- 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.

- Yes.

- 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?

- Yes.

- 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.

- Yes.

- and movies.

- Yes.

- 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

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.

- 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.

- Yes.

- 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?

- Yes.

- 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.

- 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.

- Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?

- 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.

- Yeah.

- 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.

- Yeah.

- 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.

- Yeah.

- 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.

- Yes.

- Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean...

- Yes.

- 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?

- Sure.

- 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.

- 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 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—

- Yes

- —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.

- Thank you.

- So, like, what drugs were involved?

- No drugs.

- Okay.

- No. Stopped the drugs long before.

- Okay.

- 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.

- I think so.

- 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, then I didn't,

probably didn't write any more for six months. So later on we had a child. But certainly for that

first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.

- ...you got the feeling that you can actually do it. It's true, it's...

It could have very easily been ridiculous and

not believable, the dialogue between convoys.

- Yes.

- And, yes, I mean, there's probably so much work went into

making it feel real and believable. And, and, like, that...

Like a Shakespearean type of drama, but not the cheesy kind.

- Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke. I

mean, I, I, I love dialogue. I'm always, you know, I love the sound of

words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy,

it didn't sound ridiculous. You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn't make you

cringe awfully when they spoke. That was the... At some level that was all the goal

was, and then they felt like this guy was gonna go on this life and

death odyssey and you cared about him. You had to care about his wife and

child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them.

- When did you know how you were going to end Red Dead Redemption One?

- I remember I did a meeting with Christian, the

designer. I can't remember what year. Probably some point

late 2008, early 2009, and we were discussing the last bit and,

and, and said, "I think he's gotta die." And he

leapt on the idea and went, "That's... Yes, yes. No, no, wait, no, it can't work.

Games can't work like that. It can't work if he's dead." You know, began to think through,

well, if we... Just technically it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff

up, and then began to think through, "Actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this

way." And so he then really pushed for that idea,

and it seemed to... I was like, "Ah," and I was still torn. I thought it

was clever narratively but I was torn if it was gonna work

technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.

- Yeah, and spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the

story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. He does

all the... John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang and he

finally is able to go home and be with his family,

be on the ranch, and then the government betrays him and

sends troops to kill him. And there is dialogue. I mean, that just,

I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue.

I think John talking to his wife,

if I vaguely remember. I think he said, "I love you."

But he said very little. He didn't... He made it seem like he's going to see

her and his son shortly. That dialogue was

masterfully done, like a definition of like less is more. It was just so crisp, that

and... And, of course, the other one is again, from memory, Arthur riding

his horse and the music is playing. It's very hard not to shed

a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife

at the end when he's in a barn and is about to walk out.

to face certain death. Do you remember writing that?

- Oh, yeah. Yeah. But it just... Again, I went...

The actor was so good and we've already seen a bunch of his work by then.

He had such a good... He was so good at reading those lines that I knew he

could give us... that you could feel at that point, like-

…I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy. So I knew—

- Got it.

- I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

- So you were imagining his voice. You were just-

- And I think all of those actors on Red Dead

Redemption One were so strong that they really brought that game to life. If

them and Rod, the director, hadn't done such a good job, it would have

sounded cheesy as hell.

- You've said that the ending of RDR1 is one of the best things you've been a part of

creating. Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?

- I think because for the story to work, just from a technical

challenge, for the story to work, he had to

die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to

make him die. It was probably the

fourth, fifth, or sixth open-world game I'd worked on, and

I'd spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked.

How to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted

with the open-form gameplay as best I could.

And suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was, at the

end of the game, you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories, to play

forever. You're not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead, and we're going to have

you play as a different character, and the narrative is going to

be compelling enough, if we've done a good job, where you're not going to care about that.

Or you're going to be upset that he's dead, but you can actually have this

emotional moment.

So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that, and then

it worked. So I think that was something that was very…

full of fear, and it worked out okay.

And I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because they didn't think it was going to happen, but

I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, which is that kind of creative

moment where, you know, a transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is

what we've always aspired to giving people.

- I mean, it's incredible because I don't think… I don't remember a single video game that has

done that before.

- Well, I would like to have, at the end of GTA IV, killed Niko, but you couldn't do

it. You know, the game doesn't work like that. So it was this thing where we

hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it, and then going, "Let's

do it. Let's take the risk and do it. We can't do it. Let's try." And it worked.

