A "Kick Me" Note, 9/11, and One Sleepless Night: GTA Co-Creator Dan Houser on How Rockstar's Classics Were Made

Dan Houser, the Rockstar Games co-founder who wrote the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption games, sat down with IGN for an hour-long interview about his career. He explained how the iconic GTA 3 cover came about, what finally made Bully work, and why the spy game Agent never came out. Here are the highlights from the conversation, which IGN published on October 13, 2026.

According to Houser, Rockstar's publisher Take-Two was on the brink of financial collapse in early 2001. The team believed in the game and took it to E3, but it drew very little interest there.

GTA 3 was due out in the fall when the September 11 attacks happened. The team removed a few bits of content that would otherwise have been fine and reworked a couple of lines of dialogue, which pushed the release back by about two weeks. The biggest change was the cover: the original artwork showed burning buildings. Artist Stephen Bliss drew a replacement in roughly two evenings. That is how the style of square panels was born, which later became the signature look of the whole series. Houser says it most likely would not exist without 9/11.

The game launched in October 2001 without an explosive start: no single sales week was enormous, but it kept selling week after week through Christmas and into early 2002. The sense of how big the success really was, Houser says, came gradually.

He also explains why competitors struggled to catch up. A level-based game can be polished one level at a time, while an open world is built up in layers and looks rough for a long time until everything comes together at the very end. The GTA team had rare skills that were hard to replicate, and anyone making "a game like GTA" was always going to be behind. Above all, Houser says, it is about tone: nobody else found a tone that really worked in an open world.

Houser disagrees that the series avoided controversy: it took plenty of heat. In his view, books and movies were never attacked like that for the same things. He lists several possible explanations — games are interactive, they were a new medium, Washington did not understand them, or Rockstar simply did not have enough lobbyists. People can argue about the reasons, he says, but the fact is that the studio got into a huge amount of trouble for several years.

He considers the games he worked on morally justifiable. Violence, he argues, made sense in context thanks to the third-person perspective, humor, and satire. The complaints were built on a few seconds pulled out of a 50- to 100-hour game, which is like plucking a single sentence out of a book. Houser also points out that at the same time anything at all could be found for free on the internet, and nobody was talking about regulating that.

Politics, in his view, cannot be kept out of games if you tell contemporary stories, especially about 21st-century America. Even Red Dead is a story about American mythology.

Houser jokes that Rockstar's scripts were six feet high. The work was split into parts: he wrote a story outline, designers broke it into missions, cutscenes were written first, and mission dialogue was written by writers together with designers so the lines would trigger at the right moment. Other people wrote the pedestrian dialogue.

His favorite part was the short station announcements that play between songs on the in-game radio. He wrote them with Lazlow Jones, the longtime writer and host of GTA radio, who then produced them with real radio professionals; in Houser's words, they came out sounding almost better than professional radio. Another personal joke: a friend begged for years to be a character in GTA, so Houser made him the serial killer Eddie Low.

He also shared stories about the stars:

Bully, Houser says, was in trouble the whole time. The team could not figure out what the game was once you took away the cars and the guns. The lead designer built in the class schedule and lessons, which helped, but the real turning point came later. One of the designers added the ability to stick a "kick me" note on a character's back, after which another kid would run up and kick them. Once that worked, the team felt the scale of the school and of a kid's life, and the game started to be fun.

The game's launch was surrounded by hysteria. Many people condemned Bully without having seen it, and Rockstar spent most of 2006 calming critics and persuading stores to stock it at all. Because of that, it never got the promotion it deserved. This was also the period of the Hot Coffee scandal over a hidden sex scene in San Andreas.

For GTA 4, Houser changed his approach. Earlier games drew inspiration from movies; this time he went around with local police officers and crime reporters to understand New York's underbelly. Inside the studio, the belief was that San Andreas had taken the series' earlier pop energy as far as it could go, and that if GTA did not reinvent itself, it would become obsolete.

