Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
Dan Houser shared a surprising confession about how he felt about the video games before Grand Theft Auto III.
Another Brief Review Of Dan’s Early Career
Dan and his brother Sam Houser were the sons of UK TV and film actress Geraldine Moffat. In an interview with Channel 5’s Sunday Brunch, Dan joked that he got into gaming because of ‘mostly nepotism.’
Dan and Sam got their start in BMG Interactive, the video game sister division of music label BMG. It was in this capacity that they scouted DMA Design’s prototype for Grand Theft Auto, then known as Race’n’Chase.
BMG Interactive published the first Grand Theft Auto, just before they were sold to Take-Two Interactive.
After that, BMG was incorporated into Take-Two, and the Housers were made heads of their new publishing label, Rockstar. DMA Design would also be renamed to Rockstar North.
This all happened before they published Grand Theft Auto 2. But at this point, Rockstar and Take-Two were still not the industry leading conglomerate they are today.
And this is where we get to what Dan said about this point in time.
Dan Almost Left Rockstar and Video Games In the 1990s
Dan revealed this at the start of his interview at Channel 5 show Sunday Brunch:
I kept planning to leave and do something more serious as no one took games seriously. And this was in the mid to late 1990s.
And I never could get around to it. And as the games around the year 2000-2001 when it moved to PlayStation 2, you suddenly had the much more powerful machine, and the DVD rather than a CD to store stuff on.
You could suddenly fill them with content. And suddenly, it became super interesting. Because I realized maybe a career in movies would not be that interesting and that I would not be suited to it.
And so, we got to invent all of this stuff, purely by accident.
What If Dan Houser Left Video Games Before Grand Theft Auto III?
As Dan explained in his interview with Lex Fridman, he was not the auteur figure where all of DMA Design/Rockstar North circled around and depended on. If Dan left when he planned to, we would have gotten a similar Grand Theft Auto III, but it would have definitely had a different story. And we can only guess if it and other future games would have been as memorable.
Subsequently, Dan would have entered a competitive film and TV industry, but an exciting one in the 2000s. He may have landed working on one of the blockbuster franchises at the time, between The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and more.
But if luck was in Dan’s favor, he may have also landed on TV, just in time for the Golden Age of Television. His show may have been part of that world that included The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Light Nights, Mad Men, etc.
It’s certainly interesting to speculate on, but we think Dan and Rockstar turned out OK with the way things worked out.
