Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484

- You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever

done. I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time.

What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

- People searching for meaning amongst the violence. I think that the West

and all the themes around the West really lend itself to that.

And the gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible. I think we got

to spend, a smaller group of us, working on it from day one,

coming up with some weird, wacky ideas

that we got to embed in the game. It was helpful that we got to be very

creative before it had a full team on it.

- You lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed...

Diet Cokes?

- Yes.

- Is this accurate information?

- Very accurate.

- Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?

- I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating. The games

always felt different. People have very strong feelings: "I like this one."

"I didn't like that one as much," because they are pretty different.

So you know what's going to happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, you know it's going to be

a game about being a criminal, but the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot.

- The number one question from the internet, it is so ridiculous, but I must

ask, "Have you seen Gavin?" The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a

legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the

creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption

series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time

and some of the greatest games of all time.

Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 have some of the

deepest, most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and

storylines ever created in video games.

Dan has started a new company, Absurdventures,

great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in

multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and

yes, video games. That includes A Better

Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a

super intelligent AI, American Caper, which is

an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical

world, and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic

action-adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these. I have spent

hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this

conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of

that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since,

and he has been just a wonderful human being.

I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the

luckiest kid in the world. This is the Lex Fridman

Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description,

where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions,

give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Dan Houser.

You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and

open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in

the late '70s and '80s, open-world video games

wasn't a thing. So you've credited literature and film

as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can.

- Sure.

- What to you are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time,

maybe films that were highly influential on you? I mean, Godfather.

- God, well, I think for me, probably Godfather II more than Godfather I, but I love both of them.

But I love the divided story in

Godfather II. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho.

I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love

the sections in Sicily. I think and the bit, Ellis

Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema.

When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot, it's

amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been

like to arrive in America.

- How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the

writing? How much is the cinematography and how much is the acting?

You got De Niro, you got young Pacino.

- Coppola started as a screenwriter, so I think he wrote, at least co-wrote

the script. So it's almost like the writing, directing almost become the same thing.

But it's one of those films, both of them are those films, which I was thinking about

this idea of a perfect film where everything's good.

Where the acting's seminal, where the writing's seminal, where the music is

seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes you

know, define what you think about things. It's impossible to think about the

mafia and not think about The Godfather.

- What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have movies like 2001

Space Odyssey, slow.

- Yes.

- It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slow.

- Life got faster. Life just got, you know, as I think as we moved from the '70s into

the '80s, into the '90s, people had seen so many films,

they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic

storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker,

you could show a look and just that meant you realized that person was

gonna betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker.

But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with modern, you know,

high quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting,

particularly when you're rewatching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

- Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I...

I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right?

- Yes.

- A mixture of crime and humor.

- And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of

life. You know, I think that probably changed cinema at the tail end of the '80s,

changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the '80s,

early '90s, more than any other film. And it's so

iconic. In some ways I prefer Casino, but the invention

is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino, you know, the use of

voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being

normal people, you know, it changed everything. The Sopranos is obviously

completely inspired by Goodfellas.

- Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.

- The look, the clothes... ...The music.

- I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me

is the meeting in the desert. I mean, just the drama building up to that between...

- Dig another hole.

- Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a

character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films.

- I think the great Vegas film. There are bits that I always... that I

love. At the end, when everything's wrapping up, and on the one hand you

see the Robert De Niro character, he's still good at making money, so

they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the,

the mob bosses from back home, they're discussing

all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's

that incredibly cold line where one of them, they're thinking about the old,

you know, I think it's the casino manager, and one of them just goes, "Ah, the way I see it, why take a

chance?" And then the next thing, he's just shot. The brutality of it all is just

brilliant.

- I don't know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors.

You got what, Nicolas Cage Leaving Las Vegas? I mean, falling in love with a

prostitute. You've written some of the great crime stories ever.

- Thank you.

- And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about-

...being a bit of a romantic yourself.

Appreciating the depth of love stories in literature at the

very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an

alcoholic and a prostitute. He got an Oscar for that.

- I think he did for that, didn't he?

- Plus there's the caricature of the drug world of Fear and Loathing in

Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

- I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18.

And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.

- Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?

- No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of

an English version of Hunter S. Thompson if he was also a

market gardener. I love that persona. But he's kind

of... it's hard. If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter

S. Thompson.

- Is this an American caper?

- No, it's in this animated show we're developing in

this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse, and it's in one of the stories in

that.

- What is Absurdiverse?

- Absurdiverse is a comedy

universe we're developing that will be an open-world video game

and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to

make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies. We're still thinking that all

through. And we're building the game up in San

Rafael at the moment, and it's early days, but it's looking very

exciting. And it's trying to be... like, trying to make a game that feels a

a little bit like a living sitcom.

- Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges, or is it pure comedy?

- I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons.

Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours, it won't work.

- Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.

- Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century

is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative

and heart underneath the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive

alongside jokes.

- And there's going to be an open-world video game.

- Yes. Yes.

- When?

- Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through.

- So, what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game?

Why does it take so long to get it right?

- That's an interesting question. I think if you look at the scale at which they're built,

you could argue it the other way, why is it so quick? I mean, you really are

building, in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it.

and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. You know, these things are

massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work

in lots of different ways. And I think that's us being kind of aggressive on

the timeline.

- We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent,

but I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites.

So first of all, you said you love great war books.

- Yes.

- and movies.

- Yes.

- So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least.

- Of course.

- There's more crime, fast-moving crime movies,

like Scarface. I also love True Romance.

- I love True Romance. Possibly the best, one of the best scripts ever written.

- Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino.

What do you love about True Romance? I think sometimes, depending on the

day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I've had, I will say

True Romance is the best movie ever made.

- Yeah, I mean, True Romance is super fun. Tony Scott was a really good director,

so it moves at a really good speed. It's funny, it's completely unbelievable,

but you really care about the characters. It's the kind of, you know, this world

that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters

are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievable. You could just sit and watch

unbelievable. You could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know,

you just... it's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about,

like, what do you like about films? It's the idea to be in a world. You want

to... they're not real. They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds

that people have invented.

- And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of

characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher