video games that red dead redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is insanely specific intricate details in the story but also visually it's just added to the the feeling uh that the world is real uh so i have to ask what are some of your um favorite insanely specific intricate details in in rdr and give you some options uh internet's favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather those guys did an amazing job on that yeah i mean i just and there must have been a meeting and there must have been engineers and and graphic designers just artists artists i think i don't think it was that hard okay uh thank you thank you for that all right arthur's hair and beard grow in real time so Gun maintenance matters.

Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time. Animal carcasses decompose realistically. They feel like they do. That's still extremely rare in video games. The temporal aspect. Yes. That permeates through time. NPCs remembering you. That's the best. I mean, that's the thing I love. Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that. I think it's super interesting. It's really powerful. Yeah, really interesting. i think the it just it's a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content that is also systemic and procedural yeah is it technically really difficult to do for for the game for the game to feel like it remembers you um i think with modern tech it's not that hard but there's a lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting yeah to have a memory so that's really powerful uh the mud physics uh so arthur's boots get muddy and leave actual tracks i mean that's just incredible really really incredible you know we made a dusty game red dead one is a super dusty game making you know the problem with cowboys is that if you've tried to make the greatest hits of the cowboy game and then you've got to make a sequel you've got to come up with different geographies so that's why the game starts in the snow so we wanted a game that

had snow and mud because those were things you hadn't really seen in red dead one and then the challenge is how do you make mud good in the game and the guys did an amazing job i mean this the snowstorm that starts the game rdr2 i don't remember last time i've experienced anything like it but you felt it i don't know how the hell you do that it's not just graphics it's everything everything together i suppose some of the the dialogue is really important they feel they feel yeah that's right and they feel desperate that was that feeling of sort of exodus like you're running away from something that gives the game sort of energy at the start and it was at night oh man it was just and there was a big group of them the other country you know first game start off as a lone wolf suddenly you're in this big group so it felt very different in arthur's body bullet wounds persist so that that temporal consistency that's really important and underweight arthur looks gone and uh overweight arthur gets a gut and fuller face again those like decisions that you make reveal themselves in the game across time and they're consistent i don't know i did not seen many games do that this must be difficult to do but to to give that level of care to the

details in that way across time and for specific graphical representations of things is incredible yeah do you have favorites where you were first like this is this is amazing i think all of it i think the way the whole to me the thing that i would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together you know the fact that each of those they all feel like they belong together with each other you made this cohesive very you know quote-unquote realistic for a video game experience and all the details feel like they mesh well for me everything about the horse a lot of people now testicle shrinking included what's the process of deciding this the internet seems to really care about i mean they love the game so much so they want to know if anything was cut and i'm sure stuff was cut because you you have to choose what's the process of deciding what to cut what the cut scenes like is is there any scenes that you had to let go of uh that you really miss or wish you could have done in uh either gta or rdr well i think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be yeah you know i think there was always there was a bit at the start of RDR where he'd had a baby who just died in Red Dead 2 and we ended up cutting it which

was the right decision it was too tough in some ways but I think it gave him real and he was not very sympathetic to his occasional No. And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting. Like he was not a likable character at the start. And that was one, and we ended up making him slightly more like, he's still sort of tough and nasty, but he's slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision commercially. It's better that way, but I don't, you know, but i still i like that little bit um it spoke to me personally um there and just is an inability to access his emotions i thought was really strong because then later in the game he's getting very emotional but there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed you know and um and don't well missions that just are not going to work technically usually it's like this mission's not going to work technically oh god we're going to cut it okay how do we glue the story back together and we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks you get late in the game and it's just something you know some big challenging moment just is gonna look

rubbish so you just get rid of it i think editing editing film and i imagine editing video games editing down is is an art form but it's also just it feels like torture because you're letting go of things you put so much love into yeah it could be changes you know if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes let's change it that could be of course that would be upsetting in some ways otherwise you didn't care about it but you know if i was involved in the big creative thing and he goes okay it's the right decision i can probably live with that fine i think sometimes for designers when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut that must be really really hard is there dlcs like for rdr gta that you wish you had the time when you were uh there to have created of course there's always things i wish i'd done i always wish i'd done more what would you have added this is a fun like nerding out we the internet knows we made a dlc single player dlc for gta 5 that never came out and we've also never really worked on another game but i like the idea of it that was a gta zombie game that would have been funny i think that could have been quite fun what