- Yeah, what about the decision with the son? You know,

John gives so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn't end up

in a life of violence. I mean, it's very Godfather-like. It's—

…he's dragged back into it through revenge.

- That was also, the game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right

ending, 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know.

But I know that we had to make the game work.

- Oh, interesting.

- So it was... I think it kind of worked in that way where Jack can't

escape, but I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did

escape, but that wasn't... Both were interesting to me.

- Can you just dig in a little deeper? What do you mean about for the game to work?

It's such a direct... It's like Kubrick talking about for this movie to work,

it has to have... From my perspective, I just think about the story. What's the technical

aspect for the game to work?

- It's just the mechanical experience is you have an

avatar you control, and you know, the games don't really end.

You have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff.

So at the end of the game, you have to be able to wander around with your

fairly limited set of

features, which is you can run up to someone and punch them or shoot them or

rob them, or talk to them. And that's

kind of... or jump on a horse or do all this other

stuff. In order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full

360-degree experience with it, they had to, if they

wanted to 100% the game as opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an

avatar to do that stuff with. So that was the sort of challenge of Jack's

character, wrapping up the story as Jack.

- Oh, there's real power for the avatar to end, the finiteness.

- Yeah. Both the Red Deads, you obviously change avatars.

Which we did, and then did it again. I think there's something interesting about that

moment when you change from one character to another, because they are you and they're not

you, you know, and then suddenly you're someone else.

- Mm-hmm. I mean, I was really shaken by that

experience, but it's a beautiful experience. It's like an unforgettable

experience. What else can video games possibly reach

for? You know, to create that experience,

that's what great films do, that's what great, great books do.

- It's that. I mean, it's that and the world building in games. I think the experience of being in this

fake place and then taking on these narrative

adventures, when that combines, you've got the amazing experience.

- So who do you think is the best character you've ever created in RDR?

So to me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption

2 is the best character ever created in video games ever.

- Thank you.

- I think there's not even close. I mean, John will be the se-, which is hilarious

to say, but those are... John will

be a close second, but Arthur is definitively. And you've talked about in that

interview, you said that a lot of video games

work on the same premise, that you start as a weak person and

end up as a strong superhero. But what if you start as a

tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that's

emotionally confident of his place in the world? Arthur's journey is not about

becoming a superhero because he's almost one at the start, but

it's about an intellectual rollercoaster when his worldview gets

taken apart. So it's very different than the normal journey of a character.

- Yeah, in a game...

- In a game

- ... in order to reverse it.

So there were a couple other themes that matched that. So they're guys from the Wild

West, but they're being pushed ever further east.

So it's almost like an anti-Western.

An Eastern. You're traveling east. You're traveling into civilization. And I

don't think I would've been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career,

'cause it was so, you know, this idea of getting a different kind of

strength and different kind of weakness was interesting.

- What about the component of mortality, of a character facing his own mortality over a

prolonged period? Sort of just the, the, the, the

prospect of like, real sort of fear of death, realization of death.

- Yeah. I thought that was really-

- as part of the story.

- really a fun thing to play with. John dies in Red Dead 1,

I wanted to top that with Red Dead 2, or do that in a

different way. And so the idea that John's death is fairly sudden, and

so if he's got this long, drawn-out death, then I'd always

been obsessed by TB. As diseases go, it's a great literary device.

You know, 'cause it is this long, drawn-out, slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker.

And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented

antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he

was... just after he'd had his child, my father,

and survived, but only three of them out of like 35 survived. So I was always,

captivated by TB as an illness. It

felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with

as an idea, this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal

and essentially was immortal. He was the protagonist in a video game, he could not die, and

suddenly he is becoming mortal. You know, but that

helps him see stuff. I thought that was a different way of doing a lead

character in a game.

- Yeah. Do you think it's the greatest character you've ever created?

- I think he's the best

lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters,

and I think he's the most rounded and works the best. I kind of...

Him and Nico are the two I like, you know. They were the two most ambitious.

So for me, it's always sort of a toss-up, you know? But then I

loved all the stuff, like the art team did such an

amazing job. It was their idea with the journal and that kind of...

The way that all the features worked into Arthur's character, I thought that

was really... He was really rounded, he worked in lots of different ways really well.

I loved his flawed relationship with his old

girlfriend, things like that. All the side... You know, the bits that turned up around

him.

- So you also like the side characters. You like the flavor

- Yeah, of course.

- of the full cast. What are some of the favorites you've created?

