Episode highlight

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.

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.

From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love? I mean, film... No, films.

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? You know, 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

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 it? 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, incredibly compelling, and it gives you some structure, and something to do, and it helps you from a game design perspective unlock the features."

You felt the depth. You've actually talked about this 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... 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?

So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the 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 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.

...of A Bitter 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... 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 it's harder if... You know, 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, writing manuals and writing on 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 doing, and then work 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.

I have to ask you about your writing process. And we can break it, 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 some 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'd have 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.

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.

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 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...

Are there DLCs for RDR or GTA that you wish you had the time, when you were there, to have created? Of course. There are always things I wished I'd done. I always wished I'd done more.

You left Rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched Absurd Ventures as we've been talking about. What do you miss about your time at Rockstar? Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them? Of course, it was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20 something years, 21 years or something. It was and I moved to America to do it, and grew up doing it. And I was always living in, in New York. It was a, at times, very intense and at other times magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

In the best possible way, yeah. Outside of the games you've participated in and created, what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time? Tetris.

A difficult topic, you dedicated the book to your mom and dad. And in particular, you wrote, "To my father, who died while I was finishing the book." What have you learned about life from your dad? To show up. To be present. To go to work every day. To love creative things. You know, he was a lawyer, but he was also a jazz musician, and he did both to the best of his abilities. To value family as more important than either of those things. You know, he was a present guy, I think. And, you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved films, loved music. He wasn't into video games but liked that we were doing weird things.

How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally, yourself afraid of death? Well, my father passed away in May, so a lot more since then, obviously. I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it? I don't know. Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly grow up and settled, of course, for them. Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all, and other days I feel like a random piece of good luck who's gonna get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness, and that terrifies me. I just...

What advice would you give to a young person today about, let's say, career? How to have a career they can be proud of, how they can have a life to be proud of? You've had a non-standard life. I've had a lucky life in which I have fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.

Are you excited for the future of video games? Yeah. I think we're... I, I... Completely. I still, I still look... I'm glad you've spoken so, I mean, you've spoken so kindly about our work, about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did. It's wonderful. But I just look at it and see problems. And see things that we can make do better. You know, I think it was always, try each time to do it better. And I've got, you know... Some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before. And then I think it's just... I think that games can get so much better. They can feel so much more alive. All the...