#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

32:48I 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, can I imagine, how good of an NPC am I? Can I imagine myself in every part? I try to do that very much when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War II, within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side. I imagine myself if I was a soldier, but that exercise, if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II, what would he do?

33:25I mean, that may be going a little bit too far, but basically, what are the limits of the integrity what are the limits of uh how romantic is he how narcissistic all those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character what does it take to create that kind of 360 character how hard is it um it was a lot of thinking a lot like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about a project and dialing it you know and i would just get some initial ideas, very like one sentence, they are a Serbian immigrant, or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife in, you know, type very, very simple stuff.

34:10And then just start to think through it from every angle. And, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they were acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast master of the world because i always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation they were the personality of the world you know multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist and when that when that creates interesting friction that's a really fun experience for the player you know it's uh so almost always at least one or more of the protagonists because obviously in in gta 5 we had more than one um we'd have someone who'd move to the place or was in a new part of the place or moved to a new part of the map because it was really as a player i think it was really easy much more easy to identify with your avatar when they like you were fish out of water and even when they weren't we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water in themselves um so i think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going what are their strengths what are their weaknesses how are they like me how are they not like me you know and then slowly what is it like to feel like a human being you know and then in most of these games how much of a psychopath are they how much of a sociopath are they and what are their good qualities what what is going to give them humanity alongside that what are they what what what are they what what for them apart from money is worth dying for and then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides and suddenly you go okay actually i can start to feel and then how do they speak you know because fundamentally doesn't really matter what's going on in their head they haven't actually got one but what they say is what's going to make you realize who they are so develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all of all human beings so you're basically living with that character that if we can contrast uh 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.

36:19He's been working on recently as part of a better paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep. But the AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, is named Nigel Dave. And it has, I mean, at least from my current experience with it, has like a conflicting nature. 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. But he seems to be 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.

37:06And 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 wants to be human. It wants to be loved. Maybe it wants to love. But the children, the monsters it creates, are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paperclips. Anyway, 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've been living with him for the last few years, on and off.

37:47I 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 was like 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 um but he is i with the idea that he's in almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything but zero wisdom.

38:54And 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 a digital creation. So he wants to have metaphysical experiences.

39:25And 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 sociopathic tendencies. And, 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.

40:03Yeah, but there's 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 leader, 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.

40:50Perhaps 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.

41:33And 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 solgenitsyn 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 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 there's certainly good and that all we can try to do is be better and it's funny that nido 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 team 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.

44:26And so I thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space 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. I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.

45:05And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and 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 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.

45:46So 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 how do you feel about llms being able to uh write in a way that looks awfully human i'm not that afraid of them for large stale concepts i don't think they're gonna be very good at that i think if you were, I think it's harder if, you know, I begun and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away like writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game.

46:33Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job. And I just write the website copy. And then by doing, then working on little bits and pieces. And then it, you know, I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA 3 turned up was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it. Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, they're not going to replace good ideas. They can't really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low-level stuff. So I think it's going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces.

47:10If you're not a very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you're fine. But I think, uh, I also think that the fur they, they've done the sort of first 90 % of the work to sound human, 95 % possibly in some areas, the last 5 % is going to end up being about 95 % of the work. I think that last bit in with, with, with, with tech, in my experience with things like facial animation, always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit. And so I'm probably a hideous Luddite, but I'm less scared than a lot of people. I think you're going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same.

47:50It's going to help people be creative in some ways. It's going to get some people who probably shouldn't be in that space out of that space. But if you've got talent, then you'll be fine. Yeah, I agree with you totally, actually. And it's hard to really put a finger on it. So one way to illustrate that, I speak English and Russian, and I've been reading Dostoevsky in both languages and using LLMs to translate back and forth, because I was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky. Which ones? Richard Prevere and Larissa Volokonsky. Yeah, I read quite there when they first did Crime and Punishment.

48:24Mm-hmm. That was amazing. They're wonderful translators and a wonderful love story, too. But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic. And that couple of translators are world-class experts capturing the magic. And I can't quite put that into words. Because you said totally novel ideas, yes. But also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time that captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90%, like I mentioned, human-like phrasing about the bulk of the storytelling. But the magic, whether it's the endings of Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that.

