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Dan Houser shed some light on how he managed to write Grand Theft Auto’s biting American satire.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that the Housers were from the UK. There must be some level where they saw what they were writing as foreign to their own experience.
Other members of Rockstar’s team were of course American. Dan and Sam would be Americanized as well, since they moved to the US after Take-Two acquired DMA Design and launched Rockstar Games.
IGN’s senior executive editor Ryan McAffrey finally got the chance to ask Dan how this worked out for him. Dan said this:
I think for me personally, it was an advantage to be an outsider and an insider. I was living here by the time I was doing that, and it was a huge advantage to be on the ground in America.
You think you understand America when you live in Britain but you really don’t. And when you come here, and you start to grapple with it firsthand, it’s a very different experience.
But, you know, growing up in the 80s and 90s, you are drowning in American culture in Britain. So you have a very strange reaction to it because you kind of know it and don’t know it. So I think the combination was very important.
The Americanization Of The World
Some Americans may take it for granted today, but there was a very real phenomenon of Americanization in the 1980s through the 1990s. This was the spread of American culture outside its own borders to other parts of the world.
There’s some room for debate regarding this Americanization. For example, some people want to distinguish this from a similar term, globalization. There are also people who want to argue that US culture spread much earlier than the 1980s.
But we’ll stick to Dan Houser’s experience, because that is definitely easy to explain. The Hollywood blockbuster movie, McDonald’s, Calvin Kleins, and the NBA. There were tons of US products and brands, not just in entertainment, that spread around the world specifically in the 1980s and 1990s.
It’s a cultural domination that we may take for granted today because it appears to be a monoculture. But that’s how pervasive this culture had spread to the rest of the world that we can’t even recognize what it was like before.
Dan Houser Himself Lived The American Dream
This shouldn’t surprise anyone but Houser is himself a US citizen. He experienced firsthand what many of the families of today’s Americans had when their parents or even grandparents emigrated to the country.
Dan may not have been that familiar with US culture at the start. He cites Lazlow Jones as a great help in bridging that cultural divide at the start.
But US culture isn’t particularly esoteric. If it were, the Grand Theft Auto games would not be worldwide hits.
It’s precisely that Americanization that Dan experienced growing up that also made these games popular around the world.