was the gta 5 dlc it was one when you played as trevor but he was a secret agent oh it was it was cute it was it never quite came together and it was never finished it was about half done when it got abandoned but i think if that had come out probably wouldn't have got to make red dead 2 so he was always there's always compromises but it was you know i like making the stories for me i love the model of gta 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards or red dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards i like just doing these extra things so i would have i would i personally like to have done more of that in that company um and with stuff we're doing in the future we're going to try and come up with worlds where we can add more stories i like single player dlc i just think the audience loves it and it's really fun to make does it make it a little bit sad that the gaming industry in general is moving towards more online less single player dlc maybe that observation isn't correct but it feels at the at this moment to me it feels like uh it's easier to make a lot of money with online if you get it right if you get it right and so the gaming companies are reaching for that and it just makes me really sad because

there's so much power to the what you did with red dead redemption 2 i don't know how during that time you're able to pull that off but that was like a breath of fresh air or in a time where everybody was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that you you go on and draw again the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character in video game history single player we still love single player games and i think as we started up absurd we did a lot of soul searching yeah and and also a lot of like cynical looking at looking at what goes well in the industry luckily if you want to do what we I'm forced to do, and also what I want to do, which is make new IP. You need single-player games.

You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP. It's just extremely hard. So luckily, we are focusing on what we're good at, which is open-world single-player games. And we might add multiplayer components to one of them. I think one of them is going to be really tough later on, but we're still thinking that through. But I think we're really leaning into single-player experience um as being a strength for us as a company and something we love to do and i think something a large part of the audience prefers and i'd love to with all of those keep single-player dlc one way or another going were there some other game ideas you considered while at rockstar and uh afterwards they you didn't go with so like worlds i don't know pirate games i I would love to see the possible options.

Never thought a lot about a pirate game. My son is obsessed by that game Sea of Thieves at the moment. So he's constantly saying, do a pirate game. Haven't really thought about it too much.

you know knights and and sort of trying to do a of a version of a mythological game that could have been fun and you know still love that idea but never went very far with it nights would be going really far back in history yeah i would have to go it never got to writing

any of it just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas but it was uh it's always something i thought i would never do and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit you left Rockstar in 2020, and eventually launched Absurd Ventures, as we've been talking about. What do you miss about your time at Rockstar? Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them? Of course. It was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20 something years, 21 years or something. Yeah. It was, and I moved to America to do it, and grew up doing it, and I was always living in in new york it was a at times very intense and other times magical experience but it was also just a huge chunk of my life the lows and the highs and the middles it was just it was just my life you know my life was that job and the people i knew in new york and and my family and it and we were doing something that was intense and innovative and and you know both loved and hated by by wider society in different ways and at different times and in this weird company that was constantly in trouble so it was really fun just even looking back at that time to today um how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years well i

was a child i was a 25 year old child who didn't know anything and i wanted to be a writer but i still wasn't writing and i bought a notebook and i'd occasionally scribble in it and i still got those notebooks somewhere and i was working in video games which were the least literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time there was no room for that on ps1 games really um thinking i needed to stop and do something else but not having the skills or the confidence to do it and i'd been doing that in london then i came to new york and it was fun really fun to be in new york and really fun to do a new company in new york and that was an amazing adventure but i was still lost as a human being and then um when i was 27 i still completely lost a child and i uh stopped some of my bad behavior and the next day uh pretty much the chance to write on that work on open world games and all the skills i'd half learned over the previous years and my way of thinking i thought about space a lot because i was a geographer rather than a historian uh came together and i got the chance to work on open world games i felt like was meant to be it was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton and

