#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

Speaker 1 The following is a conversation with Dan Hauser, 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.

Speaker 1 Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest, most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games.

Speaker 1 Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games.

Speaker 1 That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super intelligent AI, American Caper,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create. So this conversation was an incredible honor for me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world.

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Speaker 1 And now, dear friends, here's Dan Hauser.

Speaker 1 You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds and video game history. But when you grew up in the late 70s and 80s, open world video games wasn't a thing.

Speaker 1 So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can.
Sure. What do you are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time?

Speaker 1 Maybe films that were highly influential on you. I I mean, Godfather?

Speaker 2 Well, I think for me, probably Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather 2.
And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho.

Speaker 2 I love the bits in Little Italy and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think, and the bit Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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 Puccino.

Speaker 2 Well, Copperite started as a screenwriter. So I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script.
So it's almost like the writing and directing almost become the same thing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, it's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about the godfather.

Speaker 1 What about the pacing? It is a bit slow.

Speaker 1 You have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, slow. Yes.
It used to be back in my day, it used to be slow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker. You could show a look and just that meant you realize that person was going to betray the other person.

Speaker 2 They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness.

Speaker 2 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 re-watching them.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

Speaker 1 Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 A mixture of crime and humor.

Speaker 2 And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. You see,

Speaker 2 you know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the 80s, early 90s, more than any other film. And it's so iconic.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, it changed everything. I mean, the Sopranos, obviously, is completely inspired by Goodfellas.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.

Speaker 2 The look, the clothes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Music.

Speaker 1 I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me.

Speaker 1 is the meeting in the desert. I mean, it's just the drama building up to that.
Dig another hole. Yeah.
The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city.

Speaker 1 It's one of the great Vegas films.

Speaker 2 I think the great Vegas film. The 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.

Speaker 2 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 mob bosses from

Speaker 2 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 and one of them they're thinking about the old,

Speaker 2 you know, I think it's a 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.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas.
There's at least some competitors. You got

Speaker 1 Nicholas Cage leaving Las Vegas. I mean, falling in love with the prostitute.
You're also,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 being

Speaker 1 a bit of a romantic yourself,

Speaker 1 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.
You got an Oscar for that.

Speaker 2 I think he did for that, didn't he?

Speaker 1 Plus, there's a caricature of the drug world of fear and loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But he's kind of, it's hard.

Speaker 2 If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.

Speaker 1 Is this an American Caper?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 What is Absurdiverse?

Speaker 2 Absurdiverse is a

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it's trying to be like trying to make a game that feels 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 And there's going to be an open world video game in that world. Yes.
When?

Speaker 2 Two, three, four years, still thinking that through.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 That's an interesting question. I think if you the scale at which they're built,

Speaker 2 you could argue it the other way. Why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building

Speaker 2 in one go a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it.

Speaker 2 You know, these things are massive, four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And

Speaker 2 I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.

Speaker 1 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 and movies.

Speaker 1 So, we have to throw in Platoon from oliver stone and uh apocalypse now for me at least of course there's more crime fast-moving crime movies like scarface i also love true romance love true romance possibly the best one of the best scripts ever written written of course by quentin tarantino uh what do you love about true romance i think i sometimes depending on the day

Speaker 2 depending on the bar and how much alcohol i had i will say true romance is the best movie ever made yeah i mean like 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 unbelievably you could just sit and watch them talk all day long and you know you've just it's it's amusing you just want to live in that world i was thinking like you know what do i you like about films it's the idea to be in a world you want they're not they're not real they're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, you have Christopher Walking with the sort of legendary, super-racist

Speaker 1 discussion,

Speaker 2 right? Dennis Hopper is just sort of dream dad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dream dad, and just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on couch,

Speaker 2 Gary Oldman, Gary Oldman,

Speaker 1 yeah. And

Speaker 1 you have, I mean, a real love story. Like a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.

Speaker 2 And it's just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film.
It's endearing.

Speaker 1 The Elvis as a character. It's kind of like a mini GTA type game.
Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love.

Speaker 2 The crossed with Play It Again, Sam. It feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

Speaker 1 What about Greatest War Film?

Speaker 1 What would it be for you?

Speaker 2 Greatest War Film,

Speaker 2 if I'm feeling serious, it would would be a Russian film called Come and See, which is probably the most intense film ever made. And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now.

Speaker 2 And I would always want to watch the original cut. I don't prefer the re-edits.
I like the original first release. I think it's tighter and slicker and works the best.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, I think, madness.

Speaker 2 But from your first scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece. And again, incredible characters,

Speaker 2 brilliant dialogue.

Speaker 1 Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems.

Speaker 1 And there's different ways of doing that.

Speaker 1 And you've talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another book and movie that shows that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I watched the movie years before I read the book. And I didn't understand the movie.

Speaker 2 And then I read the book and I read a lot about the editing of the movie. and I understood why I didn't understand the movie.
And that's because the movie makes no sense.

Speaker 2 It is beautifully shot and the music is one of the best film scores of all time.

Speaker 2 But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that they're spread apart by ages in the book to assemble. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim.

Speaker 2 That would have been this like a six-hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful, but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it.

Speaker 2 But it's still very beautiful, the film.

Speaker 1 And in terms of Westerns, what's the greatest? The good, the bad, and the ugly, unforgiven? Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Speaker 2 I think for me, it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year, Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch.

Speaker 1 I love Robert Redford, rest in peace.

Speaker 2 That film, it's just, it's impossible to imagine anybody film without Butch Cassidy.

Speaker 1 It's Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clinton Eastwood for you also. Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?

