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Dan Houser has finally spoken out about the years of controversy that Rockstar has faced through the years.
Dan has a new interview with Virgin Radio UK’s Chris Evans Breakfast Show. In the course of the interview, Chris got Dan to open up about Rockstar’s years of controversies.
For fans who are too young to remember, before video games were widely accepted as a hobby for adults, Rockstar faced controversy for helping make video games for adults mainstream. We’ll review some of these below as we go through Dan’s statements.
Video Games For Adults Before Most Gamers Became Adults
Dan said this about trying to innovate on video games for adults:
And then it was this industry that we were saying had been for children and now we were saying it was for adolescence and grown men as well as for children but we were not servicing the children market. And that seemed to us not that outrageous but some people thought it incredibly offensive.
Many of the gamers who grew up on video games from the 2000s are adults now. It’s socially acceptable to see that the biggest AAAs are intended for adults.
At this time, games were still primarily made for children, but there was a never really a time when games were mostly for children.
Rockstar was fighting this stigma that video games were a bad influence for children. At the same time, it’s clear that the controversy brought publicity, and made their games more popular and successful.
Rockstar Takes On The US Government?
Dan then said this:
Well, it brought the US government down on us. They decided we were the only people on the internet peddling pornography apparently, which was ridiculous. And they nearly shut us down.
You know we got fined a huge amount of money and it almost it was a very disruptive to the company and some of my team members quit and it was really tough.
Nearly every Rockstar game that was released before Grand Theft Auto IV faced a multitude of controversies. We think we know the specific one that Dan is alluding to, and you can read about it here.
For what it’s worth, we couldn’t easily find an instance where Rockstar or Take-Two were fined for this or other controversies. As best as we can tell, the ESRB threatened to sue Rockstar and Take-Two over this issue, but ultimately chose not to do it.
Perhaps, Dan is simply being human in how he misremembered these events.
Other controversies Rockstar has faced through the years include getting their games banned across the world, critical game reviews, and lawsuits, particularly from victims of real life violence.
We’ll let you do your research on this, since this all played out very publicly. What’s interesting is to learn that Dan did not have fond memories of the ‘good old days’ that most of fans would associate with some of the best and most beloved games Rockstar made.