Naveed and Leslie and the guys in Scotland and all the people in New York making these new games in this new way and going, oh, we need to find 100 voices. We've got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We'll get everyone's friends in and just record four lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians are speaking video games. No one else was doing that kind of stuff it was insane so i think that period from kind of 2001 2005 it was lots of early innovation and and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff it didn't feel it felt creative but it didn't feel like writing yet just becoming that we felt lots of doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take and then i think we talked about it earlier but the the journey into doing gta4 when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience and i was kind of probably ready for that at that point and then i was like well this is better than films this is something that films can't do you know this 360 degree experience of being this immigrant and it still felt that we were still only scratching the surface and it still feels like that now in some ways but it still felt

and then that five games you know gta four and five red dead one and two all the extra packs for them and max pain three i think we took the games thematically into new places through that period from a writing perspective that was the most exciting period from a from a business and and sort of early creativity period the period 2001 2005 was probably the most exciting the original starting team we're all doing well you know personal life was doing okay didn't feel like such a mess and then um and then from 2007 onwards 7-8 was how happy personally um having children happily married and the games were just getting much better but there were lots of pressure in the business you know it was just and the budgets got really big so there's other stress so there's always always good bits and stresses but you know and always just try to sharpen do my best and and think about how i could do it in a new way always trying to go it's a new medium what can we do that's new but as a writer as a scholar of human nature. First of all, were you surprised that you were actually able, like you had it in you through humor and tragedy to create these incredibly compelling characters?

I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he's going to be the greatest writer ever. And I feel like every 20-year-old says this, it's just James Joyce pulls it off yes so were you were you surprised that you were actually able to do it and how did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved the team got better and better so we could write in a more ambitious way that the animation got better so we could support it in a better way we could go deeper like you couldn't go that deep on a ps2 game so it was also just the technology evolved um i don't know i felt like i felt like i was good at doing it and and well trained for it and i'd been in the right place at the right time and i was both lucky and had a in a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce them to about 10 sentences was amusing you know i think i was you know and it was and i saw the world in a holistic way and saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game.

I thought about it a bunch. The way I think about things was suitable for that, for whatever reason. That was just good fortune. Laszlo mentioned that it was another legend who you're still working with. He mentioned that you would lock yourself in a... Writing dialogue for radio, I think, you would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed Diet Cokes. is this accurate information very accurate for which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process it's anchovies and onion pizza i would also get pepperoni on my half just to be technically accurate he wouldn't because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days yeah but then he'd admit to me he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer yeah so it was a sort of fake vegetarian that was or i think we still do it now sometimes it's sort of memorialize but that began in 2001 and we the office at rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no and i i did have a private office at the time but it genuinely was a cupboard it didn't have a window i was literally sitting in a cupboard um so there was no room and i could had a desk and a chair just for myself so we but i lived quite near the office so we would write

one or two afternoons a week he'd come in he was a freelancer working with us he'd come in from long island and then we would jump on the subway go to my apartment in chelsea and sit in this grimy little apartment i was living in and buy pizza from around the corner and that became and you know we both like diet coke and pizza um very video game developer and that became good luck and we'd have these good writing sessions we realized we got on well with each other and we had a similar sense of humor and we could write the stuff and then he would do all of the real work producing it so it was perfect for me because i got to outsource most for the real work and he's a brilliant radio producer um so he was a great partner in that way and then that was how that relationship began and then i'd get him i'd say well we've got to record these 80 voices come and help me because i can't direct 80 people at once so he would help with that process and he was a really good producer like audio like getting bodies in producer as well as a technical producer so he was just that was the beginning of that relationship and it was always my job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the

Thank you. of the world and we would write it together then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny like he would just produce it in a really funny way just to give a little bit more of a shout out to laszlo what's it been like working with him for over 20 years he's working with you still he's a kind of this uh flamboyant colorful personality much loved for being a voice also on radio in the in the grand theft auto games yeah and the rule was when he was the character i would write the first pass of him so i would and i would get nastier and nastier over time so to the point when he's having his head shaved and you know being punished by everybody but even game after game he got worse he began as his quite in gta3 he's a quite likable character and then you know over the next 12 13 years it just got worse and worse so i think he's glad not to be doing that anymore but he did it with great grace he's just a great partner because he likes he like you know like me we just like making stuff he likes to make stuff he likes to work in new spaces he's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life doing a lot of the work on that he's working on that right now um and just he's he's really fun to work with and he's you know

always will put creativity first and he's ridiculous you know he's just in the best possible outside of the games you've participated in created um what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time tetris tetris tetris game boy no question tetris and a game boy yeah it was the perfect device for playing that game i never liked as much anything else my wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids trying to get them for christmas right now um it was the most addicted i ever was to anything in my life of far too many addictions that was obsessed by it dreaming about it and when you link two together with the cable and if i got four it would push yours forward it's like the perfect game design so from a pure puzzle perspective nothing comes close yes extremely simple yeah pure gameplay no narrative no no nothing no no personality at all it's a completely different perfection but but perfect in its way open world games can't be that perfect yeah but you always dream of making something like that there's super mario i think the n64 ones all of those early 3d games were very amazing when you first saw them on the n64 ps1 when you went it suddenly was like these games they were live and

they're believable in a different way i think that was very interesting it looks like anything else Nintendo has that look, doesn't it? Always. Yeah. And I think that's the, they're known for this Nintendo polish that every pixel has a purpose. Yes. I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible. It's really beautiful. And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of sort of the feeling of a world, but it's not quite open. world no but it's amazing it's almost like the new ones they almost to me feel like hitchcock they're just speaking the language of video games you know like you know everything's going to work this way and that way it's it's quite systemic but it's so how it all glues together is so amazing it feels like when you watch a hitchcock film it's not reality he's speaking the language of cinema in a very very strong without a very strong accent almost it's very very cinematic it's not realism at all and that's what those zelda games kind of feel to me like there are these amazing things that could only be video games they couldn't be anything else for me another really powerful open world is the the elder squirrels world it's role playing it's uh fantasy dragons all that kind

of stuff todd is great at what he does yeah there's they're slightly they're more or I mean, from a technical perspective, we're always involved in the same with the new games. We're constantly trying to find the balance between RPG, a role-playing game, and an action game. And try to go, well, an action-adventure game with RPG elements. And what does that mean? And I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space. but for me it always just comes down to our is it easy to play our mechanics super slick and then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive like i'm not always a great for just for what we do i like when other people do it for what we do we always want very punchy dialogue so don't give big trees but still have it interactive so we're gonna we're gonna lose a touch of interactivity but we'll still have the dialogue feeling like it's alive but we'll get better written dialogue and it feel more a slightly more cinematic experience yeah i think uh the elder scroll series have almost always leaned a little more towards the open world yes they're real rpgs yeah you know we've not really the games that you know i've worked on they've not really been rpgs they've had rpg elements onto a story driven action game it's a kind of just a slightly

different emphasis but i still think what they do is amazing he's brilliant at doing and i i think Like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim are games where you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around. And feel the world. Feel the world, just feel the world. And The Witcher, same thing. And Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3, really interesting. They really tried to make every choice that you make genuinely branched the game to where it's not the illusion of choice, it's really, choice really does something. and that's really hard to pull off technically yes and hard to pull off you're always sort of debating the the sweet spot between that and a strong story you know and strong mechanics it's hard to get them all and you you know as a as a as a game making team the whole you know the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line a difficult topic uh you dedicated the book to your mom and dad and in particular you wrote to my father who died while i was finishing the book what have you learned about life from your dad to show up to be present to go to work every day to love creative things you know he was a lawyer but he's also a jazz

musician and he did both to the best of his abilities you know and that to value family as more important than either of those things you know he was a present guy i think and and you know he loved books always loved books always loved but loved films loved music didn't wasn't into video games but liked that we were doing weird things was he proud of you yeah i think so i hope so and he was he was for for a lawyer he really venerated at some level giving the man the the quote unquote the man the finger like you know whenever life goes crazy yeah he just was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous and and i think that you know he always wanted to answer people back always give the silly comment and i certainly you know taking that from him to my detriment probably but it makes life more fun like he always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn't give a fuck and that was uh you know i think that was probably quite inspiring so you have a bit of that in you unfortunately so yes not good at shutting up not good at towing the line i think i speak for most of humans A civilization that, fortunately, you have that as part of who you are, because it comes through your stories.

I think it made school difficult. You know, they sent me this very formal school that was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s. But then they, you know, I was always getting in trouble, not for doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all of the time. Couldn't be quiet. Yeah. How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally yourself afraid of death? Well, my father passed away in May. So a lot more since then, obviously. I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it? I don't know. Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly go up and settled, of course, for them.

