Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484

- 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? - People searching for meaning amongst the violence. I think that the West and all the themes around the West really lend itself to that. And the gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible. I think we got to spend, a smaller group of us, working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. It was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. - You lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed... Diet Cokes? - Yes. - Is this accurate information? - Very accurate. - Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI? - I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating. The games always felt different. People have very strong feelings: "I like this one." "I didn't like that one as much," because they are pretty different. So you know what's going to happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, you know it's going to be a game about being a criminal, but the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. - The number one question from the internet, it is so ridiculous, but I must ask, "Have you seen Gavin?" The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 have some of the deepest, most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurdventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games. That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super intelligent AI, American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world, and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action-adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being. I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Dan Houser. You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in the late '70s and '80s, open-world video games wasn't a thing. So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can. - Sure. - What to you are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time, maybe films that were highly influential on you? I mean, Godfather. - God, well, I think for me, probably Godfather II more than Godfather I, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather II. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily. I think and the bit, Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot, it's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America. - How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the cinematography and how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got young Pacino. - Coppola started as a screenwriter, so I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script. So it's almost like the writing, directing almost become the same thing. But it's one of those films, both of them are those films, which I was thinking about this idea of a perfect film where everything's good. Where the acting's seminal, where the writing's seminal, where the music is seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes you know, define what you think about things. It's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about The Godfather. - What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, slow. - It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slow. - Life got faster. Life just got, you know, as I think as we moved from the '70s into the '80s, into the '90s, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker, you could show a look and just that meant you realized that person was gonna betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with modern, you know, high quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're rewatching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow. - Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I... I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right? - A mixture of crime and humor. - And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. You know, I think that probably changed cinema at the tail end of the '80s, changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the '80s, early '90s, more than any other film. And it's so iconic. In some ways I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino, you know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people, you know, it changed everything. The Sopranos is obviously completely inspired by Goodfellas. - Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything. - The look, the clothes... ...The music. - I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, just the drama building up to that between... - Dig another hole. - Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films. - I think the great Vegas film. There are bits that I always... that I love. At the end, when everything's wrapping up, and on the one hand you see the Robert De Niro character, he's still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the, the mob bosses from back home, they're discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's that incredibly cold line where one of them, they're thinking about the old, you know, I think it's the casino manager, and one of them just goes, "Ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?" And then the next thing, he's just shot. The brutality of it all is just brilliant. - I don't know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors. You got what, Nicolas Cage Leaving Las Vegas? I mean, falling in love with a prostitute. You've written some of the great crime stories ever. - Thank you. - And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about- ...being a bit of a romantic yourself. Appreciating the depth of love stories in literature at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. He got an Oscar for that. - I think he did for that, didn't he? - Plus there's the caricature of the drug world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one. - I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18. And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book. - Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories? - No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson if he was also a market gardener. I love that persona. But he's kind of... it's hard. If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson. - Is this an American caper? - No, it's in this animated show we're developing in this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse, and it's in one of the stories in that. - What is Absurdiverse? - Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open-world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies. We're still thinking that all through. And we're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment, and it's early days, but it's looking very exciting. And it's trying to be... like, trying to make a game that feels a a little bit like a living sitcom. - Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges, or is it pure comedy? - I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours, it won't work. - Okay, so comedy needs some darkness. - Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes. - And there's going to be an open-world video game. - Yes. Yes. - When? - Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through. - So, what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game? Why does it take so long to get it right? - That's an interesting question. I think if you look at the scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way, why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building, in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. You know, these things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline. - We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent, but I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So first of all, you said you love great war books. - and movies. - So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least. - Of course. - There's more crime, fast-moving crime movies, like Scarface. I also love True Romance. - I love True Romance. Possibly the best, one of the best scripts ever written. - Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino. What do you love about True Romance? I think sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I've had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made. - Yeah, I mean, True Romance is super fun. Tony Scott was a really good director, so it moves at a really good speed. It's funny, it's completely unbelievable, but you really care about the characters. It's the kind of, you know, this world that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievable. You could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know, you just... it's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about, like, what do you like about films? It's the idea to be in a world. You want to... they're not real. They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented. - And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super racist discussion. - Yeah. Rant. - Rant. - Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad. - Yeah. Dream dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on the couch. - Gary Oldman. - As a rasta. - Yeah, and you have... I mean, a real love story. Like, a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context. - And it's just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film. - Yeah. - It's endearing. - The... Elvis is a character. It's kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love, the- - Yeah, and it's all crossed with Play It Again, Sam. It sort of feels a bit like that with the Elvis character. - What about greatest war film? What would it be for you? - Greatest war film? If I'm feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See. which is probably the most intense film ever made. And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always want to watch the original cut. I don't prefer the re-edits. I like the original first release. I think it's tighter and slicker and works the best. - Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, I think, madness. - Yeah, but from your first- - Yeah - scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece and, again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue. - Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems, and there's different ways of doing that. And you've talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another book— ...and movie that shows that. - Yeah, yeah, and I watched the movie years before I read the book, and I didn't understand the movie. And then I read the book, and I read a lot about the editing of the movie, and I understood why I didn't understand the movie, and that's 'cause the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot, and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that they're spread apart by ages in the book to assemble... I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. It would've been as a six-hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. But it's still very beautiful, the film. - And in terms of Westerns, what's the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven? Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. - I think for me it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year, Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch. - I love Robert Redford. Rest in peace. - That film, it's just impossible to imagine any buddy film without Butch Cassidy. - It's Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you, also? Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead? - I love Unforgiven, but the truth is with Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of Westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of Westerns. They were always on TV. You know, I felt I knew a lot, quite a bit about Westerns. And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns. I tried to watch no more Westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I didn't like about them, what would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game. And I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional Western. And then having done that, tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor. Didn't just feel like more of the same. - From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love. - No, films. - Films. - Films was always, well, what I loved first as a kid was films. Um, older... Began reading books properly aged about eight. Was watching films long before that. - Nice. - And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred. I think they're good at different things. Games, I played and, above all, watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid, you know, other people playing them. Um, and I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They're responsive, they're alive, and that's captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun, or you know, beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well. Sometimes obsessively so. You know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I should've been studying, for months at a time, to Tetris on a Game Boy. You know, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world that's really emerged for me pretty much as soon as I left college. But I didn't love it. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them, probably as late as like 2001. - Oh, wow. - And when I suddenly began to see... First of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story, but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making these things that was this, you know, where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like. And I think that was when I really went, "These are amazing." And that's when I really fell in love with... I could see it in moments and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me. - Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open-world games that are so narrative-driven. So it's like you didn't have too many examples. - Yeah, before that it was PS1 or even before that. Games looked terrible. You know, you would be like it's eight pixels, it's a car. You know, it was not a car. They just didn't... It was always you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. And all they were about, you know, very surreal subject matter 'cause you couldn't make them remotely real. And suddenly we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive. And we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life. And yet you see you could tell a story in three or, you know, using time, in four dimensions, and that felt very inspiring. - Yeah, I think GTA III is probably one of the most influential games of all time. It created a feeling of an open world. What do you think it takes to create that feeling? There were like these looming skyscrapers. There were the changing traffic lights. There's the feeling like, first of all, you had a feeling you could do anything, and then the world was reacting to it. - Yes - in a way that didn't feel scripted. - Yes, and it wasn't scripted. It was really, really, really low-rent AI. It was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened, and I think that was incredibly... It was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with and the simulation seemed to have a personality. So you could push and see... And the world would push you back in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this... I think one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio, I could... Look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians, and not in GTA III, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. And the world was there and existing, and so it was the idea of almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games, the idea of being a digital tourist. You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn't feel like you'd started it. Of course, you had started it, but that feeling, I think, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating, was, "I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist." - So there are these two concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them: one is systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games. And the systemic is from the environment perspective, which means that there are