Dan Houser doesn’t care that much if you get all the way to the story credits on his games, as long as you’re having fun in the worlds he’s created. “If someone enjoyed a game, that’s great,” the Rockstar co-founder and Grand Theft Auto/Red Dead Redemption writer said at a panel at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Saturday. “If you can’t finish a story, but you loved it in other ways: Great, I don’t care. I mean, I would like it if you finish the story because I spent ages on it. If you enjoyed it, that’s enough for you.”
Houser’s longtime creative partner Lazlow — who founded the multimedia studio Absurd Ventures with Houser after leaving Rockstar in 2020 — also sat on the panel, adding: “We also love burying very deep Easter eggs and games. Sometimes they take one or two years or longer for players to discover. I mean, we love burying stuff so deep that sometimes three or four years goes by, I’m like, ‘Maybe this makes it too hard to find.’ And somebody finds it and then it blows up on Reddit, and we’re like, ‘Yay.’” Just earlier this year, Red Dead Redemption 2 players discovered a spiderweb mystery that had gone unnoticed for seven years since the game’s release.
“The whole point of an open world game is we provide guides,” Houser said. “We want you to experience the story. Our goal was always — from GTA 3 onwards — to try and get more and more people to finish the story. And the numbers went up and up; they used to be pretty level. But ultimately, that’s up to the player. The players enjoy being in the world, mucking around, doing whatever they want to do, messing with the systems. The most fun thing about the game isn’t any rubbish we write, it’s the systems that we make.
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