Was Rockstar Games’ Bully About Dan Houser’s Own Childhood?

Another former Rockstar employee has shared some surprising insight about one of their PlayStation 2 classics, Bully.

As reported by GamesRadar, a former Rockstar employee, Andrew Wood, told magazine Retro Gamer about making their classic juvenile delinquency game.

He explained that the developers thought the idea of bringing their open-world game design to a school setting would be ‘very interesting.’

But then he said this:

We knew that a lot of the experiences really came from Dan Houser’s own childhood.

He was projecting himself into the story, but everybody’s gone through school and those social cliques and stereotypes.

It touched on all our childhood memories.

So Is Jimmy Hopkins A Stand-In For Dan Houser?

There isn’t a lot publicly known about the Houser’s family lives. And of course, we don’t think this is the time and place to pry into that.

But it’s certainly interesting that this came up. It makes it look like Dan had some personal motivations to tell this story.

What Could School Have Been Like For The Housers?

Based on public information, it doesn’t seem like Dan and Sam had the stereotypically grueling childhood that Jimmy Hopkins had in the game.

The two were the children of British actress Geraldine Moffat. Dan went to a private school, St. Paul’s School, in Thames, before going on to Oxford.

But even if this was the case, the Housers’ childhood could not have been pleasant. They grew up under the long tenure of Margaret Thatcher as UK’s prime minister.

Without getting into the finer details, Thatcherism had terrible consequences for both the UK education system and their juvenile delinquency policies.

And these are the things that could have inspired Dan when writing Bully.

Not Dan’s Life Story, But The Stories He Grew Up With

We don’t think Dan was a juvenile delinquent himself. We’re going to leave it to him to clarify that if he wants.

But it seems more likely a lot of the stories and bits in Bully were inspired by stories he heard growing up in the schoolyard.

Schools have their own subcultures. Dan and his friends would have shared oral histories of both past students and their own notorious peers.

And of course, it wasn’t just Dan who was contributing to the writing of Bully.

We do wonder if Dan did imagine Jimmy Hopkins to be an exaggerated version of himself as a child. Maybe it was some form of wish fulfillment to make Jimmy the worst kind of kid that Dan could have been.

And that’s probably what Bully’s fans also had in mind when they played it and it became one of their favorites.