Aside from that, some days I feel spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all. And other days I feel like a sort of random piece of good luck who's going to get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness, and that terrifies me. What do you think about the nothingness? I mean, that in itself is terrifying. yeah that is terrifying i mean i i i tend to i i tend to you know i've spent long periods of my life tormented by that stuff the last few years i tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life and that we have some kind of spiritual or soul-based existence not i'm not quite sure if it matters if there is a god or not we should probably live our lives the same way either way um but i tend to think that you know there is a metaphysical purpose to life and part of the that purpose is to you know search for the purpose but at other points you can get you know if you read too much science you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all also there's a component to uh to your brain uh when talking about uh weathering heist by emily bronte you said that you have been by fortune struck with a bit of a capacity for the grandiosity of feeling so you

feel the world deeply sometimes romantic sometimes overly romantic you've uh said i like this line feelings may destroy you but they're the best thing we have so uh that ability to feel the world is that a gift or a curse for you what do you think that's a really interesting question because it's obviously both you know times it's both or times it's one or the other when things are going well when you feel alive when you feel like you're connected to things when you're seeing beauty in people and joy in experiences of course it's it's it's wonderful when you're feeling like you know bereft and set adrift by the world and you can't connect it to in some way and you're lost and abandoned by god or consciousness or fate or whatever it is it's awful you know when i feel like a dreadful hack which is most of the time you know it's terrible you'd rather not be doing this rubbish and then sometimes you're working creatively and it feels good and you feel like you're doing the right thing and it feels fantastic but that's not very often you think it's possible to have one without the other no yeah no of course not when i think about growing up to the extent that i am capable of growing up um it is about accepting

the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself you know going okay it's not perfect or i'm not perfect uh you said you often feel like a hack is that that self-critical part of your brain is that a feature or a bug that's an i think it's that new thing that We're going to lean into the bug feature. It's both, isn't it? I mean, it cannot lead that self-critical brain that I think lots of people suffer from, and I think the internet is designed to induce. If you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online. It clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency, so it can also become a feature.

i had a pretty uh intense argument with paul conti who's a legendary psychiatrist student of the mind about this um he worked with many famous creative people and he he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius and i thought i know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice i'd rather not have it but i certainly have lived with it this far that there's a danger that negativity for me that negativity and consciousness become the same thing you know and sometimes have to fight to not just be perpetually negative um and that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people and certainly has been for me i think if you're trying to do you know good stuff and you're reflective inevitably and you know you live in this world of constant constant criticisms by the internet of course you know everyone who ever put something on the internet be a picture of themselves or any kind of work they've made or whatever it is is going to get 50 good comments and one bad comment and remember the bad comment so that and that that becomes fuel for the negative voice i don't know anyone that's strong enough not to know you know we all you know some level you should just measure that

stuff in in weight not in not in quality but of course we just focus on the quality and i do think in general as you get older that's a real challenge for people you can see the different trajectories people choose to take but it's easy to slip into cynicism and negativity into this uh dostoevsky's notes from underground nihilistic kind of worldview i think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic to seem more good to uh i think there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first uh for for the the first maybe half of your life or two thursday and then while maintaining some self-critical aspects just so you stay humble start to see the good uh in everything around you and other people in the world and even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself i hope so i mean that's what i've been i could not be more cynical i think you put that beautifully i could not be more cynical than i was as a child you know i could not see goodness anywhere i i couldn't see you know i don't think uh late 1970s to early 1990s england was a great it was a place of great you know optimism and naivety it was brutal and i was brutal i was brutal within it and i think um

I've become much more naive and, and, and try to become more innocent in some ways and always try to see the flawed good in people. You know, I've tried to, and I've had to force myself to be like that because, you know, the other way is not fun. It's not nice to, it's not nice to not be nice. As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic-Con. I've been a big fan of his for a long time. He writes amazing stuff at IGN, and he has a great podcast. Everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it. Plus, I get to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience. And like we were saying offline, the LA Comic-Con, it's the first Comic-Con I've been to. There's just all kinds of real, genuine nerds, good-hearted. It's just so much kindness and goodness and just simple joy.

