Dan Houser: belief

Transcript context

…One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA V from a fan, “GTA V is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA V and GTA Online. GTA IV is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me. When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met? How’s that even possible? We know the answer isn’t money, because there are other studios with a lot of money, and they are two decades behind Rockstar.” So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games and stories? I think the cult… I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. The culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity. And people would just, you know… And also an ambition to make… I think we thought GTA III could be really popular. Really popular to us meant, quite honestly, it’s going to sell two or three million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative. We knew we were making something innovative, but we didn’t know if people would understand how innovative it was. And then when we got the chance to make Vice City and to try and repeat it, I think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better. And to use, this was long before we had lots of resources, to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the medium of building fake worlds further. And that was always… there was, it was both clarity of, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what the tone of the game is going to be. Here’s how features will fit into that, and so why these features would work and these features wouldn’t work.” Because fundamentally by 2002, you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted. It wasn’t a technical limitation. It was just making it cohesive. And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence. Navid Khansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker- …who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games spoke highly about his time working with you. Quote, “We always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn’t coming from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn’t matter how hard we worked.” So I’m sure there were some tough grinds.…

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