Dan Houser: You Don't Have to Finish Rockstar's Stories

If you have ever felt guilty for wandering off the main path in a Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption title, the man who wrote them has a message for you: don't worry about it. During a panel at the Tribeca Festival in New York City, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser clarified his stance on player completion, emphasizing that the primary goal is simply for users to enjoy the worlds he helped create.

"If someone enjoyed a game, that's great," Houser said. "If you can’t finish a story, but you loved it in other ways: Great, I don't care. I mean, I would like it if you finish the story because I spent ages on it. If you enjoyed it, that's enough for you."

Houser noted that while the studio’s goal since Grand Theft Auto III has been to encourage more players to reach the end of the narrative, the core appeal of an open-world game lies in the player's agency. "The most fun thing about the game isn't any rubbish we write, it's the systems that we make," he explained. "[What’s] always gonna be the most fun is being in this world, seeing what happens when you jump off this building, when you punch that person, you drive that car... we can't be precious about what they do."

The Art of the Deep Cut

Houser was joined on stage by his longtime creative partner, Lazlow, who co-founded the studio Absurd Ventures with Houser following his 2020 departure from Rockstar. The duo discussed the joy of hiding intricate secrets within their games, often burying them so deep that players might not discover them for years.

"We love burying stuff so deep that sometimes three or four years goes by, I'm like, ‘Maybe this makes it too hard to find,’" Lazlow said. "And somebody finds it and then it blows up on Reddit, and we're like, ‘Yay.’” As a recent example, players only uncovered a specific spiderweb mystery in Red Dead Redemption 2 seven years after the game's initial release.

Satire and Reality

Reflecting on their time crafting the satirical environments of the Grand Theft Auto series, Lazlow spoke about the challenge of creating content that feels grounded yet absurd. He recalled the creation of GTA V character Jock Cranley, a stuntman-turned-politician who ran on a platform of hating the elderly and the military.

"We're like, ‘Ha ha ha ha, this kind of crazy shit will never happen in real life,’” Lazlow said, pointing out how difficult it has become to stay ahead of reality while writing hyper-ridiculous satire. "We're basically like an in-house ad agency... it's all got to be this hyper-ridiculous satire that also speaks to the tone of that place."

Since moving on to Absurd Ventures, the pair has been busy with new projects, including the comic series American Caper and the novel A Better Paradise. They are currently developing an unnamed AAA open-world sci-fi action-adventure game set in the A Better Paradise universe, with South Korea’s Smilegate serving as publisher.