Dan Houser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just even looking back at that time to today how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years? Well, I was a child, I was a 25-year-old child- …who didn’t know anything, and I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn’t writing. And I bought a notebook and I’d occasionally scribble in it, and I’ve still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video games, which were the least literary medium it’s possible to imagine at the time. There was no room for that on PS1 games, really. Thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do it. And I’d been doing that in London, then I came to New York, and it was fun, really fun to be in New York, and really fun to do a new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure. But I was still lost as a human being. And then when I was 27, I was still completely lost, a child. And I stopped some of my bad behavior, and the next day pretty much the chance to write on, work on open world games and all the skills I’d half learned over the previous years and my way of thinking where I thought about space a lot because I was a geographer rather than a historian came together and I got the chance to work on an open world game. So it felt like it was meant to be. It was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton, Navid, Leslie, and the guys in Scotland and all the people in New York making these new games in this new way. And going, “Oh, we need to find a hundred voices. We’ve got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We’ll get everyone’s friends in and just record all lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians would speak video games.” No one else was doing that kind of stuff. It was insane. So I think that that period from kind of 2001 to 2005, it was lots of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff. It didn’t feel… it felt… creative, but it didn’t feel like writing yet. Just becoming that, we felt lots of, doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take. And then I think, we talked about it earlier, but the journey into doing GTA 4 when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience. And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point. And then I was like, “Well, this is better than films. This is something that films can’t do.” You know, this 360-degree experience of being this immigrant. And it still felt, we were still only scratching the surface. I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways, but it still felt a little… And then that five games, you know, GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them, and Max Payne 3, I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period. From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period. From a business and sort of early creativity period, the period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting. places through that period. From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period. From a business and sort of early creativity period, the period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting. To use the original starting team, all doing well. Personal life was doing okay, didn’t feel like such a mess. And then from 2007 onward, ‘7, ‘8, was happy personally having children, happily married, and the games were just getting much better. But there were lots of pressure in the business, you know, and the budgets got really big, so it added to the stress. So there’s always good bits and stresses, but, you know, and always just tried to show up and do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. Always trying to go, “It’s a new medium.” What can we do that’s new?”…

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