Lazlow Jones and Dan Houser will be forever associated with Rockstar Games. On both the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption games, their work as creatives have an indelible mark on both franchises.
Dan Houser left Rockstar Games to start a new company, called Absurd Ventures. Lazlow joined him in about a year, and in a new interview with IGN, Lazlow has shed some light on what the two have actually been doing.
In Absurd Ventures’ initial press release, they referred to building several ‘universes’, though they didn’t actually elaborate on it. Now, we know that they are actually producing transmedia storytelling projects, and we’ll take a few minutes to explain what that means.
Transmedia is the idea of telling a single story across multiple types of media. While one could argue that any big multimillion dollar franchise is transmedia, we could point to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a clear example.
MCU Phase One was about introducing each Marvel hero with their own movie to culminate in the first Avengers film, their first crossover where everyone was together. In contrast, MCU Phase Four launched several TV shows that had the same actors playing the same characters from the movies.
Because TV and movies are different media, MCU arguably really only became transmedia during Phase Four. Subsequently, what Absurd Ventures is doing is even more limited than this, at least for now.
A Better Paradise launched as an fictional podcast, with a video game also on the way. But A Better Paradise‘s story is itself about a studio making an open world video game. In this world, AI has gone so far that it now creates real-time advertisements to manipulate consumers into buying. The studio has built an AI named NigelDave, who is actually conscious enough to try to figure out humanity.
A Better Paradise is clearly a far cry from Grand Theft Auto, but as you can tell there’s a cynical satirical edge to it, reminiscent of the franchise. NigelDave manipulates his game’s players too, by going through their memories and using it to cater the game to them and make them addicted.
Lazlow wanted to make it clear that the A Better Paradise video game isn’t intended to compete with Grand Theft Auto. Clearly, the subject matter, and potential genre is different, but he also wanted it to be clear that they aren’t working on Grand Theft Auto budgets.
So maybe this is like the Grand Theft Auto version of Futurama or King of the Hill – a not-really spinoff that has a lot in common with the original, because of the similar creators, but certainly does its own thing. It will certainly be interesting to learn more about the A Better Paradise video game when Absurd Ventures will finally be ready to announce it.