these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world. And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything. And when those two things combine, the feeling like you can do anything, and the feeling like there's a world that's full, that is also doing anything it wants, that creates this incredible feeling of, like, "This world is alive. - And I'm in it." - And I'm in it. - And it's the combination of those two things, I think, that is very powerful. And I think with GTA III, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my life personally, and I was very able to engage in it, probably for the first time professionally, actually away to do something. And we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content, and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven? So, as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting. - There's often been a tension through your work between an open world, that freedom, and the narrative... ...driven storytelling. And I think you've often, maybe always, gotten the balance right. So what is the value of each, and how do you get the balance right? - Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly, I think at various points, we debated or, you know, I'd have theoretical discussions in my own head with myself, or other people in the team would really push for less story, less story. You know, let the whole thing evolve organically. You know, have it all be procedural. Have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going, "Story can be, if done well, can be incredibly compelling, and it gives you some structure." So, I think... and something to do, and it helps you from a game design perspective unlock the features. It means we know the features, the big features 'cause they, you know, essentially when you put someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming. You know, playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience even than reading a movie, you know, reading a book or watching a movie. You've got to engage in it properly. So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there's an art and a skill to that. And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process. And also just, you know, people are looking in their lives for story. I think story's very important and very powerful, and when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But it is a... You know, there is a tension always there. I think in a game like GTA IV, which I worked on and loved and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story, and that meant you cared too much about Niko, and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world. I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead II, or when playing as Trevor in GTA V if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked, the character, absolute freedom, 'cause also you didn't want... In any game, you don't really want to compel the player. If you're giving them freedom, you don't want to say, "Well, I'm giving you freedom, but then I'm taking it away 'cause you've got to be this kind of person when you're free." So I liked it when it could be... He could, you know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think that's when it was at the strongest. So you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides. - But you felt that character's personality. - You felt the depth. You've actually talked about this... the really powerful concept of creating a 360-degree character. I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation. ... which is a really interesting philosophical concept. I started to immediately think of that, can I imagine... How good of an NPC am I? Can I imagine myself in every possible I tried to do that very much when I, when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War II within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side, just I imagine myself if I was a soldier. - But that exercise, like if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II, what would he do? - No, I mean, that may be going a little bit too far. But basically, what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits? of how romantic is he? How narcissistic? All those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kind of 360 character? How hard is it? - It was a lot of thinking. Sometimes a year from when we begin talking about a project and dialing it. I would just get some initial ideas, like one sentence. They are a Serbian immigrant, or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife in, you know, type. Very simple stuff. And then just start to think through it from every angle. And you know, start to think, "Would it work if they acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world?" Because I always thought the games were a kind of mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist. And when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. It's almost always at least one or more of the protagonists, cause obviously in GTA5 we had more than one. We'd have someone who'd moved to the place or was in a new part of the place, or moved to a new part of the map, cause it was really, as a player, I think it was really easy, much more easy, to identify with your avatar when they, like you, were a fish out of water. And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water themselves. So I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, "What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How are they like me? How are they not like me?" You know, and then and slowly, what is it like to feel like a human being? You know, and then in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities? What is going to give them humanity alongside that? What are they, what are they, what for them apart from money is worth dying for? And then you start to build it out from these fundamental sides. And suddenly you go, "Okay, actually I can start to feel..." And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally it doesn't really matter what's going on in their head. They haven't actually got one, but what they say is what's going to make you realize who they are. - So develop more depth and complexity on the good and evil side of that human that is a part of all of all human beings. So you're basically living with that character. Then if we can contrast what is it, Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system, Nigel Dave, you've been working on recently. As part of A Better Paradise World, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep. - I hope so. - But the AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, is named Nigel Dave. And it has, I mean, at least from my current experience with it, it has a conflicting nature. Maybe it's psychopathic; I haven't quite figured that out yet. - I don't think he's decided. - Yeah, I don't think he's decided either, but he seems to be bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity and it seems that the "children," quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. And actually, there's a really interesting idea there which is maybe it's not the AGI, ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it; it's conflicted, it's chaotic, it wants to be human, it wants to be loved, maybe it wants to love. But the children, the monsters it creates, are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paper clips. Anyway, that's a character and you have to build that up, you have to think through that. So you've been living with that one for a while? - Yeah, I've been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one note, and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of Borg-like fog. And I thought, "That's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting." AI is being built by humans, and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers, and there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other. So, Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself, they wanted to call him something sort of Primal Adam, and he renamed himself Nigel Dave 'cause one dad was called Nigel, and one dad was called Dave. And he's just riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his, it's gonna become clear in the next, or clearer in the next volume of the book and and in the game, he's riddled with his dad's previous careers. But he is, I, with the idea of he's almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything, but has zero wisdom. And so the only thing he knows, and then he's seeing the world through the internet. The most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch them, but he's stuck, pressed against. He can't actually get into our world. So he's, he can control people's minds arguably, but he can't control the world. And so he wants to be human, he wants to have these human experiences. He sees all this stuff on, you know, the internet, goes, "Oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to..." 