Rockstar Co-Founder Dan Houser Says There’s No Right Way to Play an Open-World Game

Rockstar Co-Founder Dan Houser on Open-World Game Experiences

Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and a key writer behind the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, has made it clear that he doesn’t expect players to finish every story in his games. At a recent panel during the Tribeca Festival in New York City, Houser emphasized that the enjoyment of a game is what truly matters. “If someone enjoyed a game, that's great,” he 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 was joined on the panel by Lazlow, his longtime creative partner, who has since launched the multimedia studio Absurd Ventures with Houser after leaving Rockstar in 2020. Lazlow shared insights into the creative process of embedding deep Easter eggs and hidden content within Rockstar’s games. “We also love burying very deep Easter eggs and games. Sometimes they take one or two years or longer for players to discover,” Lazlow said. “I mean, we love burying stuff so deep that sometimes three or four years go by, and I'm like, 'Maybe this makes it too hard to find.' And somebody finds it and then it blows up on Reddit, and we're like, 'Yay.'"

Just this year, Red Dead Redemption 2 players uncovered a spiderweb mystery that had gone unnoticed for seven years since the game’s release. This kind of discovery is a testament to the depth and complexity of Rockstar's worlds.

The Open-World Philosophy

“The whole point of an open-world game is we provide guides,” Houser said. “We want you to experience the story. Our goal was always — from GTA 3 onwards — to try and get more and more people to finish the story. And the numbers went up and up; they used to be pretty level.”

However, Houser also acknowledged that ultimately, the choice is up to the player. “The players enjoy being in the world, mucking around, doing whatever they want to do, messing with the systems. The most fun thing about the game isn't any rubbish we write, it's the systems that we make.”

Houser elaborated: “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, when you interact with this thing, or that thing, whatever way. That's always gonna have a sort of magical quality to it, and we are on some level on the story side, just the icing on the cake.”

He continued, “We can't be precious about what they do. We can encourage them to play it the way we want them to play it. But we have to give them agency.”

Crafting Satirical Worlds

Lazlow also spoke about the challenge of creating fleshed-out satirical worlds that, at the time of their creation, seem patently deranged until reality catches up. This is something that The Boys also recently dealt with in its fifth season. “We would set out with a massive list in every game of all the media that we wanted, be it a phone that you can disappear into, just like you do in the real world,” Lazlow said. “I mean, we're basically like an in-house ad agency because there would be a billboard for a brand, you'd hear a radio commercial from the same brand. You can see a TV commercial for the same brand, and then you get a pop-up on your phone for it, but it's all got to be this hyper-ridiculous satire that also speaks to the tone of that place and the vision that [Houser] has for how he wants you to experience that world.”

Lazlow specifically recalled creating GTA 5’s Jock Cranley: “The thing that became difficult as the projects took longer, is making ridiculous characters, brands, products, situations so that the world doesn't catch up with you. I remember we had a politician that we came up with in GTA that was an ex-stuntman who was running for governor, and a Hollywood guy, and he came out with this campaign ad saying that he hates the elderly, he hates crippled people, he hates the military. We're like, ‘Ha ha ha ha, this kind of crazy shit will never happen in real life.’”

Since its founding, Absurd Ventures has expanded beyond games. The studio has released the comic series American Caper via Dark Horse Comics, and the novel A Better Paradise along with an audiobook adaptation. An animated series of shorts, Absurdaverse, first premiered at the Netflix Is a Joke comedy festival. Additionally, an unnamed AAA open-world sci-fi action-adventure game set in the A Better Paradise universe is in development with South Korea’s Smilegate as the publisher.