being a fan of a thing was there. Yeah, which is what those things are all about. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time. And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast you did with Sonia Walger, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast. She has guests pick their five favorite, most impactful books and so on. You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation. but uh you picked uh winter holiday by arthur ransom uh second one was withering heights by emily bronte then tender is the night by f scott fris gerald uh the thin red line by james jones and middle march by george elliott but just zooming out reflecting back on that conversation what do you think if an alien came what are what are some candidates for books that you'll recommend to them middlemarch it's the best novel written in english war and peace it's the one of the best novels written in russian i would argue i think both of those are because if you've only got one book you want a long book yeah and and they're both books that kind of it's something i was always trying to put into games and you know that feeling of all of life is here you know

you've got love death violence romance the whole human experience in different ways so i think that there's something amazing about you know vanity fair i used to used to love the novel not the magazine um because same thing all of life is here you also spoke highly of scott's gerald and hemingway i was obsessed by them in my 20s yeah completely obsessed as one must be yeah and i think them as a double act is so amazing you know one helped discover the other and then died first and then suddenly it died in in obscurity and then was rediscovered as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity but into decline i think it's that their relationship is itself very novelistic that that by the way is a phenomena of writing maybe no longer maybe still uh that you know people like franz kafka who died in obscurity like all these writers who died in obscurity not nobody knows them and they become famous later yeah that is just so interesting that's such an interesting you know that franz kafka and franz kafka was in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt destroyed so that insecurity speaking of the critical voice is just uh and i i think he's

one of the one of the best writers of the 20th century of course the dystopian novels are really interesting 1984 um brave new world love 1984 had never listened to it or read it and then i think i did it on talking book or maybe read it i can't remember during covid and became i think i did both became obsessed by it and it's got elements of that creeping into a better paradise but it's so good i hadn't realized how good it was yeah and it's so of the moment it's almost like because of its fame and yeah it's almost like cliche and you think of the character and i remember the year 1984 this is i remember the song you know it's too much yeah it can't be that good and then it was that i came to it completely cold just i should get work my way through this because it's another classic i haven't read and then it's it's incredible and the book i've read more than any other book is animal farm by george i don't know why exactly but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism well you grew up in a communist country yeah maybe that's it the roots of it i remember you know i was a kid in the cold war in london and we were always terrified of eastern europeans you were going to come and kill us all and then i i ended up marrying a pole yeah and um

and i was we were and we had ukrainians you know who worked for us and worked with us. And I was sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New York, the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian, and he'd been in the Red Army. I was like, history is so strange that you end up, the Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy. And we're like, we're now just hanging out with, everything changes. You think these things are permanent and they're really not. We face some of that now where you think these structures are permanent and they're going to change and you also mentioned that the three great world war ii books are the thin red line life and fate by vasila grossman and the end of the affair graham green uh what makes for a great war book i think world war ii is interesting because it affects everywhere obviously and so you can get all these different kinds of stories and there's so many good i was just trying to come up with a range of one american one british uh one eastern european uh just to get just to get different perspectives but there's so many amazing world war ii books around all kinds of stories i think the most complete one because it is this all of life being there probably is life and fate which is amazing

and it was uh written by vasili grossman he experienced stalingrad firsthand and there's also just a deep flow softball component and the bit in treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book i ever read and it really almost more than any other piece of art around the holocaust made me feel what you would feel like at that moment and it's just incredible piece of humanism and also just i mean man's search for meaning by victor franco oh yeah it seems like that context reveals in the most pure way human nature and like what kind of you know in uh man's search for meaning is when everything is taken from you you know the little remains of love for in this case his wife it's the thing that is a little flame that burns and uh let's say a grossman is small acts of kindness is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist i love the bit in life and fate when you get obviously it's in this stalinist period and so they're all losing. They all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen. So there's a whole, and everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post the purges. But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building

fighting in Stalingrad. And so they know at this moment they're dead anyway. And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin and all his nonsense. And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some ways in all of its horrors the most disappointing thing about the 20th century in some ways was the absolute failure of communism you know it was because it was such a you know quote-unquote beautiful idea and it just did not work time and time again and these people who fought for it and then saw it not working i think they're sort of fascinating characters you know all of the all of the revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed by Stalin which was all of them apart from him and him and him and Lenin and that was uh you know people in modern day politics talk about communism like it's trivially it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities but I don't think it's that trivial it's uh it's this idealism of human of humans yeah it's like why you know why can't basically Why can't we all get along?