I'm sure the one you're currently working on-

Nigel, that's a... You called him a side character.

- Well, he's not a protagonist. He's like a god, not a character.

So he's not... Him, I'm enjoying. I love Dutch.

You know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him

for the first game, and the actor did such a

such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me

all of their backstory, which I'd been playing around with by that point anyway a little bit in my

head. But I knew it was his bigger gangster from then. I sort of saw exactly who he

was. And so that was... That felt like... He felt like a living character to me.

- And we should say that Dutch is kind of like, maybe a little bit of a godlike figure-

in both of the Red Dead Redemption games. He's the leader of the gang.

And there's a father-son relationship with Dutch, with, uh,

I mean, with Arthur, with John. There's a family feeling to the

gang. They explore all of those dynamics, and then the feeling of

betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis.

You're going against the family, going against the father-

because he is transforming his sense of the

world, of morality, of all those kinds of things. So all the kind of very

Shakespearean drama is right there. And Dutch is

a prominent godlike figure through all of that. Also

flawed himself. Also a man of good and evil in that,

framework that they're operating under.

- And he's just drowning in his ego at the end.

You know, his ego gets the better of him. I think he's a... But there was

something flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger, and that's

mostly off-camera. And then just so you know, always been

as an individual, I've always been very susceptible to charming people.

And he's charming. So I was kind of... I can see how people get captivated.

by charming people. And the idea here was a very charming person,

and the road's run out for him.

- I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings,

and how susceptible I am to charm and charisma.

'Cause it can cloud your judgment about human nature.

- Completely. And that's what's happened with him. And it ended up

clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.

- Yeah, but also it clouded Arthur's judgment.

- Oh, completely. Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in

love with him. He was worshiping him. He'd given up his power to him. And then I think for

Arthur, the journey is retaking that

power in the moment of dying. You know, and that's what the whole... that's why

I thought that was really interesting.

- Yeah, it's truly tragic for Arthur to be

losing his identity, lifelong identity, and

sense of belonging, and losing his life at the same

time. In facing mortality, he is realizing that he's not all of it has been a lie.

- But he gets to do some... Well, it depends on what choices you make.

But he gets to do some good. And so he gets his moment of redemption.

- Just a little bit. But realizing...

your whole life you've been living not a good life. You've been not a good man.

- Isn't that what we're all afraid of?

- I guess it's never too late to change your ways.

- Hope not. I mean, that's...

- So, the biggest, most important, primary question, central to the

reason we're talking today, the number one question from the

Internet, it is so ridiculous, but I must ask. Have you seen Gavin?

Who is Gavin? So, for more context, there's a guy named Nigel in Red Dead

Redemption 2 who's frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin

throughout the game. This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst

the interwebs, the RDR fan base. So, the theories

include, theory one is it's a split personality disorder. Nigel

himself is Gavin. So, the evidence for this theory is the letter that has some

evidence that may be due to trauma, this split

personality disorder was created. This Gavin was created inside Nigel's

mind. Theory two is Gavin is dead, and Nigel's simply in denial.

Theory three is that it's

just a troll, and Rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery

to drive players crazy. I also heard theory four is

Gavin is the Strange Man. So, there's this

fascinating character, the Strange Man, this supernatural character that has a

presence in RDR1 and a little bit in RDR2 also. But yeah. So which theory

is closest to the truth?

- Not three or four. In my mind, somewhere

between one and two. I just loved the way he

shouted, "Gavin." It just amused me. So at some level, it

probably is trolling in that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery.

You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it.

but it was meant to be ... Without ever fully being

explained that Gavin's not there anymore. Gavin's either gone

home, Gavin's left him, Gavin's... And we were going to keep

exploring that idea. That he was going to reappear in some way or other.

- Did you have any idea how much imagination, excitement, and curiosity

that little interaction would inspire in people?

- Yes and no. You could never know what people are going to find amusing

in these big games, and a lot of it comes down to acting as well. The guy was just funny when

he said "Gavin." It was just funny.

You know? But there was a ped in Red Dead Redemption one that everyone was obsessed

by, and I really wasn't expecting that. So we try to put a few

characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing.

But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by. There are other characters

I think are funny, and people don't even notice them, you know, or they see them in a completely

different way.

- Did you have a part in writing the letter?

- Yeah. I can't remember if I wrote it or... Either I wrote it or Mike

wrote it, or we both wrote it. I really can't remember, to be honest with you. But yeah, I certainly would have edited

it, and Mike might have written it, or I might have written it. I really can't remember.

