Rockstar co-founder and former lead writer Dan Houser thinks, in some ways, there’s “no greater compliment” than being compared to his best Grand Theft Auto games. At the same time, he hopes his new projects at Absurd Ventures can hold up on their own.
After leaving the famed open-world developer in 2020, Dan Houser opened his own studio called Absurd Ventures that’s now working on a number of multimedia projects, alongside a couple of games – at least one of which is another open-world romp. But the shadow of GTA still follows him.
“In terms of will I always be compared to it? I don’t know,” Houser says in an interview with Variety. “I mean, hopefully, on some level there could be no greater compliment. On another level, I hope some of the stuff we make is going to be successful in its own right. It’s no problem to have made good things, but of course, if you make good things, if the new stuff’s not as impactful, that’s going to be disappointing in some ways. But it’s still a privilege to make anything, otherwise you’re just always drowning in your own previous creative work.”
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Despite the comparisons, Houser thinks his job is to “make things I’m proud of” rather than making things that are successful, which is probably the healthier way of thinking about a post-GTA career.
Still, working on maybe the biggest video game franchise of all wasn’t a stress-free experience, either. “Certainly, there was a lot of pressure making any GTA game when I was on them,” he explains. But he somewhat managed that pressure by developing games with “as much integrity as I can muster” and ultimately making something he can be proud of. “And does it feel fresh, new? And if that’s the case, let the results fall where they may. And certainly, even with games at Rockstar that were not successful, I was proud of them if we’d done what I thought was a good job. And so that’s going to be the same here. We can’t sit there going, ‘If it’s not the biggest thing ever, I’m a failure.’ Because then you’ve got to process either, I’m a failure, I’m a success — but it feels just the same. So the work is the creative work, not what the market thinks of it.”