There's a real compassion behind it, there's real love. And what you realize is there is, it's a real study, the 20th century of human nature that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized power. So there's a dictator always in that context in those, given that set of technologies. A dictator arises and does the opposite of what the promise of the ideal is supposed to be. Well, I think I thought a lot about that then because I was taught by all these disappointed communists. After 89, all of these English communists were all discovering all these atrocities that happened. It always fascinated me. Then you think about complexities or where one's values are in the modern moment and i i say you know without from from e and whether either of them any what we would call left now or call right now does it have any bearing on on the sort of communist era of those words and i would say probably not i think things have changed but fundamentally the one value that i would go i think is worth fighting for is go whenever either side starts to move towards thought control move away that's never the right outcome the never right outcome is oh you've said the wrong thing you should be removed now that should never ever

be a thing we should lean towards yeah it does seem like freedom individual freedom is a prerequisite for happiness for happiness for in a flourishing of a larger society so there's like you said 1984 is pretty i mean it's a caricature but it is brilliant it's quite it's actually also just a good story that's my criticism of brave new world it's just poorly written but i like brand new world probably applies more to the 21st century uh than does 1984 i think 1984 with the with the fake wars and the way that it revealed that everything in it was a setup for him there's something if he could have seen the internet there's something it's like it's like an analog internet that world they build around uh the main character what advice would you give to a young person today about let's say career how to have a career they can be proud of they can have a life to be proud of you've had a non-standard life i've had a lucky life um in which i have fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone you've uh traveled in south america and had hobos chase you with machetes yeah yeah yeah so that happened series of poor life decisions yeah um and i i ran away you know i was i mean i ran away to south america

that was a poor decision i ran away from the guy with the knife that was a good decision yeah i came to america that was a good decision um i ran came to la that's i think been a good decision it's been fun to see a different side of america and um be in a different creative environment la is still amazing for creativity and entertainment the wider entertainment industry stuff i think that's been fun um what would i say i would say when you get a chance take it that was one thing i did do well when i got chances i was good at taking them um i would say do not worry too young about your career i would say worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life because you're going to spend the whole of your life in your own head so the more interesting you find your own head the more interesting you find the world the less you're gonna annoy yourself so i would say i would i would say do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate that's my i would say do something else do something you know random and then focus afterwards that would be i think uh i was advocating against the obsession that people had about four years ago with stem subjects and now ai is going to make them all irrelevant anyway perhaps so you know it's interesting to see everything changes

um jobs are not that hard you know turn up be enthusiastic uh be turn up in person be enthusiastic uh help people say you'll be fine in any job people is you know did you always know when the chance to take showed up like this is okay this is interesting this is new this is different not always no but i did the the big times were the chance to move to america for me that was a big moment my life was a mess that was weird timing so i i read that sam wrote you an email what in south america i literally i was in south america in columbia when there was a war raging there yeah i was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills age 25 um my latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn't start work till nine but the muggers started at eight and so i was out uh walking along the beach at eight uh and these uh guys this raster uh turned up who i'd been talking me to the day before i started trying to talk to me and then two guys came up to talk to him and i couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed the money or he bought me to them but i did notice one of them had a machete and now they had a kind of broken gun so i thought this is not good and i ran off sprinted down the beach in my in my uh silly

shoes and uh got to the chance once in my life to run over to a road run jump into a taxi and scream you know take me anywhere i feel like i'm an action movie and they have guys chasing after the machete and the taxi driver looks back sees the dude with the machete and goes see con amigos they're not my friends get me out of here and then i um he drove me up the street into a bit the town was um it's kind of between the old town and the new town in cartagena and um i got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock that was the sum total of my injuries and um then went to an internet cafe because this was probably late 98 and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in new york and i was like well if i stay in south america much longer i'm going to get myself killed because this was i was getting into silly stuff um and so i went to new york and they're just starting rockstar and so i got to sort of write the mission statements and whatnot there and help set the tone for that and just ended up staying you know had to come and go a bit well visas got sorted out and then just ended up staying for it till i stay for a year because new york's pretty fun it actually was not that this was the height of giuliani before he was

a maniac um so he uh you couldn't when you went to bars you're told you couldn't dance because they were trying to clamp down on new york being fun so it was actually less fun than london but there's still a great energy in new york and got exposed to the kind of madness of new york capitalism By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York. Whenever I'm in New York, there's always sirens. Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA at least. Yeah, but it's more spread out. You can get a bit more quiet here.