- It's so fascinating because that little piece of writing— of course, you have thousands of

pages-

- Yeah.

- ...but that little piece of writing gets analyzed.

- Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth, and if Mike was here,

I'd ask him. He might remember. I can't really... And we do so many of those things.

And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird

backstories. And some became very clear and some were still

a little kind of opaque. But I think the general vibe was there was no

Gavin. Either there was no Gavin or he'd long since left. So it's kind

of a split personality, you know, and then we were going to over subsequent

games provide more information.

- So in some sense, you yourself don't quite know. You kind of have

an idea, like which way do you lean more, theory

one or two? Is he dead, and Nigel's in

denial, or is there real communication going inside his head?

- No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality, and the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game

No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality, and the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game

were we going to reveal that Gavin was dead, or was Gavin going to turn up having

long since abandoned this maniac. That was what we were still playing around

with. I think the idea was that he was never going to meet... He was never going to meet

Gavin in this game.

- I mean, it's just fascinating because you have to think about all of that.

You have to write all of that. You have to have those discussions. You have to have those debates.

- And it has to feel fresh.

Like, what we've done before. Constantly looking as you do. You know, I

think I've done, you know, somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games. Got to do stuff

that's new. It can't repeat itself too much.

- I mean, we also live in the age of the internet. Just, like, you

realize there are millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.

- Thank God.

- It's like-

- It's great, yeah.

- It's fascinating that they're having... Is, think about people reading, like,

James Joyce or something and thinking about the character, like, breaking apart

Ulysses and thinking about, like, arguing about

different interpretations of it. And to me, that in itself is also beautiful.

- Yeah. We want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still

want these discussions.

- Yeah, the mystery.

- You know, and you want as long as it feels tonally appropriate for

this whole big sort of shaggy dog story experience you're

making. Which Gavin was just about, and he was so weird, and he just

was intrinsically... there was just something funny about an English person screaming,

"Gavin." I don't know why.

- Yeah. Some of that humor, there's... there's certain in Red Dead

Redemption there's humor, but there's a lot of it in Grand Theft Auto-

...and what... It's hard to put into words.

why that's funny, why it becomes a meme, why it becomes viral,

'cause it's just funny.

- Yeah, I know why I think it's funny, but you... what you can't... What I'm not good at doing at

least is going, "This thing will become really popular online and

this other thing won't." You can create this bunch of, you know, fifty different

side things that people might get captivated by, and you just do not know what

they're going to respond to.

- How do you know when something's funny? Is it... you just feel it?

- I know what I think is funny. It's, you know, it makes-

- You just Google it or you just-

- ...like just 'cause it's ridiculous as well.

That was just... There's nothing funny about a dude shouting, "Gavin," a lot.

He just said it in a funny way... I just thought it might be funny-

It was great... and he just said it in such a funny way-

...and then it just became funny. Like, we often have those side characters

and they're not that funny, and I think they're going to be hysterical, and then you put them in the

game, and they're fine, but they're not amazing.

That guy just brought that stuff to life.

- Yeah. And his backstory too. I mean, Londoner and not... yeah, that...

- Yeah, I think that was what... you know, just that it... there's something sometimes fun, you know, in...

an English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny. I don't know why.

- So, about the Strange Man, AKA, the Man in Black... Is there some

element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto V? Like, who is the Strange

Man?

- Well, the Strange Man was again... was, was, was

someone we came up with quickly. It... we made Red Dead 1,

and we... well, were making Red Dead 1, and

we'd made this... we felt quite compelling story and quite

interesting open world. But... and we'd already made a bunch of

Grand Theft Autos, obviously, but unfortunately, we'd taken out the machine guns 'cause it was

a cowboy game, apart from the big fixed position ones. And we'd taken out the

cars, and we'd taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians. So we

essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse...

...around the desert. And it was quite... and it was quite boring.

And so we then started filling it with content, and we filled it with these...

and having to improvise. And we filled it with these things we call random events that would be

these sort of motion-capture moments that you could interact with. And it...

they were, they were... the designers did an amazing job with those. They were really fun.

But there was not enough of them. And then we felt we needed more story 'cause the story was perhaps a

little short. So we kind of quite late in development

started putting in almost like these RPG-type content where you go and meet

someone. And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories. So you go and meet

someone, they'd set you a slow problem, like go and collect me 15

bunches of flowers. And when you came back, it would resolve your story.

