The Grand Theft Auto series of video games is a rare cultural phenomenon: incredibly popular (the last version sold more than 25 million copies globally), widely condemned (by politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joseph I. Lieberman) and adored by the highbrow (Junot Díaz is a huge fan). Yet its creators at Rockstar Games have been able to shroud themselves in relative mystery for more than a decade, even after a Federal Trade Commission investigation in 2005, when copies of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were yanked from store shelves after a fan unlocked some sexual content that had been hidden in the game’s code.
Americana at Its Most Felonious
Q. and A.: Rockstar’s Dan Houser on Grand Theft Auto V
Rockstar Games
Michael, one of the three playable characters in the coming Grand Theft Auto V, by Rockstar Games.
By CHRIS SUELLENTROP
Published: November 9, 2012
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Rockstar Games
Trevor, another of the playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V, which will be introduced next spring.
With Grand Theft Auto V, the first major title in the series in five years, coming out next spring, Rockstar seems more eager than it has been in the past to talk about itself and the maturation of its work. Rather than being inspired solely by gangster films and TV shows like “Miami Vice,” the Grand Theft Auto games now try to capture, albeit in heightened form, aspects of contemporary life. The new game, set in a fictionalized Los Angeles called Los Santos, tackles the aftermath of the credit crunch and the housing crisis for three criminals, each of whom is playable. (Previously, the games focused on a protagonist.) Yet it’s still Grand Theft Auto: In a demo version one character pours a ring of gasoline around a truck and lights it on fire.
During a recent conversation in SoHo, Dan Houser, Rockstar’s head writer and vice president for creative — as well as the brother of the studio president, Sam Houser — spoke about what he and Rockstar are trying to achieve with Grand Theft Auto V, how his Englishman-in-New-York status informs his writing, and whether he thinks the studio has changed with time. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q. What do you want people to get out of the games that you make?
A. Obviously, we want them to be entertained. We want them to be stimulated, questioned, amused, all of the other higher and lower things one gets from entertainment.
Books tell you something, movies show you something, games let you do something. Open-world games have an enormous strength, creatively. As well as letting you do something — run around, fly a helicopter, be the hero, be the antihero, whatever — they also let you be in the world, passively. So we’ve taken some of the things the director used to control within the movie and handed it to you as the consumer of the medium.
We have a vision for what we think interactive entertainment can become, and each time we get closer to realizing those ambitions.
Q. What is that vision?
A. It’s the stuff we’re trying to realize with this game. It’s a world brought to life, in which you are able to exist and explore and have the benefits of some kind of narrative pull-through, a world that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. We’ve made something that sort of is Los Angeles and sort of isn’t. And that’s deliberate, that it isn’t an exact replication of it. We wanted this post-crash feeling, because it works thematically in this game about bank robbers. And that seems like it’s going to endure through the next year.
Q. Do you start with a place, or with the qualities and themes you want to address?
A. The longest part of the process of making one of these games is making the world. If this wasn’t the right way to do it, which I think it probably is, anyway, just from a pure production standpoint you have to start building the world as soon as possible. We start with the place, and then the characters come out from the place.
Q. How does the new, three-character structure help you get closer to the ambitions you have for the medium?
A. Just at the conceptual level, the idea was three separate stories that you play in one game. The next bit was, let’s not have the stories intersect once or twice but have them completely interwoven. It felt like it was going to be a real narrative strength: you get to play the protagonist and the antagonist in the same story.
Q. Is it fair to say that your games are satires of American culture?
A. I think it’s fair to say that they are set in a world that is a satire of American media culture.
Q. Does your Britishness give you a perspective on this country that illuminates your satire?
A. I don’t think anyone in America really understands what growing up in Britain in the ’70s and ’80s was like. Eighty percent of the television was American. Every movie you saw was American. Even though there are all these great British pop stars, 95 percent of them sing in American accents, and they all sing in an American idiom. So there was a great love of America, and maybe some junior-partner resentments for it. But it’s a very different relationship compared to America’s contemporary relationship with Britain, where a few small things are cherry-picked and told how wonderful they are.
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