Rockstar announced Agent in 2009 as a PlayStation 3 exclusive, but the game never came out. According to Houser, two or three different teams tried to make an open-world spy game. His explanation: a spy story constantly pushes you forward, while an open world needs room to slow down. On top of that, the fun of a spy movie is jumping from one location to another far across the world, and that does not work in an open world.

Like Bully, Red Dead Redemption had several points when it almost didn't get made, Houser says. He discussed killing protagonist John Marston with lead designer Christian Cantamessa, and both were in favor. Houser's doubts were about production rather than story. After the finale, players usually return to the world to finish side content, which meant they would have to play as Marston's son Jack. Did the team have the time and resources for that? What happens with a side character whose three-mission arc is only one mission in? Internally there was broad consensus, but Houser was surprised by how angry some players were after launch. He puts it down to players feeling like co-creators of the story. He had wanted to kill a protagonist in several GTA games too, but technical constraints stood in the way.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, Marston is not the protagonist until the final part of the game, just one of the gang. Houser found it interesting to show him as a selfish young man, not much of a father or husband.

As for Max Payne 3, Houser says he misjudged how players would react and sees much of its failure as his own. We covered that part of the interview separately.

The decision to have three playable characters in GTA 5 was made very early. Houser was writing a five- or six-page story outline and, as usual, had to deliver it by Monday morning. On Sunday night he sat alone in the New York office. Michael and Franklin already existed, the game was taking shape around a heist, but a third character was missing. And then, Houser says, Trevor came to him.

Michael and Trevor were designed as opposites. Michael is charming and believes he is a good guy who took a wrong turn, but in reality he has no moral core at all: he is a liar, a hypocrite, and he betrayed his best friend. Trevor is repulsive, yet he lives by his own code. Franklin watches them both and figures out who is worse. Houser feared the pairing might not work, but once actors Ned Luke and Steven Ogg first played a scene together, the doubts were gone.

Houser does not romanticize his departure from Rockstar: it did not feel freeing, it was terrifying. He had no team, no money, and no worlds of his own. Now Absurd Ventures is building three worlds: American Caper, a story about two neighbors in suburban Wyoming that started as a comic book; A Better Paradise, which began as a game idea and grew into a novel; and the comedic Absurdiverse. The A Better Paradise game, according to Houser, is in full production, and its artificial intelligence theme appeared long before ChatGPT launched.

The studio's new game is an open-world comedy, developed by a separate team. Houser admits some parts are still early, but he is quietly confident. The studio is trying to make games a little faster and more efficiently, because new worlds are expensive and risky. He does not see long development cycles for big games as a new normal: games that took six to nine years have always existed.

His proudest achievement, he says, is Red Dead Redemption 2, along with the opening of GTA 4 and the middle section of GTA 5 with its character switching. He ranked his top five games from fifth to first: Vice City, Red Dead Redemption, Bully, GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption 2. He named The Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo 64 as probably the most influential game for his generation, and the rocket launcher as his favorite GTA weapon, because it made the game ridiculous.

Judging by the interview, almost every Houser game had a moment when it could have gone wrong: GTA 3 went unnoticed at E3, the Bully team spent a long time not knowing what their game was about, Red Dead Redemption came close to not being made more than once, and Agent never came out at all. The GTA 3 cover was drawn in roughly two evenings, and Trevor came to Houser in a single night. Now Houser is starting over with an open-world comedy.

Which Dan Houser game matters most to you — and does it match the top spot on his list, Red Dead Redemption 2?

The key points from Dan Houser's IGN interview.

The original artwork showed burning buildings and was deemed unacceptable after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Stephen Bliss drew the new cover in roughly two evenings.

According to Houser, two or three teams tried to make an open-world spy game and could not get it right: a spy story needs constant forward momentum and trips across the globe, while an open world needs room to slow down.

His studio Absurd Ventures is making an open-world comedy game and a game set in the A Better Paradise universe, which is in full production.

From fifth to first: Vice City, Red Dead Redemption, Bully, GTA 4, and Red Dead Redemption 2.