'Cause that seems fun. "I want to have..." You know, he's a digital creation, so he wants to have metaphysical experiences, and he's trying to imagine what that will be like. "Oh, that's what children are." You know, "That's what love is." And he's... So I think he's So I think he might be a sociopath, and he certainly has sociopathic tendencies. But then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there's something sympathetic about him. And I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist. He's more of a side character. - But an ever-present one. - Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally, he sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention. - Yeah, but there are some characters that really create a flavor of a world. - In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital, large-scale, massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build. And so he's almost like God in his world. He's not quite God, but he's got a lot of the qualities of God. So he has to deal with, "Am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?" - And of course, there's the leader of the, the CEO of the company, that's also a character. That's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. His name is Mark Tyburn. And Kurt, one of the employees... of the company talks about Tyburn as, "He hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that. All those people who want to build their own utopia. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of Earth." Do you think that's always going to be the case for the most part, that power and money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI? - Yes. I mean, I think there are two processes. I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end, as well, but I also think that there's something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias, or paradises, or heavens. 'Cause what they're saying is, "I like humans apart from the bad bits." And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there's a side where people are just hideous perfectionists, want to get rid of the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. And that's a huge side of us. So I worry about those people. I find them, you know, it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior. - "I like humans apart from the bad bits." That's so beautifully put. Yeah, that there's... It's so counterintuitive, but the people that say, "We're almost there, we just need to... There's this path we take and we'll be perfect then" and that somehow gets us into trouble. It's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits, we have to love the bad bits about humans. Those bugs are features. - Yeah, and there's bad bits and there's flaws. And I think we're all flawed, and we can really try to be better people. But we still have to accept that we're flawed and we're not perfect, and we have to accept that in other people. And I think when we do that, we're more human, and that's probably usually the right course. - I mean, it really is a return to that Solzhenitsyn line of, "The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man." And he also, like, the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves from day to day, from month to month throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better. And as the perspectives shift, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding. And as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection. So yeah, it's a beautiful mess, and all of us have that line. - Yes, and I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. When you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil, and there's certainly good. And that all we can try to do is be better. - And it's funny, that Naiyo Dave, by the way, I like the name. It grew on me very quickly. Has that line and is struggling with it. And it's fascinating to watch. It's really, as a character and there's also going to be a video game of A Bitter Paradise, potentially? - Okay. - Yeah, we've got that in early development in Santa Monica. - Oh, nice. - And it's pretty fun. It's very early, but we assembled a really fun team, and they're doing amazing work. So it's a pleasure to work with them. - I mean, it would be so great and I suppose new for you because it's kind of near-term future. - Yes. First, I always... Well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space. But only if I could do it... I was like, "Well, what is sci-fi?" It's science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I've always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis. The story was Blade Runner, is my favorite, and that's obvious, you know, the replicants are better than the humans. And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis. The AI is more intelligent than us, but he's also as broken as we are. That was an interesting hypothesis to explore. You know, what happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world? That was the... I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring, and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell. - And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and smarter AIs. It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It's a real commentary as the thing is happening. So I have to ask, as a person who loves literature, and one of the, if not the greatest writer in video game history. Kurt, in the book- of Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful: "At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that? A writer. Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others. So instead, I decided to get a master's in marketing and started to sell language models." So you, as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives, - Thank you - in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human? - I'm not that afraid of them for large-scale concepts. I don't think they're going to be very good at that. I think if you were... I think it's harder if... I began and I was too shy to tell anyone I wanted to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away, like writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job and I'd just write the website copy. And then by working your little bits and pieces. And then, you know, I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA III turned up, it was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of the small bits of skills that I could assemble into it. Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, they're not going to replace good ideas. They can't really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low-level stuff. So I think it's going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you're not a very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you're fine. But I think, I also think that they've done the first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work. I think that last bit with tech, in my experience with things like facial animation, it's always been the last bits and pieces that take far longer than the first bit. And so I'm probably a hideous Luddite, but I'm less scared than a lot of people. I think you're going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same. It's going to help people be creative in some ways. It's going to get some people who probably shouldn't be in that space out of that space. But if you've got talent, I think it'll be fine. - Yeah, I agree with you totally, actually. And it's hard to really put a finger on it. So, one way to illustrate that, I speak English and Russian, and I'm reading Dostoevsky in both languages and using LLMs to translate back and forth because I was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky. - Which ones? - Uh, Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky. - Yeah. I read it when they first did Crime and Punishment. That was amazing. - They're wonderful translators, and a wonderful love story too. But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic. And that couple of translators are world-class experts at capturing the magic. And I can't quite put that into words. Because you said, like, totally novel ideas, yes. But also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time, - Yeah. The phrasing. - captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90%, like you mentioned, human-like phrasing about the bulk of the storytelling. But the magic, you know, whether it's the endings of Red Dead Redemption one and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that. But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions. But what is that magic? And again, that could be just a romantic human side of me saying that LLMs won't be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope. - I don't think they're going to come up with magic. I think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff. - I have to ask you about your writing process. We can break it up. On Grand Theft Auto- GTA IV is when it really started ramping up. How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series? How many words are we talking about? I saw thousands of pages. - I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA IV, it was about this high. And GTA V, it was about that high. But that was including all the pedestrians who had pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world. Because you interact with each one of them. But even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long. - What was the writing process like on that, to generate one page at a time? - Bit by bit, by bit, over several years. But you start with once people are determined, "Oh, here's the, here's the world. We're doing one based on a version of New York," so GTA IV. And, um, I was living in New York, had been living in New York for a few years. Wasn't sure if I was happy. I was going through a lot of personal dramas, as usual. And that was why I was looking at some of GTA IV again recently, and it's really dark. And I was like, "Ah, that's why." You know, I was a single and miserable, and I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in America. My life was in a lot of flux. As a company, we'd had all that Hot Coffee drama, so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that. You know, a lot of drama in the company, so it felt like, having had this run of success and, and relative personal stability from GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, suddenly 2005, '6, '7, early '7, life felt very unsure. Um, and that kind of bled into it. But in terms of the process, it was... trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience that I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2008 when the game came out. And then tell it, sorry, from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it, made it interesting. And then this sort of journey around these various New York characters. So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off, and, you know, wandering around New York and driving around, and, you know, on and off. While, just go out for the morning from the office, normal stuff. But doing that through 2005, assembling little notes. "Here's a funny character for this, here's how..." Figuring out the order we want to travel around the map in. Characters of this, what was an interesting take on, on, on the, you know, mob for that kind of time period. What was an interesting take on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period. And assembling lots of notes and more and more notes, and really, really, really running away from the work. Which is, you know, I have to admit, it's part of my process, if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work. Thinking about it, but not working. You know, a lot of time... And then, and then it all kind of... Pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work. Months and months of this. And then finally set myself a deadline, told all the other people, on the senior people on the team, "Okay, I have a story draft due Monday morning." I can't even remember what I'll say, February the 1st. And then the, the weekend before was in a cabin we had upstate, and just stayed up all night, knocking these notes into shape. Assemble about probably a 30-page document, so story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters. And then hand that over, and that gets broken, that would get broken down with me, with me and the designers. And I was always clear, "I'm not a game designer, I'm a sort of creative director." We need to break that down into missions. And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling. And then begin... But then it's a... But the bulk of my work's then done for a bit, so I can relax and, and offer opinions on other people's work and feel... be lazy for a bit. And then start to worry, 'cause then I've actually soon got to start writing dialogue. And for GTA IV in particular, it's like, "We're going to try and write..." You know, our animation's going to Our animation is going to be a lot better. Our character models are going to start to look better. The world is going to look amazing. Therefore, we can support longer scenes. We can have more in-depth characters. But we have to find a tone that works with the game. It's not easy, no problem. Then I start to worry and worry and worry. And also, writing as a Serbian immigrant. I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian. And trying to capture what on Earth that would feel like. Just start to worry, you start to worry again. Avoid work for as long as possible. And then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night. Hammering away at a keyboard and going, "Does that right? Is that...?" Once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. So it was like writing with Niko, and he's this kind of awkward, he's out of town, but he's got more self-assurance in some way than the American characters. Once I kind of talked him through it like this, he just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness. And he's that... Then he started to come to life. Then I would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more Americanized energy, and that felt like it was a good double act. And then from there it starts to come to life. But it's written in small chunks for the motion cap... So then we'd motion capture small chunks. And then the other writers write the mission dialogue for small chunks. And we'd slowly assemble the game, 10, 15 missions at a time, over the next year and a half. - Do you remember a few lines that brought Niko to life? - Yeah, I think so. It was a couple of... his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car, and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle. And his cousin's... It was so... which was a kind of comic moment. His cousin's... And then they go to the cousin's flat. And the cousin also, even though he was a sort of failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences, and how harrowing they were. I was like, "Yeah, can I make this work in a game?" It's very different from stuff you normally see in games. Is it going to feel ridiculous? And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much. It might feel over the top. I think, you know, the game's so pretty. The artists are doing such an amazing job. The game's looking... I think we can get away with this. Let's try it. And then they motion capture the animation. Then after that, it's like, "Yeah, it kind of works." I think that moment... those were both pretty early. Once we had those, we went, "Okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy with this character. Now it's working." You remember, "During the war, we did some bad things, and bad things happened to us." "War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry." "Maybe that is no excuse." - Yeah, he escaped. He's a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence. - Yes, he can never escape his sort of violent past or... I don't know if he can never escape it. He never does escape it. You know, whether he's got agency or not is a whole another question. Of course he doesn't, because he's a character in a video game. But, you know, whether he ever could have escaped it another way, who knows? - I think he's probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series. Of all the characters you've written in Grand Theft Auto, would Niko be the best character you created? - I think he's the most innovative. And the most morally defensible in some ways. You know, he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for what's right. He's the nicest person in some ways. Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he's the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways. He's also tough, like he just comes across as tough. I loved CJ in San Andreas. I thought Melee did such... Just the way he spoke gave him such humanity. So I just loved... It wasn't the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting, it was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael, he was so understated, but he loved the character, but he brought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a... you know, he has no principles. He sells everyone out. I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn't necessarily get as many plaudits as Steven Ogg for Trevor, who was also wonderful. But I think the Ned Luke character sort of anchors that game so much. So I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Niko the most. - And of course, Michael's from Grand Theft Auto V. And he's one of three protagonists with also Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V when the three characters come together. Can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto V? Is there some degree... I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but... - A little bit. - Is there some aspect of the three protagonists, sort of, you know, Brothers Karamazov, ...Alyosha, Dmitry, and Ivan, sort of, using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature and... - Yes, sure. - ...just the tension between them that allows you the, the, the three of them become a character in themselves. - Their relationship. - is more... Yeah, it was, it was, I think one of the reasons that, that the team did such... That Grand Theft Auto is still so popular is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was. It was a crime, it was a crime drama, you know, began as a crime, a crime sim in GTA 1 about stealing, you know, 2D top-down cars. And we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And I think having done, you know, GTA IV, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character, and then these two extra stories that came afterwards. So the challenge, the, the, the challenge was, can we combine... Can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists? And the technical challenge of moving from character to character. The team did such an amazing job that I don't think people realized how hard it was. But we would sit there just sort of holding our heads 'cause they hurt so much around like, what happens if you do this, then do that? It's just, this is so hard. Why have we, why have we decided to do this? It's horrible. And then it all came together. But I think the idea was to develop three characters who do feel like characters. They don't just feel like philosophical, you know, psychological avatars. But where one is really, really driven by ego, one is really driven by id, and one is really driven by trying to get ahead. So some kind of representation of the super-ego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other. - 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's 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. You know, 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 were like... We thought GTA III could be really popular. Really popular to us meant, quite honestly, it's gonna sell two or three million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative. I mean, 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 sort of medium of building fake worlds further. And that was always... You know, there was a, it was, you know, 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 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 question, 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. - I think finishing it is certainly... It's tough, but it also is intensely rewarding. And you get something done, and you've made something. And that feeling is, as you say, really, really incredible. I mean, it can sometimes feel a bit empty as well because it's... when you're finished, you're like, "Then my life's got nothing to it," and then you have to... You know, but that's the same with any big undertaking that you take. I don't think there are... You know, when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work/life balance. But the truth is, you're not working that hard all of the time. So you just have to manage it slightly differently. - Man, that's such 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?" What, 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... 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 just if I can be... 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, or if I didn't want to go insane, I couldn't sit there and worry about financial results. 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 sort of 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 had 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. 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. 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 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. I think with Red Dead 2, 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, you know, it's not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure. But, you know, anything, doing something new, you know, the new stuff, there's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book in the same way, because it's not taken as long, but, you know, if you're making things, there's always pressure that people are going to like it. - Because they don't come out that regularly. And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different, you know, people have very strong feelings: "I like this one. I didn't like that one as much," because they are pretty different. So you would... there would be simultaneously where you know what's going to happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, you know, it's going to be a game about being a criminal, but the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. So I think the way the IP kept evolving made people really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well. We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing, where you really felt like you're already in the product just because you'd seen the trailers and stuff. - You've mentioned that you haven't written for Grand Theft Auto VI. What's it feel like Grand Theft Auto VI returning to Vice City? This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the '80s. So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit? - Scarface, Miami Vice. - Miami Vice. - and our '80s childhoods. You know what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game and it was set I think in '86. And it... We made it in 2002, so 16 years after. And now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So the '80s were not that long ago when we made it. - You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world. Especially if you're thinking about satirizing American culture, it has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld. It has the