Dan Houser: preference

Transcript context

…You 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, experienced team. I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game, and then we kind of had to follow through with. But I think it was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. I think that the cowboy setting 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 IV, 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 some people think is 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 West and all of the themes around the West really lend themselves to that. So I think that, and then the gunplay was fantastic, 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-…

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