And so then, you know, one would go, "Go get them for my bride," and you come back and the bride's dead.

You know, to... We tried to make them like these short stories with a sting in the

tail. And

he came out... as I was trying to come up with ideas for those, as just this

weird character. And then we built him a bit into the story,

where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a

commentary on what you were doing. So he was meant to be a kind of

manifestation of your,

you know, shadow, your karma, the devil, somewhere, you know, just

saw the world. And then we built out his backstory over time

and decided, you know... And so in Red Dead 2, you could interact with him again and...

or not really interact with him. But he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something I

suppose any creative is scared of, an artist who's kind of

sold his soul to the devil. And that slowly revealed itself.

- There is a connection between the main character and

the... Is it like a Jungian shadow type of situation?

- Well, it's sort of, because he knows what you're up to. The connection is...

what's never really made clear is, does he know this about everybody?

Like, is he following you, or is he able, because of the pact he's made

with evil forces, able to do this for everybody? I don't think we

necessarily ever clarify that. He's certainly able to do it for you.

- I mean, there's, sort of narrative-wise, there are techniques to reveal a kind of

self-reflection analysis of the main character's thoughts. That's why I

brought up the therapist with Michael. That was a really powerful,

interesting thing to do in a video game. Like, I, I

don't think I've seen... That's such a cool... I mean, there's a Sopranos element

there, with the therapist.

- A little bit, yeah.

- I really love an opportunity for a character to just

self-reflect through that technique.

- But it also changed depending on what you'd done.

- Yes.

- So it was, it was sort of slightly... It wasn't as interactive as it could be,

but it was slightly interactive, or slightly responsive to what you'd done.

So it felt it was still valid video game content, 'cause it was living, up to a point.

And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander, was just funny, 'cause he was awful.

So it was like LA. You're in therapy. It's very LA. But it's also very LA, he

wants to write a book and betray you.

Which felt like a good, a good twist. It felt like a Grand Theft Auto

therapist. But just like the idea of making the player in a game,

and games are intrinsically kind of physical, and, you know, you...

you walk, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people,

whatever. There are these kind of physical fantasies. Trying to put them into a

slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think can be really

fun.

- I think, to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, about

video games, that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much

value for storytelling is insanely specific, intricate details.

In the story, but also visually. It just added to the feeling that the world is

real. So I have to ask, what are some of your, um,

favorite insanely specific, intricate details in RDR? I can give you some

options. The internet's favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.

testicles shrinking in cold weather.

- Yep. Those guys did an amazing job on those.

- I mean, I just... And there must've been a meeting, and there must've been engineers

and graphics designers.

- It was just, I think just artists.

- Artists

- Modelers, I think. I don't think it was that hard.

- Okay.

- Enough of that pun.

- Thank you for that. Arthur's hair and beard grow in real time.

So, gun maintenance matters. Firearms get dirty and perform worse over

time. Animal carcasses decompose realistically.

- They feel like they do.

- That's still extremely rare in video games. That, the temporal aspect.

- Yes. Yeah.

- That permeates through time. You know, NPCs remembering you.

- That's

the best. I mean, that's the thing I love. Playing around with a lot of stuff

in the new games around that, 'cause I think it's super interesting. Okay?

- It's really powerful, right?

- To make them... Yeah, really interesting. I think it just gives a...

it's a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content

that is also systemic and procedural.

- Yeah. Is it technically really difficult to do for the

game, for the game to feel like it remembers you? You know?

- Um, I think with modern tech it's not that hard, but there's a

lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting.

- Yeah, to have a memory.

So that's really powerful. The mud physics. So Arthur's boots get

muddy and leave actual tracks. I mean, that's just incredible. Really, really

incredible.

- You know, we made a dusty game. Red Dead 1 is a super dusty game. Make, you know, the

problem with

cowboys is that if you've tried to make a Greatest Hits of the Cowboy game, and

then you've got to make a sequel, you've got to come up with different geography.

So that's why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted a game that had snow and mud,

because those were things you hadn't really seen in Red Dead 1. And then the challenge is how do you make

mud good in a game? And the guys did an amazing job.

- I mean, the snowstorm that starts the game,

RDR2, I don't remember the last time I've experienced anything

like it, but you felt it. I don't know how the hell you do that. It's not just

graphics, it's everything. Everything together. I suppose some of the

dialogue is really important to that.

