Few people shaped Grand Theft Auto into the series it is today more than Dan Houser. Even so, he doesn’t plan to play the next entry.
Speaking to Variety, the Rockstar Games co-founder said he hasn’t seen GTA 6 and probably won’t play it. His explanation is straightforward: he’s currently building open worlds of his own, and he doesn’t want Rockstar’s version running through his mind while he works.
Asked about GTA 6, Houser said, “I haven’t seen it yet.” He plans to keep it that way.
The distance is intentional
Houser departed Rockstar in 2020, and the studio is now run by his brother, Sam Houser. Dan said he makes a conscious effort not to follow what’s happening there. His knowledge of GTA 6 is limited, which is exactly the point, since he doesn’t want the game to have “influenced” his current projects in any way.
Those projects are two new open-world games being made at his company, Absurd Ventures. He described his reasons for staying away like this:
“I haven’t seen GTA 6 yet and I’m going to try to avoid it because I always try to stay away from things that might influence me creatively. Since I spend a huge portion of my time trying to create open-world games, and the rest of my time trying to find innovative ways to push them forward, I don’t need to see what others are doing. I’m constantly trying to think of new ways to do things rather than sitting there comparing what I would have done differently.”
Open-world games rarely make his play list
This isn’t a family feud. Houser said the choice has nothing to do with Rockstar or GTA 6 in particular. It’s how he approaches the whole genre: he seldom plays open-world games at all.
“When I play, I feel like I can analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the team that made it in real-time, and that distracts me… I start thinking: the animation team isn’t that strong, but the game design is excellent. I’m not a game designer; I’m more of a creative director. So I’m always trying to find new things that have never been done before…”
He has a creative director’s mind that never really switches off. Houser said his team keeps track of industry trends, but he doesn’t do it himself.
He skipped Westerns during Red Dead and The Sopranos during GTA
He has worked this way for a long time. When work started on Red Dead Redemption, Houser quit watching Westerns. He didn’t watch The Sopranos until he had left Rockstar.
“I’d only seen one episode. Until then, I hadn’t seen any of the show. I finished it during COVID. And I’m actually grateful for that. It’s such a great series that if I had watched it back then, it would have influenced everything I did in GTA. That’s why I really try to avoid things that I believe could overly influence me.”
Think about that for a moment. The man writing GTA’s crime stories deliberately kept Tony Soprano at a distance until the day he left the studio.
Why it matters that he’s not around
Houser was a driving force in writing and producing GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA IV and GTA V, as well as Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2.
Calling him “a writer” doesn’t do him justice. He was one of the people who built Rockstar’s identity: the satirical take on society, the dark humor, the complex characters, and huge open worlds with stories on the scale of a film production.
Every one of those traits is part of whatever GTA 6 ends up being. Meanwhile, one of the people who helped create them will be working elsewhere on worlds of his own, and he’s choosing not to look.