49:18But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions. but it's what is that magic uh and again that could be just a romantic human side of me this thing that ellen's won't be able to capture that maybe desperately holding on for hope i don't think they're going to come up with magic i think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap decent stuff i have to ask you about your writing process and we could break it break it up on on grand theft auto gta 4 is when it really started ramping up how much writing went into the grand theft auto series how many words are we talking about i saw some thousands of pages i mean when we printed out the scripts for gta 4 it was about this high yeah and gta 5 is about that high but that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world because you interact with each one of them but even even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long what was the writing process like on that to generate one page at a time a bit by bit by bit over several years but you start with once people are determined oh here's the here's the world we're doing one based on a version of new york say gta4 and um i was living in new york i've been living in york for a few years wasn't sure if i was happy i was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual and um and that was why i was looking at some of gta4 again recently and it's really dark and i was like oh that's why you know i was uh single and miserable and i wasn't sure i wanted to stay in america my life thought in a lot of flux as a company we'd had all that hot coffee drama so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that you know the lot of drama in the company so it felt like having had this run of success and and relative personal stability from uh gta3 by city san andreas suddenly 2005 six seven early seven life felt very unsure um and that kind of bled into it but in terms of the process it was uh trying to find an underbelly to new york and capture an immigrant experience i'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2000 and when the game came out and then tell it story from a different angle as an immigrant which i thought made it made it interesting um and then this sort of journey around these various new york characters so i kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and you know wandering around new york and driving around and you know on and you know while just go out for the morning from the office normal stuff but doing that through 2005 assembling little notes here's a funny character for this here's how figuring out how the order we want to travel around the map in um characters of this what was an interesting take on on on the you know mob for that kind of time period what was an interesting take on on some jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period and assembling lots of notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work, which is, you know, I have to admit it's part of my process.

52:37If there is any kind of process, which is not doing work, thinking about it, but not working, you know, a lot of time. And then, and then it all kind of did pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work months and months of this. And then, um, finally set myself a deadline, told all the other people on the senior people on the team, okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning. i can't remember i'll say february the first and then the the weekend before was in a in a cabin we we had upstate and just stayed up all night grab knocking these notes into shape assemble about probably a 30-page document so story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters and then hand that over and that gets broken that would get broken down with me and the designers um and i was always clear i'm not a game designer i'm a sort of creative director uh with me and break that down into missions and then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin but then the bulk of my work's then done for a bit so i can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel be lazy for a bit and then um start to worry because then i've actually soon i've got to start writing dialogue and for gta4 in particular is that we're going to try and write you know our animation is going to be a lot better our character models are starting to look better the world is going to look amazing uh therefore we can support better you know longer scenes we can have more in-depth characters uh but we've got to find a tone that works that with the game easy no problem and i start to worry and worry and worry and and also writing as a as a serbian immigrant and i was an immigrant but i'm not serbian and trying to capture what on earth that would feel like so i start to worry you start to worry again avoid work for as long as possible um and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night, hammering away at a keyboard and going, does that write?

54:25Is that? And once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. And so it's like writing with Nico and just, he's a kind of, he's awkward, he's out of town, but he's got more self-assurance in some way, not the American characters. And so once I kind of thought him through this, he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness. and then he started to come to life. And then I would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more Americanized energy. And that felt like it was a good double act. And then from there, it starts to come to life.

55:02But it's written in small chunks for the motion. So then we'd motion capture small chunks and then the other writers would write the mission dialogue for small chunks. And we'd slowly assemble the game sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half. 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, which was a kind of comic moment. And his cousin's foot, and then they go to the cousin's flat.

55:40And 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, 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. It might feel over the top. I think 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 captured the animation.

56:12I was like, yeah, it kind of works. And I think that moment, those were both pretty early. Once we had those, you go, OK, 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 happened 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 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.

57:46He normally does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right. He's the nicest person in some ways. 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. He's also tough. 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 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 brought 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 we just kind of I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and and didn't necessarily get as many as many plaudits as 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.