- Also the acting. They feel cold.

- Yeah, that's right.

- And they feel desperate. There was that feeling of sort of

- Yes

- exodus. Like you're running away from something, that gives the game energy at the

start.

- And it was at night. Oh man, it was just masterfully done.

- And there was a big group of them. The other cont-

- Yes.

- You know, first game, you start off as a lone wolf. Suddenly you're in this big group.

So it felt very different.

- In Arthur's body, bullet wounds persist. So that, that temporal consistency-

...that's really important. Underweight Arthur looks gone, and

overweight Arthur gets a gut.

And a fuller face. Again, those decisions that you make

reveal themselves in the game across time. And they're consistent.

I don't know. I did not see many games do that. It must be difficult to

do, but to give that level of care to the details in

that way across time and for specific

graphical representations of things is incredible.

- Yeah. I mean, I guess-

- Do you have favorites where you were first like, "This is amazing?"

- I think all of it. I think the way the whole... To me, the thing that I would care about most

was the way the whole thing sat together. You know, the fact that each of

those, they all feel like they belong together with each

other. You made this cohesive, very, you know,

quote-unquote, "realistic" for a video game experience, and all the details

feel like they mesh.

- Well, for me, everything about the horse.

For a lot of people. Testicle shrinking included.

What's the process of deciding? The internet seems to really care

about... I mean, they love the game so much, so they want to know if anything

was cut. I'm sure stuff was cut because you have to choose.

What's the process of deciding what to cut, what to cut scenes like? Is there any

scenes that you had to let go of that you really miss or wish you could've

done in either GTA or RDR?

- Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be.

You know, I think there was always... There was a bit at the start of RDR

where he'd had a baby

who just died in Red Dead 2, and we ended up cutting it, which

was the right decision. It was too

tough in some ways. But I think it gave him real... He was not

very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby. And

so, it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to

play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more

interesting. He was not a likable character at the start, and that was one...

We ended up making him slightly more like... He was still sort of tough and nasty, but he's

slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision

commercially. It's better that way. But you know, I still like that

little bit. It spoke to me personally. And just his inability to

access his emotions I thought was really strong because then later in the game he's getting very

emotional. But there are also always little bits and pieces that

get trimmed. You know, and don't... Or

missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually, it's like, "This mission's not going to work

technically. Oh God, we have to cut it. Okay, how do we glue

the story back together?" We got better over time at gluing the story

across missing chunks. You get late in the game, and it's just something,

you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish, so you just get rid of

it.

- I think editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down

is an art form, but it's also just... It feels like torture

because you're letting go of things you put so much love into.

- Yeah, it could be changes. You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, "Let's change

it," that could be... of course that could be upsetting in some ways. Otherwise, you can care about it.

But, you know, if I was involved in the big

creative thing and you go, "Okay, it's the right decision," I can probably live with that fine.

I think sometimes for designers when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole

game and two of them get cut, that must be really... ...Really hard.

- Is there DLCs like for RDR or GTA that you

wish you had the time when you were there to have created?

- Of course. There's always things I wished I'd done. I always wished I'd done more.

- What would you have added? This is a fun, like, nerding out.

- We... the internet knows we made a DLC, single-player DLC for

GTA V that never came out. And we've also never really

worked on another game. But I like... the idea of it, it was a

GTA zombie game. That would've been funny. I think that could've been quite fun.

- What was the GTA V DLC?

- It was one where you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent.

- Oh.

- It was... it was cute. It never quite came together, and it was never finished.

It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have gotten

to make Red Dead 2. So, there's always compromises. But it

was... you know, I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of

GTA IV when you had the extra stories coming afterwards

or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these

extra things. So, I would've personally liked to

have done more of that in that company. Um,

and with stuff we're doing in the future, we're going to try and

come up with worlds where we can add more stories.

I like single-player DLC. I just think the audience loves it, and it's really fun to make.

- Does it make you a little bit sad that the gaming industry, in general, is

moving towards more online, less single-player

DLC? Maybe that observation is incorrect. But it feels at

this moment, to me, it feels like,

It's easier to make a lot of money with online...

- If you get it right.

- If you get it right. And so the game companies are reaching for that. And

it just makes me really sad because there's so much power to the... What you did with

Red Dead Redemption 2, I don't know how during that time you were able to pull that off, but that

was like a breath of fresh air. Or, in a time where everybody

was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that, you go

on and draw, again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the

greatest character in video game history, single-player.