influencers, the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super rich people, and the desperately poor, just the whole of it. Would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of characters that are possible, that human nature can generate? - I think it's one of them. You know, there's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles. I think they're all very good for exactly what you laid out. You know, you could move it to any of those and it would work, you know? - So yeah, there's a melting pot... - Melt... - ...aspect in New York also, right? - Yeah, a melting aspect to LA. You know, there's glitz, glamour, underbelly, immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them. I think those are what, I think, are really fun for any, not even just the GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book. You know, this big slice of life. He did it with London. You know, this psychotic version of these, you know, all kinds of characters in a melting pot. Any of these global cities work well for that. - Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere, to like a London? - We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top-down for the PS1. That was pretty cute and fun. As the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider's perspective. But that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really have worked in the same way elsewhere. - So you've created, I don't know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games. - I think so. - I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say, to not be a part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world? And having to watch Grand Theft Auto VI be released? Or is it more excitement? What's the feeling? - I think it's a, it's... How would I describe it? Of course, it's all, all of the above, you know, it's exactly as you, you know, pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now, super excited of course, letting go of something I worked on in one way or another for like 20 odd years. You know, and wrote on them for the last 10 or 11 that came out. Wrote all of them, or you know, lead writer on all of them, whatever it was. So of course, letting go of that is, you know, is a big, is a big change. And a lot, and, and, and sad in a way, because each of the games was a kind of standalone story. It's not quite the same as, as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead, because it was a cohesive two-game arc. That might be more sad to hear someone working on that. But again, not, and that, that will probably happen too. I don't own the IP. That was sort of part of the, the deal. It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it. - When you're done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like when you're done with Red Dead 2, is it like you're saying goodbye to Arthur? The characters you created, you're walking away. - You kind of are saying goodbye to Arthur in the end of the game. - Even before the end of the game. Um, yeah, I think you've got, you know, I've been with them for seven, eight years, and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one. - So, there's always this thing of, of, "Okay, that's done." And sometimes people would ask me questions and I, about older games. And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in the se- I just couldn't really necessarily even remember. And I got a pretty good memory normally, because you kind of have to let it go. So, it's not, it's, you're so immersed in it and thinking about it. And certainly in that last period, the last few months, you're really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time. And then you're just not thinking about it in the same way. - Yeah. It's funny from the player perspective, it feels like an old friend that I miss, whether it's John or Arthur or Nico, it's a real goodbye. That's the, there's a real sadness to finishing a video game. Like- - I hope so - ...legitimately- not just because the story is sad or- - Because you've been with them so long. - Yeah. And it's a real goodbye to close it. There's that feeling when you're sort of closed the video game, and it's, I mean, it's like saying goodbye to a friend. And it's- - That's when you finish a book you love. - It's the same feeling. - Same feeling. - And I think that was something that we really, in the early... ...days of Rockstar, really aspired to have that, where people would... ...have that. It wasn't just the mania of clearing a level, but the... ...feeling of saying goodbye to characters. You know, I think that was something we... really ...wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible. So, to hear people... say that is incredibly rewarding. - Yeah. The end of On The Road by Kerouac: "Forlorn rags of growing... ...old." I just remember closing that and thinking, "What the fuck am I doing in this big... ...world?" It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling, and you've... ...achieved that. It's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red... ...Dead, and for me, it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Nico. I have to ask, in the 2018 interview, you talked about... ...satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to... ...do. And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that... ...on the political front, people are getting more divided. It's... ...getting more absurd and ridiculous and... ...extreme, so becoming harder and harder to satirize because... ...of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous. You're talking about you don't even know if... ...Grand Theft Auto VI, if it's possible to satirize, because by the time you release the thing, it's already going to be outdated in terms of the satire will become reality... First of all, it'd be nice to get your updated view on that. And second of all, it seems like you've answered your very own comment with American Caper, which... ...seems to satirize American culture just fine in how much over the... ...top it goes. Anyway, that's lots of questions in there. - One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are, it... still has lead times. But the lead times are not four or five years. The lead times are, you know, a year when we're putting... We can... ...make little updates much, much newer. And we're, you know, we're just wrapping issue 10 of a... ...12-issue arc for that. So it's... ...not quite... It's not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it. Um, but yeah, I think it's, I think it's an issue anyone trying to talk about this... ...current era, which began in 2015, 2016, is going to have of how do you... ...characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast? - So American Caper is, first of all, epic comic book. I love it, the art. - Yeah, the art's beautiful. David Lapham is the artist. He did an amazing job. He is a... He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller. - What made you want to set it in Wyoming? - I hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about. I'd started... ...to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West, and I was... ...like... I'd spent a lot of time in, like, the countryside in Upstate... New York, and thought I never really captured it quite right. And just the... ...idea of these places as they change didn't... It was a way of doing a... ...crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA. You know, it was not... ...somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and... under-explored. - And there is over-the-top stuff. There's... - Yeah, it's definitely slightly over the top. - So let me take notes on this. There's a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe. There's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement. - He is not necessarily the... Sharpest tool in the box. And his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates. - And of course, there's this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation, and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil. So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy. - Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean... - These