59:11Can 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, Alois, Dmitri, and Ivan, sort of using the protagonist to explore the spectrum of human nature and just the tension between them that's that allows you the 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 the 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 about stealing you know two top-down cars and we always try to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the with the art direction innovate with every piece of the game and i think having done you know gta 4 which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards the i the the the challenge was can we combine can we make a 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 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 superego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other one of the most upvoted questions on 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 when you lead a team of over 1 000 people to make a masterpiece like gta 5 or red dead redemption 2 how do you ensure that the bar perfection is always met How is that even possible?

1:01:43We know the answer isn't money because there's other studios with a lot of money and they are two decades behind Rockstar. So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games? I think a cult, I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. You know, the culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and people just, you know, and also an ambition to make i think we were like we thought gta3 could be really popular but really popular to us meant quite honestly it's going to sell two or three million copies um and we thought we were making something pretty innovative i mean we knew making something innovative but we didn't know if people would understand how innovative it was and then when we got the chance to make to make by city and to try and repeat it i think every time from then on the team was very driven to make something better and to use this long before we had lots of resources to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the sort of medium of building fake worlds further and that was always you know there was a it was a it was you know both clarity of here's what we're trying to do here's what the tone of the game is going to be here's how features will fit into that and so why these features would work and these features wouldn't work because fundamentally by 2002 you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted um it wasn't a quite it wasn't a tech there wasn't a technical limitation it was just a making it cohesive um and then it was also just uh everyone committing to a culture of excellence navi kansari an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games spoke highly about his time working with you.

1:03:34Quote, we always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn't coming from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making badass shit. So it didn't matter how hard we worked. So I'm sure there were some tough grinds. Finishing it is certainly, it's tough, but it also is, you know, intensely rewarding. And you get something done and you've made something. And that feeling is, as you say, really, really incredible. I mean, because sometimes it's a little bit empty as well. Because when you finish it, you're like, oh, my life's got nothing to it.

1:04:11And then you have to, you know, but that's the same with any big undertaking you take. I don't think that, you know, when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work-life balance. But the truth is you're not working that hard all of the time. So you have to just manage it slightly differently. Man, that's such a heavy thing about the human experience. I've talked to Olympic gold winners, 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 are truly happy to do it. And then it's like, what else is there in life?

1:04:46Compared to this, what else is there? So that's the ups and downs of life. 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 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 art form you know so you have to be in long mind you're spending large amounts someone else's money um you have to try and make it back for them but at the same time my my argument with myself as well if we the way to make it back is try and make something great so both pressures are pointing the same direction um i think gta 4 was very pressured because there'd been all this pressure on the company the company nearly imploded several times uh due to hot coffee it was extremely tough so i I think that felt very stressful.

1:06:48GTA 3, the company, was basically broke. But I was young, I didn't really care. You know, I wasn't living 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 came out that 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 Red Dead 2, when we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much, I didn't want to think about it.

1:07:25And 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. But, you know, anything, anything 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.

1:07:57And 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 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 i thought i was 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 it has 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 the desperately poor, just the whole of it.

1:09:37Would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of 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 say, move it to any of those and it would work you know so yeah there's a melting pot aspect in new york also yeah 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 there was so much americana inherent in the ip it would be really hard to make it work in london or anyone 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 that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere so you've 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 6 released or is it more excitement is it what's the feeling i think it's a it's how would i describe it of course it's all of the above you know it's it's exactly as you you know pleased to be doing other stuff excited for what we're working on now super excited um of course letting go something i've worked on it one way or another for like 20 odd years you know and and wrote on them for the last 10 or 11 that came out wrote all of them or you know lead writer and all them whatever it was um so of course letting go of that is you know is a big change and a lot and sad in a way um because it was 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 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.

1:13:14So there's always this thing of, okay, that's done. And sometimes people would ask me questions about older games. And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones, I couldn't necessarily even remember. I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go. So you're 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 closed 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 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 4 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.

1:15:05And 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 it's 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 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 the 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 lead 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 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.