Yeah. And I love the energy. You know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late. And New York was really, really a fun experience for me. You work with your brother, Sam, for many years. what do you admire about him as a creative mind as a human being his drive and his vision uh early on to see what video games could become he was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing and i think that was uh you know people would laugh in our face about that in those days and so to have someone that was strong and saying no no we stick state of the course and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects are you excited for the future of video games yeah i think i i completely i still i still look at i'm glad you've spoken so i mean you've spoken so Kindly about our work, about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did. It's wonderful, but I just look at it and see problems and see things that we can make do better. You know, I think it was always try each time to do it better. And I've got, you know, some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before.

uh and i think it's just i think the games can get so much better they can feel so much more alive all that they can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like you know their systems all the stuff the component parts we talked about you can we can both make each of those parts better and tie them together better i think it's the technology is all it to me it still feels like it's only just beginning you know it's been it's been cinema evolved from like 1900 1895 whenever it was until they invented talking in 1930 or whenever that was it's not that and then it's kind of found its modern form and then by 39 they're shooting in color and that's basically a modern film is no different from a 1939 film but with games i still think we've got a long way to go the tech there's so many different parts of the tech that it's still got a long way to go and you can go in all different fun directions i just wish and i know you said video games take a lot less than they possibly they they could but i just wish it was faster like you've already made me fall in love with absurdiverse and you've made me fall in love with the better paradise and now i am going to sit depressed realizing i'm gonna have to wait

i could of course read we should have some little short cartoons coming out in a while for absurdiverse and more stuff coming in the next period but yeah it just takes it takes a little bit of time and i think i mean movies you big movies are four years plus from start to end yeah you know with all the legal stuff at the start you know will be about the same yeah and certain movies from idea to completion i mean take 10 plus years yeah a lot of that's just that development process that is really sometimes feels like it's designed to not make stuff a bit more of a specific advice but on the topic of video games what advice would you give to uh to maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games they're inspired by red dead they're inspiring of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you've created like how is it possible to have a chance of doing something like that i mean it's part of the two two ways try and do it cheaply for with yourself in a small group or join a company that you think is doing it the right way you know and i think there's upsides to either of those i think if you want to make something that's cinematic ai is going to change some of this

but if you want to make something cinematic you need resources you can still make something that's really interesting that isn't super cinematic but it's an interesting experience in some ways but the second you're involving actors and motion capture and one of those big experiences it's going to cost some money so therefore if you want to do that you've got to figure out what companies that you want to work out and figure out how you get to work there do you have do you have hope for ai helping with some of the video some of the video generation some of the world generation some of the open world assistance in in generating the world yes limited absolutely if used correctly it will be a great tool if used incorrectly it will lead to loads of generic stuff yeah you know i've been in games for 29 years and all the time the piece of tech that's going to make making games much easier and much cheaper is about to turn up and all that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive so i'm always nervous about saying finally we have that bit of tech that makes our lives easier but it looks as if it might be able to do that when you use it in the right way if you use it you know if you use it to try and as

a substitute for creativity it's going to be really generic a big ridiculous question uh what's the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here of life of existence why are we here to watch the Universe. the easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways consistently more and more interesting ways yeah uh what role does love play as part of that it's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing everything else everything material is irrelevant so the only things of value are these immaterial things you know i do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me well dan from the bottom of my heart speaking of love thank you what a pleasure thank you man thank you for everything you've created in this world and me and millions of diehard fans of your games are forever grateful i know there's a lot of people that would like to say thank you to you just to be clear because i always like to make this very clear yeah it was never me it was always me sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.

Well, I hope you keep being self-critical and creating awesome stuff in the world. And we can't wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. And thank you so much for talking today, brother. Thank you for having me. What a privilege. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Houser. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway, one of Dan's and my favorite writers. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time. Thank you.