Dan Houser has revealed that he himself had a little homicidal thought in his head while he was making Grand Theft Auto IV.
In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Houser said this:
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 out like that. So it was this thing where we hadn’t done it.
Why Did Dan Houser Want To Kill Niko Bellic?
In the context of the interview, Houser simply explains that Rockstar had not ended any of their Grand Theft Auto games with the playable character dying at the end. On the face of it, that sounds like an unserious interest.
But it makes sense if you think about the Grand Theft Auto franchise as a whole. Of course, you play criminals in these games. Often these are hitmen and operatives for crime organizations.
In the pre-HD games, these criminals are rewarded for their exploits. At the same time, these stories are fashioned to make them sympathetic.
But this still creates this disparity in the narrative. The game tries to convince you that after you killed a lot of people, including potentially a lot of civilians and bystanders, that you deserved that happy ending.
We’re sure a lot of gamers who grew up with these games didn’t see any disparity. But even in their time, that’s unusual. It’s the sort of thing you usually see in exploitation movies.
Did Niko Bellic Deserve A Happy Ending?
We’ll use Bellic himself as an example here. Of course, this part of the article will contain spoilers.
At the start of Grand Theft Auto IV, Bellic is working as a human trafficker. It’s also implied that Bellic could have committed war crimes and humanitarian crimes in the course of the Yugoslav wars.
We don’t know which particular conflict Bellic was involved in, but the details of the Yugoslav wars are truly horrific.
Should Niko Bellic Be Canonically Dead?
It looks like Dan and Rockstar added these details on purpose. They wanted players to be horrified by the implications of the people they were playing.
It seems that it flew by for a lot of people. And that may explain what they did to Niko Bellic next.
In Grand Theft Auto V, there are references to Niko Bellic, but it isn’t clear if he is still alive or not. There’s also this video speculating that Rockstar intended for Trevor to kill Niko instead of Johnny Klebitz.
Rockstar didn’t make it official then. But maybe the Niko Bellic that you played, and the kind of person he was before you played him, didn’t deserve any good fortune. It would certainly be interesting if Rockstar decided to close the chapter on him in Grand Theft Auto 6.