1:16:36So American Caper is, 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 wonderful, wonderful storyteller. What made you want to set in Wyoming? I hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about. I'd 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 thought I'd 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.

1:17:13You 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. There's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement. He's not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box. And his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

1:17:51And 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 nose 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 has lost his mind living on a big ranch.

1:18:37Of 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 DC. 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 far more anticipated, sold much better early on.

1:19:34So 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 um 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 and 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 awesome 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 a 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 better 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 the games are only going to get better more interesting more creatively, you know, diverse.

1:21:47You 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, 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 that 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 very strong team and really strong material where did you have to go to in your mind maybe philosophically maybe spiritually to be able to create the rdr world so of course it was based on red dead revolver but that's that's a fundamentally uh different i mean that leap into the great mythic story that was red dead redemption one and then even more so red dead redemption two that was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games thank you so like what uh drugs were involved no drugs okay no no stop the drugs long before okay that's why i did all that work um had nothing else to do uh so open open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way kept me busy um but uh red so red i'll tell you i'll give you the my version now games are made by big teams yeah so i will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only um we we made red dead revolver decided that or finished red dead revolver that being a capcom game and they didn't want to finish it so we finished it and they released in japan and we released it in the us in i think 2004 um and decided we would start work on open world cowboy game for ps3 um didn't think too much more about it and that was a bunch of other stuff to work on and slowly 2005 2006 the game started to come to life began to uh meet with uh the lead designer christian cantamessa and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for for the game and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about what works for an open world game what works for a cowboy game and again was being lazy or procrastinating uh can we just on a small tangent uh when you mention you take notes when you're being lazy what do those notes look like are they like doodles either either a yellow pad or a blackberry in those days or an iphone in these days i'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note uh here's a good idea those might be scribbling on a pad um and then i'll assemble if i if they're done digitally then i'll do i'll assemble them into one long word file and then i'll look at them and go you know here's an idea here's an idea and see if it comes to anything see if i aggregate them together and then read through them.

1:25:47There's anything coherent there. You know, some character like this, a character like that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character, actually make the main character work like this. You know, what about this relationship? As a start to just play around with, what about if we start in that place, go to that place, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces. And we begun to flesh out some flow for the start of the game. And this idea you'd start in dusty American West, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees and then go to mexico and then come back um and we had a sort of loose flow and i was really scared of writing any actual dialogue um and i didn't have a clue how to go about it and i could it'll come it'll come and then um and i kept i could postpone if ages were doing gta 4 and i kept worrying about it and then gta my work was wrapped on GTA 4, but the game wasn't out yet.

1:26:41And we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff and I had a little window where I wasn't doing much else. And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child. And we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the, well, she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I went and sat in the room all day, every day, and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about how can I do this that it doesn't sound ridiculous how can you write in in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have and think we can think we can get away with and after about three days it just started to come and then suddenly I wrote about nine ten scenes in the next couple of days and after that knew I had it and it was I don't know if it was that was why there was so much about a character caring about his family because i was just beginning the process of having a family oh i don't know to what extent that bled in there but i think it bled in there to some extent so that was part of the creating the 360 degree characters i think so here's this man uh that is capable is involved in a lot of violence but also cares about his family grown up and he's trying to step away from that and be and be a man be a grown-up and can he get away from it and then and then when he can't get away from it what's he willing to do to save his family and that was i felt starting to get some idea feeling just i mean she hadn't given birth yet but i was beginning to grapple the ideas of i'm going to become a parent so i hope some of that and obviously then i didn't probably write anymore for six months later on we had a had a child but but certainly that first bit i think some of that began to bleed in there you got the feeling that can actually do it it's true it's uh it could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable the the dialogue between conboys yes i mean there's probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable and and like that like uh like a shakespearean type of drama but not the cheesy kind.