- We still love single player games. And I think

as we started up Absurd, we did a lot of soul searching.

And also a lot of cynical looking at what goes well

in the industry. Luckily, if you want to do what we're forced to do and

also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single player games.

You can launch a multiplayer game as with new IP.

It's just extremely hard. So, luckily, we

are focusing on what we're good at, which is open world single player games.

And we might add

multiplayer components to one of them. I think one of them is going to be really tough, later

on. But we're still thinking that through. But I think we're really leaning

into single player experience as being a strength for

us as a company and something we love to do, and I think something a

large part of the audience prefers, and I'd love to, with all of

those, keep single player DLC one way or another, going.

- Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterwards?

that you didn't go with? So, like, worlds...

- Oh, yes

- ...or pirate games? I mean, what... I would love to see the notes, the possible

options.

- Never thought a lot about a pirate game.

- Yeah?

- My son is obsessed with that game, Sea of Thieves, at the moment, so he's constantly

saying, "Do a pirate game." Haven't really thought about it too much. We worked a

lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game.

- Yeah.

- And it never came together.

- So Agent?

- Agent, and it's had about five different ... iterations

- ... so good.

- I don't think it works. I concluded

I, and I keep thinking about it sometimes. I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it, and I've

concluded as an open, as what makes them really good

as film stories makes them not work as video games. We need to think

through how to do it in a different way as a video game.

- So for people who don't know, it would be hypothetically set in the 1970s Cold War era.

- That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in current. We had so

many different versions of this game.

- Got it.

- We worked on so many different teams.

- But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage-

- That, yeah, espionage, like...

- ... and assassinations.

- Yeah, assassinations. I don't know what it would've been 'cause it never really...

We never got it enough to even do a proper story on it. We're doing the early work as

you get the world up and running. It never really found its feet in either of them.

- So interesting.

- And I sort of think I know why,

because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic

and they beat to beat to beat. You gotta go here and save the world. You gotta go there and

stop that person being killed and then save the world. An open-world

game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large

portions, it's a lot kind of looser, and you're just hanging out and doing what you

want. I want freedom. I wanna go over here and do what I want, and I wanna go over and do what you

want. That's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to

do. We try and create, you know,

external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at

times. But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock.

So I think for me, I question if you can even make a good open-world spy game.

- So interesting. So you have to be able to ride around in a car and listen to the

radio.

- Yeah, and cruise about.

- Or ride a horse and just look at nature.

- So lots of things would work as open-world games, but I don't know if a spy does.

- That's brilliantly put. But to me, there's such espionage and assassinations and...

...the geopolitical international context is so interesting. But you're right.

I just wanna listen to what is it? Lazlo and, uh...

- Yeah. Well, you can't. You gotta save the world. And so you need this time pressure.

- With a Russian accent? Or something. Yeah, wow. Wow. That's really interesting.

- Then we played around with the knights concept that was looking at...

- Nice

- ...you know, knights, and sort of trying to do a version of

a mythological game that could have been fun. And you

know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.

- Knights would be going really far back in history.

- Yeah, it would have to go. It never got to writing any of it. Just did

some backstory and played around with a few ideas. But it was

always something I thought I would never do, and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.

- 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? Are 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. I was always living in New York. It was at times, very intense and at

other times, a magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

- The lows and the highs?

- And the middles. It was just my life, you know?

My life was that job and the people I knew in New York, and my family.

And we were doing something that was intense and innovative, and, you know, both

loved and hated by wider society in different ways and at different times.

And in this weird company that was constantly in trouble. So it was really fun.

- Just even looking back at that time to today, how did you evolve as a

creative mind across those 20 years?

- Well, I was a child. I was a 25-year-old child.

I didn't know anything, and I wanted to be a writer.

But I still wasn't writing. And I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally

scribble in it, and I've still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video

games, which were the least

literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time. There was no room for that on PS1 games,

really. Thinking I needed to

stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do

it. And I'd been doing that in London. Then I came to New York, and it

was fun, really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a

new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure, but I was still lost as a human

being. And then when I was 27, I was still

completely lost, a child. And I stopped some of my bad

behavior, and the next day pretty much

the chance to write on, work on open world games, and all the skills I'd half learned over the

previous years and my way of thinking, where I thought about space a lot because I was a

geographer rather than a historian, came together, and I got the chance to

work on an open world game. So it felt like it was meant to be. It was fun to explore, but really