Dan Houser has revealed in his own words why he stepped away from making Grand Theft Auto games.
As reported by RockstarIntel, he talked about how making the games was starting to get overwhelming for him in a new interview with Channel 4.
He said this about making these games:
I think the scale of the last couple (GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2) were beyond any imagining; I worked with incredibly talented people so thinking that group, me piggybacking off their vast brains, could do something amazing that’s why I worked there.
When Dan was asked point-blank why he left Rockstar in 2020, he said this:
Because the projects were really long and tough and take a long time to make. It can be a tough journey getting things at that scale with that many moving parts finished.
You’ve got 450,000 lines of dialogue and equal number of parts of other things all trying to assemble itself. It’s this huge production experience.
That swallows all of your time for many years at a time and I don’t know if I had another one of those games in me.
Does This Really Confirm “That” Rumor?
RockstarIntel linked this response to the rumor that Dan left Rockstar Games over a disagreement with his brother Sam.
Tex2 (FKATez2), who was our source for this rumor, also claimed that this was specifically not about the incident in 2018. But if we examine what Dan said here, it actually does look like there was an issue with him in particular.
Was Dan Houser Working Too Hard On Grand Theft Auto And Red Dead Redemption?
To refresh everyone’s memories, Dan created a minor controversy in 2018 when he said in an interview that they had been working 100 hour work weeks to get Red Dead Redemption 2 finished.
Dan later clarified he was only talking about himself and four other development leads. Now, Tex2 seemed to mean that Dan did not get in trouble with Rockstar and Take-Two for making this statement.
But it looks like the issue is that Dan was working 100-hour work weeks. In this instance, it was voluntary on his end, but obviously he could have decided afterwards that he did not want to live like that.
Absurd Ventures Allows Dan To Coast Along, As He Deserves To
When we look at how Dan is doing now, it’s easy to see that Absurd Ventures is the best thing that could have happened to him. He can rely on his existing fanbase to follow his new projects outside of Grand Theft Auto.
He’s also savoring the creative freedom of telling new kinds of stories, the stories that Rockstar won’t handle.
His disagreement with his brother Sam could be that he doesn’t want to live like that anymore. And that’s the kind of disagreement that they would be both fine with each other with.