1:28:56Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke. I mean, I love dialogue. I'm always, you know, I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy. It didn't sound ridiculous. You wanted to hit them speak more. It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke. That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was. And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey, and you cared about him. you had to care about his wife and child that he left behind even though he didn't know them when did you know how you're going to end red dead redemption one i remember i did a meeting with christian the designer i can't remember what year probably some point late 2008 early 2009 and we were discussing the last bit and and uh said i think he's got to die and he leapt on the idea and went that's yeah yes yes no then i went no it can't work games can't work like that it can't work if he's dead and then i began to think through well if we just technically it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up and then began to think through actually i think we can make it work if we do it this way and so uh he then really pushed for that idea and it seemed to i was like i was still torn i thought it was clever narratively um but i was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design but i think it did.

1:30:16Yeah. And, uh, spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. He does all the, John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang. And he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch. And then the government betrays him and sends, uh, uh, troops to kill him. And, and there is dialogue. I mean, I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue. I think John talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember, I think he said, I love you. But he made it seem like he's going to see her and his son shortly.

1:31:09That dialogue was masterfully done, like a definition of less is more. It was just so crisp that, and of course the other one is, again, from memory, Arthur riding his horse and the music is playing. It's very hard not to shed a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife at the end when he's in a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death uh do you remember writing that oh yeah yeah but it does again i went i the actor was so good and we've seen a bunch of his work by then he had such a good he was so good at reading those lines that i knew he could give us that you could feel with that point like i think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy and so i knew he'd be able to make that line sound good so you were imagining his voice yeah and and i think all All of those actors on Red Dead Redemption 1 were so strong that they really brought that game to life.

1:32:14If them and Rod the director hadn't done such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell. Yeah, you've said that the ending of RDR 1 is one of the best things you've been a part of creating. Why? Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent? um i think because for the story to work i mean just from a technical challenge for the story to work he had to die but for a game to work it felt like a challenge to make him die it was probably the four fifth or sixth open world game i'd worked on and i you know spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked how to make them work technically how to make them feel right how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best i could and suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules which was at the end of the game you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories to play forever we're not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead and we're going to have to have you play as a different character and the narrative is is going to be if we've done a good job compelling enough where you're not going to care about that and or you're going to be upset that he's dead but you're going to actually have this emotional moment um so i think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that and then it worked so i think that was something was very full of fear and it put and it worked it worked out okay i mean i think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because i didn't think it was going to happen but i think they also had that kind of experience you're describing it's that kind of creative moment where you know transcendent moment with with characters in a piece of fiction which is what we've always aspired to giving people I mean, it's incredible because I don't think, I don't remember a single video game that has done that before.

1:34:06Well, I would like to have at the end of GTA 4 killed Nico, but you couldn't do it. You know, the game doesn't work. So it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it. And then going, let's do it. Let's take the risk and do it. We can't do it. Let's try it. 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 coubert 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 uh that was the sort of challenge of of jack's character slash wrapping up the story as jack oh there's real power uh for the avatar to end the finiteness yeah both the red deads you 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 yeah that's the 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 taking 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 the same 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 that interview you said that uh a lot of video games uh work on the same premise that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero but what if he started 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 roller coaster when his worldview gets taken apart so it's it's very different than the normal journey of a character yeah in a game in a game to reverse it yeah so there were a couple other themes that matched that so they're guys from the wild west but they're being pushed ever further east so it's 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 i was so you know this idea of getting getting a different kind of strength and 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 realize the the the prospect of uh like real sort of fear of death realization of death yeah i thought that was really part of the story really fun thing to play with um john dies in red dead one uh and wanted to top that with Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way.

1:38:56And 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 by TB as an illness. It felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea, this guy getting weaker, who felt like he was immortal, and essentially was immortal.

1:39:41He was the protagonist in a video game. He could not die. And suddenly he is becoming mortal. 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 the greatest character we ever created i think he's the best lead character you know the lead characters are different from the side characters and i think he's the he's the most rounded and works the best i kind of him and nico are the two i like you know they were the two most ambitious so for me it's always it's always sort of a toss-up you know but then i loved all the stuff like the the the art team did such an amazing job it was there i did with the journal and that kind of like the way that all the features worked into arthur's character i thought that was really he 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 the flavor the of the full cast what what are some of the favorites you've created i'm sure the one you're currently working on not just dave that's if you call them a side character well he's not a protagonist he's like a god 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.

