Dan Houser shared an amusing anecdote about what Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive was around the time they released Grand Theft Auto III.
Houser has a new interview with Virgin Radio UK’s Chris Evans Breakfast Show. He talked to Chris quite a bit about making Grand Theft Auto III, which was the studio’s breakout moment.
Houser had previously talked about how the company was in dire straits when they were making the game. It what may be the first time, he has some surprising criticisms of Take-Two, at least for the time.
Houser said this:
I think we were (Rockstar Games) a video game company in New York. All the rest of the video game companies were either in Guilford or they were in San Francisco.
And so we were we were in New York. We were mostly English. We were younger than a lot of the other companies.
We didn’t have the corporate oversight of our parent company was not very responsible. They were always getting in trouble for, you know, financial impropriety.
So we could kind of do what we want.
How Was Take-Two Not Being Responsible?
In this same interview, Dan revealed that Take-Two Interactive was actually $ 100 million in debt. In fact, we found out that the SEC was investigating them for accounting fraud at the time.
But the company’s financial situation could be attributed to more than that single fraud case, which ended with a $ 7.5 million settlement.
Take-Two was somewhat acting like Embracer Group. In the same year they acquired DMA Design and renamed them to Rockstar North, they invested in Bungie, and the Gathering of Developers.
This was in the year 1999, so some gamers can imagine how big these investments were. Bungie announced Halo in 1999, and Take-Two would eventually sell their shared to Microsoft.
Gathering of Developers, on the other hand, brought together several big studios at the time, including Epic Games, Terminal Reality, and Ritual Entertainment.
A few years before, Take-Two was also aggressively making acquisitions and investments, after going public in 1997.
This all played out in the late 1990s boom in the video game industry. Much like we have seen play out in the pandemic years, the 1990s saw up and down periods.
By the time the 2000s hit, many of those game studios had gone out of business, or became smaller fish as they were overtaken by more successful developers.
The situation Dan described here just does not exist in the exact same way anymore. Today’s Take-Two under Strauss Zelnick also makes mistakes, but they have figured out how to balance the needs of their stockholders and creatives in their game studios.
