Dan Houser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Man, that’s such a heavy thing about the human experience. I’ve talked to Olympic gold medal 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’re so truly happy to do it, and then it’s like, “What else is there in life?” Compared to this, what else is there? So that’s the ups and downs of life. You need the darkness and you need the lows to really experience the highs. Let me ask you about the pressure. There’s an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto VI. Same was true for GTA V and GTA IV, and even before that. And you and the team delivered every time. How difficult was it to do creative work under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success? I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and just saying… And I try just to go, and with all creative work, I go, “Well, 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 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 have probably done all of the above,” you know, try to bring something new to it. 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, I 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. Because the goal is to make something that’s… You know, video games are expensive, so it is a commercial form of creativity. It’s a commercial art form, you know. So you have to be, in your mind, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we… The way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction. I think GTA IV was very pressured because there’d been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to Hot Coffee. It was extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful. GTA III, the company was basically broke. But I was young and didn’t really care. You know, it wasn’t… 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, you know, we were behind schedule. We were over budget so much I didn’t want to think about it. And 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. It’s not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure. But anything, doing something new, 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 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 IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?…

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