1:41:13And the actor did 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 anyway, a little bit in my head. But I knew it was his bigger gang stuff. And then I sort of saw exactly who he was. And so that felt like 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 Arthur, with John. I mean, there's a family feeling to the gang that you explore all of those dynamics.

1:41:52And then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis. You're going against the family, going against the father because he is transforming his 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 godlike figure through all of that. Also flawed himself. Also a man of good and evil in that 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.

1:42:33and that's mostly off camera but and then just 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's happened with him. And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.

1:43:14Yeah. But also it clouded Arthur's judgment. Oh, completely. Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him. He was worshiping 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, well, it depends on what the choices you make, but he gets to do some good.

1:44:00Yes. 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 what 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.

1:44:49So 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, 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 RDR one and a little bit in RDR two.

1:45:36Awesome. Yeah. So which theory is closest to the truth? Not three or four. somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two. Yeah. I just loved 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 uh imagination excitement and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people yes and no i mean no 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 yeah you know but there was a ped in red red direction one 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 um but you never know what's what people are obsessed by there are the 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 i really can't remember it's so fascinating because that little piece of writing of course you have thousands of pages yeah that little piece of writing gets like analyzed oh but we certainly talked about it in in depth and uh if mike was here i'd ask you he might remember i can't really 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 and the guy 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 and the 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 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 of 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.

1:48:59Thank 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 character, like breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about like arguing about different interpretations of it. 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 as long as it feels totally appropriate for this whole big sort of shaggy dog story experience you're making which 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 Grand 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 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.

1:50:42And there's a backstory too. I mean, Londoner and not. Yeah. That was what, you know, just there's something sometimes fun. An English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny. 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 V? Like who is the strange man? Well, the strange man was again, was someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead 1 and we were making Red Dead 1 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.

1:51:23But 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 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 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 so we kind of quite late in development started putting in almost like these rpg type content where you go and meet someone and the the way we thought of them was they were like short stories.

1:52:09So 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 so in red dead 2 you could interact with him again and or not really interact with him but 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 evil forces, able to do this for everybody.

1:53:35And I don't think we necessarily ever clarify that. He's certainly able to do it for you. I mean, 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 a video game. I don't think I've seen... 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. It also changed depending on what you've done.

1:54:11Yes. So 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 it's also very LA. He wants to write a book and betray you, which felt like a good twist. And it was, he felt like a Grand Theft Autotherapist. 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.

1:54:52There'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 just added to the feeling that the world is real. So I have to ask, what are some of your favorite insanely specific intricate details in RDR? I can give you some options. Internet's favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.

1:55:37Those guys did an amazing job on that. Yeah. I mean, 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 pun 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 uh animal carcasses decompose realistically they feel like they do that's still extremely rare in video games that the temporal aspect yes that permeates through time you know npcs remembering you that's the best i mean that's the thing i love it playing around 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.

1:57:03The problem with... cowboys is that if you've tried to make a 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 snow storm 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 started 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 see many games do that this must be difficult to do but 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 for 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 that you really miss or wish you could have done in either GTA or RDR?

1:59:33Well, 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 girlfriend who'd had the baby 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.

2:00:18That was the right decision commercially. It's better that way. But I still, I like that little bit. It spoke to me personally. There, and just his inability to access his emotions, I thought was really strong because then later in the game he's going to get very emotional. But there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed, you know, and don't, well, missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually it's like this mission is not going to work technically. oh God, we've got 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.

2:00:55You get late in the game and it's just something, you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish. So you just get rid of it. I think editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down 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 mean 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 care about it but you know if i was over 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.

2:01:48Of 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 V that never came out. And we've also never really worked on another game. But I like the idea of it that it was a GTA zombie game that would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun. What was the GTA V DLC? It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent. Oh. It was, cute. It never quite came together and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned.

2:02:22But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead 2. So there's always compromises. But 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 personally like to have done more of that in that company um and the 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 you 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're 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 as a with new ip it's just extremely hard so luckily we are like focusing on what we're good at which is open world single-player games and we might add um multiplayer components to one of them i think one of them it's 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 mean what i would love to see the most possible options never thought a lot about a pirate game My son is obsessed by that game, Sea of Thieves, at the moment.

