Dan Houser shared a fascinating story about Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar Games, and Take-Two Interactive.
Houser once again did a new interview shedding light on everything we wanted to know about Rockstar Games’ history. This time, he went to Virgin Radio UK’s Chris Evans Breakfast Show.
This is not the Chris Evans who played Johnny Storm and Captain America in the MCU, of course. Chris is a notable DJ in the UK, whose interviewed numerous celebrities.
In this interview, Chris described how Oasis’ Noel Gallagher became a millionaire overnight after the launch of their breakthrough album Definitely Maybe, as Noel described it to him.
Chris then asked Dan if he experienced something like that with the Grand Theft Auto games. Here’s Dan’s story:
The company (Rockstar Games) was owned by another company called Take 2. We were a division of Take 2.
Take 2 was $ 100 million in debt. So we were making this game that we thought was going to be great called Grand Theft Auto III and we were making it on a shoestring.
Um and it was going to be – we thought it was very very innovative and it could be amazing. It didn’t have a lot of excitement before it came out.
The company was doing so badly it got delisted from the stock market and then 911 happened.
We were in New York, you know, just about a mile away from it. Had to make a couple of changes cuz a couple of things could have seemed slightly offensive in a sort of post 911 world.
The game was due to come out then. It came about two came out about two weeks later. Um I came to London uh for for a couple of weeks on on personal business around then.
And by the time I came back, we were successful. The company was out of debt. And it was it was we hadn’t made enough copies of the game. We couldn’t make it fast enough. He was selling like 50,000 a day at various points.
As you can see, Dan was not certain that Rockstar was going to have a future at this point. This may have been why he said in another interview that he was considering leaving the game industry then.
It may seem like Rockstar was just a company that came out of nowhere to change the industry overnight. But we now know that wasn’t the case at all. If Take-Two had made bigger mistakes at the time, or Rockstar wasn’t able to make Grand Theft Auto III come together, we wouldn’t have this industry that’s been defined by open-world games.
