All of the notable Grand Theft Auto games have been set in fictional versions of American cities, but there was once an expansion pack that showed us a glimpse of somewhere else. Somewhere, if you’re me, very close to home: London.
In 1997, an expansion pack was released for the original Grand Theft Auto game that remade its world to look like London in the Swinging Sixties – specifically, in 1969. Cue lots of colourful Minis and mini-skirts and mods and bob haircuts and garish pastel colours. It was fun, and it was enough of a glimpse to keep the question of whether Rockstar might ever return to London, for a full-fat GTA instalment, alive for many years after.
But that dream-balloon has popped now, with Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser telling Lex Fridman that the Grand Theft Auto series has become too characterised by Americana to be set anywhere else.
“There’s a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles,” Houser said. “They’re all very good for what you laid out…” Houser was referring to Fridman’s description of Miami being a place where huge wealth exists next to extreme poverty, of it being a place of everything: glitz, glamour, immigration, drugs and organised crime – the whole lot. A melting pot.
London arguably has that but it doesn’t have other important ingredients. One of those ingredients Houser described as larger-than-life characters, because GTA games, he said, are exaggerated slices of life. A GTA experience would be like “a psychotic version of a Dickens book”, he said, smiling. But a bigger problem is a lack of available guns here – a weapon Grand Theft Auto games depend upon.
“For a full GTA game: we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else,” Houser said. “You needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective, but that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn’t have really worked in the same way elsewhere.”
Dan Houser left Rockstar in 2020 to create a new studio called Absurd Ventures, which is making a couple of open-world video games – one set in a science-fiction world called A Better Paradise, and the other within a comedy satire setting. A Better Paradise book has been released but other than that, we don’t know anything about these games.
Given how long ago Houser left, he has had nothing to do with the making of Grand Theft Auto 6, which will be a notable change for the GTA series. Houser was usually the person who’d come up with the story the games would be based on, then hold the team to that creative vision as the game went forward.
Nevertheless, I find it fascinating to hear Houser reflect on past GTA projects, particularly on the pressure the studio felt making them, because Rockstar often projects an aura of invincibility at the time.
“GTA 4 was very pressured because there had been all this pressure on the company – the company nearly imploded several times due to Hot Coffee,” Houser said, referring to the infamous reinstated-by-modders sex mini-game that people found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. “It was extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful. GTA 3, the company was basically broke, but I was young and I didn’t really care. I wasn’t living in the grown-up world yet. All of them had their own pressure.”
But even years later in Red Dead Redemption 2, the company’s most recent major work, there was enormous pressure on Houser and the studio. “With Red Dead 2, we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much I didn’t want to think about it, and you’re making a game about a cowboy dying of TB, and the game’s not coming together,” he said. “Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment; it’s not a lot of fun. That was a lot of pressure.”
I suspect that therein lies the reason he ultimately left Rockstar, after taking an extended break following completion of the Red Dead Redemption 2 project. His brother Sam Houser, however, remains there, as president of Rockstar Games.