2:05:03So he's constantly saying, do a pirate game. Haven't really thought about it too much. We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game. Yeah. And it never came together. It's the agent. Agent. And it's had about five different iterations. So good. I don't think it works. I concluded, and I keep thinking about it sometimes. I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it. and i've concluded as an open as what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games or need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game so uh for people who don't know it would be hypothetically set in 1970s cold war era that was one of the versions there was another one that was set in current we had so many different versions of this game we worked on so many different teams but it would be more geopolitical like espionage that yeah and assassinations like yeah assassinations i don't know what it would have been because it never really we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it we're doing the early work as you get the world up and running it never it never really found its feet in either of them and i sort of think i know why because one of those films they're very very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat you know you've got to go here and save the world you got And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together.

2:06:25But for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want. And I want freedom and I want to go over here and do what I want. And I want to go over and do what you want. And that's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do. And we try and create, you know, external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times. But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.

2:06:54So interesting. So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio. And cruise about. Or ride a horse and just look at nature. So lots of things would work as open world games, but I don't know for spiders. That's brilliantly put. But to me, there's such espionage and assassinations and the geopolitical international context is so interesting. But you're right. i just want to listen to uh what is it lazlo and uh well you can't you gotta save the world and so you need this time pressure with a russian accent or something yeah wow wow yeah that's really interesting and then we played around with a knights concept that was looking you know knights 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 nice we'll 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 uh 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 at 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.

2:10:29We've got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We'll get everyone's friends in and just record all 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 That period from kind of 2001, 2005, it was lots of early innovation 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, it felt lots of, doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take.

2:11:00And then I think we talked about it earlier, but the journey into doing GTA 4 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 i mean it still feels like that now in some ways but it's still and then that five games you know gta 4 and 5 red dead 1 and 2 all the extra packs for them and max pain 3 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 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 i had this other stress so there's always always good bits and stresses but you know and always just try to sharp and 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?

2:12:41Because 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 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 the 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 when saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game i was you know i thought about it a bunch the way i think about things was suitable for that for whatever reason just that was just good fortune laszlo mentioned that uh it was another legend who you're still working with uh he mentioned that you would uh lock yourself in a writing dialogue for a radio i think you lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed i cokes is this accurate information very accurate for which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process is the 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 as 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 of 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 produce 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 tone 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 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 that even in game after game he got worse he began as his quite and 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 in the best possible way yeah yeah outside of uh 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 for that was like perfect game design so from a pure puzzle perspective nothing comes close yeah it's 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 yeah always yeah and i think that's the they're known for this nintendo polish every pixel has a purpose yes and what do you i mean I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible.

2:19:01It'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. No, but it's amazing. It's almost like the new ones, they almost to me feel like Hitchcock. They 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 i mean from a technical perspective we're always involved i'd be in the same with the new games we're constantly trying to find the balance between you know rpg a role-playing game and an action game and you know 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 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 interactive so you 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'll feel more a slightly more cinematic experience yeah i think uh the other 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 RPG elements onto a story-driven action game.

2:21:10It's a kind of, just a slightly different emphasis. But I still think what they do is amazing. He's brilliant at doing it. And I think 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 branch the game to where it's not the illusion of choice it's really it 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 game-making team, the whole, you know, the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

2:22:10A difficult topic. 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 like 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 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 taken 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 human civilization that fortunately you have that as part of 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 yeah that was like it might as well have been set in the 1870s in the 1990s and but then they want you And I was always getting in trouble, not for doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all of the time.

2:24:27Couldn't be quiet. How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally yourself afraid of death? Well, my father passed away in May.

2:24:43So 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 out 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 i just what do you think about the nothingness i mean that 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.

2:25:47I'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. But I tend to think that there is a metaphysical purpose to life, and part of that purpose is to search for the purpose. But at other points, you read too much science, you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all. Also, there's a component to your brain. When talking about Wuthering Heights 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.