are the notes I've been taking. - Yes. He is a, um... he is a somewhat confused, longevity obsessed... - Right. - rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies. - And bull semen is a big component of longevity. - Yes. He's very into all the life hacking, you know, "roiding" roiding HGH and making money. - And, uh... - has lost his mind living on a big ranch. - Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC. - Yes. Based on someone I know, who got completely red-pilled. And I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people. - Yeah, so, you know, satire of American culture. Quick pause. Bathroom break? - I think GTA V had the biggest launch in video game history, and GTA VI has the potential to top that. First of all, do you think it will? And more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game? - I would assume it will because it's so anticipated, and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA IV versus Red Dead Redemption One. You know, GTA IV far more anticipated, sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you're... you're spending someone's money. So the number one success is, "Are you making that money back plus a dollar?" At some level, that has to be... that has to be the single most important. thing so you get to do it again. You know, you've got big teams of people. People need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business, so you have to make a small profit. If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative. I think that was like... Trying to forget about that, it's not really an option. Um, but we almost always did that. We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that. I think the definition of success for me was had we tried to do new things and done them, or achieved some of our goals. That was the thing that I meant... Again, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to? - Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars, when if you look at, like, the '80s and '90s, you know, nobody took video games seriously. And even in the aughts, it... And now they're basically... I mean, it's very possible if you look out 10, 20 years from now that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories. - I think they've possibly already done that in some ways. And certainly as a business proposition, they've already done that. But I think that's not... You know, as a way of telling stories, I think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories, and films are better at other kinds of stories. You know, I think, I think if you want a long, discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better. We always felt games were the coming medium. And so spent 20 years saying, "Games are the future. Games are the future." And, you know, being sneered at, then being laughed at, then having people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening. So I would... Well, you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don't necessarily believe it's gonna be true. But it has become true, and I think still that games are only gonna get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse. 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 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 technical know-how, a very, very strong team, and really strong material. very, very strong team, and really strong material. - Where did you have to go in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the RDR world? Of course, it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's— - —that's a fundamentally different. I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption one. And then even more so, Red Dead Redemption two. That was unlike anything you, or maybe anyone, has ever created in video games. - So, like, what drugs were involved? - No drugs. - No. Stopped the drugs long before. - That's why I did all that work. Had nothing else to do. So yeah, open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way. Kept me busy. But Red, so Red— Dead, I'll tell, I'll give you my version. Now the games are made by big teams. So, but I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. We made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver that had been a Capcom game. And they didn't want to finish it, so we finished it. And they released it in Japan and we released it in the US in, I think, 2004. And decided we would start work on an open-world cowboy game for PS3. Didn't think too much more about it, and that was when we did a bunch of other stuff to work on. And slowly, 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life. I began to meet with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game, and began to think about some stuff. And start thinking about, well, what works for an open-world game? What works for a cowboy game? And again, I was being lazy or procrastinating. - Can we just on a small tangent, when you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy. What do those notes look like? Are they like doodles? - They look like either a yellow pad— —or a BlackBerry in those days, or an iPhone in these days. I'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note. Here's a good idea. Here's a good idea. Or it might almost be scribbling on a pad. And then I'll assemble, if they're done digitally, then I'll do, I'll assemble them into one long Word file. And then I'll look at them and go, you know, "Here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea." See if it comes to anything. See if I now aggregate them together and then read through them. If there's anything coherent there. You know, something about a character like this, or that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character. Actually make the main character work like this. You know, what about this relationship? As you start to just play around with, "What about if we start in that place, go to that place?" Start just to play around with all of the different bits and pieces. And we began to flesh out some flow for the start of the game. And this idea you'd start in dusty American West, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees, and then go to Mexico, and then come back. And we had a sort of loose flow. And I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue. And I didn't have a clue how to go about it. And I kept... It'll come, it'll come. And I kept... because I could postpone it for ages because we were doing GTA IV. And I kept worrying about it. My work was wrapped on GTA IV, but the game wasn't out yet. And we'd done a bunch of the marketing stuff, and had a little window when I wasn't doing much else. And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child, and we went up to a house upstate and sat there. Well, she, she, she sat there, either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I just went and sat in the room all day, every day. And just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about, "How can I do this so that it doesn't sound ridiculous?" How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have, and think we can get away with? And after about three days, it just started to come. And then suddenly I wrote about nine, 10 scenes in the next couple of days. And after that, I knew I had it. And it was a bit... I don't know if that's why there was so much about a character caring about his family, because I was just beginning the process of having a family. - Oh. - So I don't know if that- I don't know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent. - So that was part of creating the 360-degree characters. - Here's this man that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence, who also cares about his family. - He's grown up and he's trying to step away from that and be a man, be a grown-up. And can he get away from it? And when he can't get away from it, what's he willing to do to save his family? And that was, I felt, starting to get some idea. I mean, she, well, She hadn't given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of, "I'm gonna become a parent." So I hope some of that... And obviously,…

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