2:26:25You've said, I like this line, feelings may destroy you, but they're the best thing we have. So 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 and 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 that 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 do 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 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 it i think it's the new thing that we're going to lean into the bug feature yeah it's both isn't it i mean it's it's it cannot lead that self-critical brain 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 um 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 i 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 Dostoevsky's notes from underground, nihilistic kind of worldview.

2:30:05I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good. I think there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first, uh, for, for the, 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.

2:31:07And I think I've become much more naive 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, 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.

2:31:45And 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. Oh, it's fascinating. It's just so much kindness and goodness and just simple joy and 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.

2:32:19You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation. But you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom. Second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Frisgerald. The Thin Red Line by James Jones. And Middlemarch by George Eliot. But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think, if an alien came, what are some candidates for books that you would recommend to them? Middlemarch is 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.

2:33:24So I think that there's something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair. I used to love the novel, not the magazine. Because same thing, all of life is here. You also spoke highly of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I was obsessed by them in my 20s. Yeah. Completely obsessed. As one must be. Yeah, absolutely. 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 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.

2:34:06That, by the way, is a phenomena of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still, that, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died in obscurity, nobody knows them, and they become famous later. Yeah. that is just so interesting that's such an interesting you know that Franz Kock and Franz Kock was in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt like destroyed so that insecurity speaking of the critical voice is just and 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 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 his fame and yeah it's almost like cliche and you think of the character and i remember the year 1984 you know this is i remember the song you know there'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 who worked worked for us and worked with us and i was sitting a few years ago sitting around a campfire in upstate new york surrounded with the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband who's ukrainian and he'd been in the red army i was History is so strange that you end up, the Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy.

2:36:17We're now just hanging out with it. Everything changes. You think these things are permanent, and they're really not. We've faced some of that now, where you think these structures are permanent, and they're going to change. And you also mentioned the three great World War II books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene. 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, one Eastern European, just to get different perspectives.

2:37:01but 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 written by Vasily Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. And there's also just a deep philosophical 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 he's just incredible piece of humanism. And also just, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

2:37:40Oh yeah. It seems like that context reveals in the most pure way, human nature. And like what kind of, you know, in a 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 is 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 the they're all losing they all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen.

2:38:25So 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 uh is abused by centralized power so there's a dictator always in that context in in those given that set of technologies a dictator arises and does the opposite of what the 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 you know after 89 all of these english communists you know all like having to access discovering all these atrocities had happened in you know so it was it always fascinated me and then you think about complexities or where one's own values are in the modern moment and i i They say, you know, without, from, from, from, I don't know 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?

2:40:41And 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 and a flourishing of a larger society. So there's, like you said, 1984 is pretty, I mean, it's a caricature.

2:41:17But 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 Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century than does 1984. I don't know. I think 1984 with the fake wars and the way that it revealed that everything in it was a setup for him. If he could have seen the internet, it's like an analog internet, that world they build around 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 how 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 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.

2:43:06I 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 going to 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 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 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 uh 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 yep 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 guys this raster uh turned up who i'd been talking 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 another 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 And they have guys chasing after the machete.

2:45:28And the taxi driver looks back, sees the dude with the machete and goes, Si, con amigos? And I'm like, no, no, no, they're not my friends. Get me out of here. And then he drove me up the street into a bit where the town was. It was kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena. And I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total of my injuries. And 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 I was getting into silly stuff.

2:46:06And so I went to New York and they've just started 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, I had to come and go a bit. Well, the visas got sorted out and then just ended up staying for it. to 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. So he, you couldn't, when you went to bars, you were 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.

2:46:47By 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 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

2:47:28vision 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 to 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 completely i still i still look at i'm glad you 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 uh it was always each try each time 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 they can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like you know their systems all the stuff the 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 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 i'm going to sit depressed realizing i have to wait i can 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 we'll 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's 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.

2:50:41But 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 you want to work out and figure out how you get to work there. 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 much cheaper is about to turn up and all that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive.

2:51:34So 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 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.

2:52:57Well, 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 Hauser. 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 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.

2:53:40Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

2:53:54Thank you.