Speaker 2 I love Unforgiven, but the truth is with Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of Westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of Westerns.
They were always on TV.

Speaker 2 You know, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit, quite a bit about Westerns. And then,

Speaker 2 you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns.
I tried to watch normal Westerns and just think about

Speaker 2 what I liked about them, what I didn't like about them, what would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game.

Speaker 2 And I think Red Dead One was a slightly more traditional Western, and then having done that, tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor.

Speaker 2 Didn't just feel like more of the same.

Speaker 1 From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games?

Speaker 1 Literature was the first love. I mean, no, films.
Films.

Speaker 2 Films was always.

Speaker 2 Well, what I loved first as a kid was films.

Speaker 2 Older,

Speaker 2 began reading books properly, age at about eight, was watching films long before that. Nice.
And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred.

Speaker 2 I think they got at different things. Games,

Speaker 2 I played and above all watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid and, you know, other people playing them.

Speaker 2 And I obviously liked

Speaker 2 the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They're responsive.
They're alive. And that's captivating.

Speaker 2 And then the competitive angle of games is fun, or, you know, beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well.

Speaker 2 Sometimes obsessively so. You know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I should have been studying for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy.

Speaker 2 You know, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world that's really emerged for me pretty much as soon as I left college. But I didn't love it.

Speaker 2 And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them probably as late as like 2001.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 And when I suddenly began to see,

Speaker 2 first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story, but just

Speaker 2 suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making

Speaker 2 these things that was this, you know, where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like. And I think that was when I really went, these are amazing.

Speaker 2 And that's when I really fell in love with, I could see it in moments, and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open world games that are so narrative-driven. So it's like you didn't have too many examples.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And before that, it was PS1 or even before that.

Speaker 2 Games looked terrible. You know, that you would be like, it's eight pixels.
It's a car. You know, it was not not a car.

Speaker 2 It was, they just didn't, it was always, you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. And or they were about, you know,

Speaker 2 very surreal subject matter because you couldn't make them remotely real.

Speaker 2 And suddenly we had, we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions.

Speaker 2 and it felt alive and and we were trying to give it even more at least the illusion of even more life and and yet you so you could tell a story in three or you know using time in four dimensions and that felt very inspiring yeah i think uh gta 3

Speaker 1 is probably one of the most influential games of all time it created a feeling of an open world what do you think it takes to create that feeling you know there was like these looming skyscrapers there was a changing traffic lights there's the the feeling like First of all, you had a feeling you could do anything, and then the world was reacting to it in a way that didn't feel scripted.

Speaker 2 Yes, and it wasn't scripted.

Speaker 2 It was really, really, really low-rent AI. Like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened.
And I think that was incredibly,

Speaker 2 it was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with.
And the simulation seemed to have a personality.

Speaker 2 So you could push and see, and the world would push you back

Speaker 2 in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this, I think one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed.

Speaker 2 Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio.
I could look at billboards. I could talk to pedestrians.

Speaker 2 And not in GTA 3, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking.

Speaker 2 And the world...

Speaker 2 was there and existing. And so it was the idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games,

Speaker 2 the idea of being a digital tourist. You know, you were in

Speaker 2 these worlds and you went there as a visitor and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running.
It didn't feel like you'd started it.

Speaker 2 Of course, you had started it, but that feeling, I think, was

Speaker 2 one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating was

Speaker 2 I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist.

Speaker 1 So there's these two concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them. One is systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games.

Speaker 1 And the systemic is from the environment perspective,

Speaker 1 which means

Speaker 1 that there is

Speaker 1 these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent

Speaker 1 behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world.

Speaker 1 And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything.

Speaker 1 And when those two things combine, the feeling like you could do anything, and the feeling like there's a world

Speaker 1 that's full, that is also doing anything it wants, that

Speaker 1 creates this incredible feeling of like this world is alive. And I'm in it.

Speaker 2 And I'm in it. And it's the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful.
And I think with GTA 3,

Speaker 2 you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in life personally. And I was very able to engage in it probably the first time professionally, actually awake and do something.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven.

Speaker 2 So as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting.

Speaker 1 There's often been a tension through your work between an open world at freedom and the narrative-driven storytelling. And I think you've often, maybe always, gotten the balance right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 what is the value of each and how do you get the balance right?

Speaker 2 Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom.
And certainly, I think at various points,

Speaker 2 we debated or

Speaker 2 I had theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people people in the team would really push for less story, less story, you know, let the whole thing evolve organically, you know, have it all be procedural, have it all just evolve from what you do.

Speaker 2 I think for me, I would always come back to going, story can be incredible, if done well, can be incredibly compelling. And it gives you some structure.
So I think, and something to do.

Speaker 2 And it helps you from a... a game design perspective, unlock the features.
It means we know the feet, the

Speaker 2 big features, because, you know, essentially when you put someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming.

Speaker 2 You know, playing a game is a lot more an engaging experience even than reading a movie, you know, reading a book or watching a movie. You've got to engage in it properly.

Speaker 2 So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there's an art and a skill to that.

Speaker 2 And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process. And also just, you know,

Speaker 2 people are looking in their lives for story. I think story is very important and very powerful.
And when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds.

Speaker 2 But it is a, you know, there is a tension always there. I think in

Speaker 2 a game

Speaker 2 like GTA 4, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story and that meant you cared too much about Nico and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world.

Speaker 2 I think we probably

Speaker 2 got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead 2 or when playing as Trevor in GTA 5 if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked.

Speaker 2 The character absolute freedom because also you didn't want in any game, you don't really want to compel the player.

Speaker 2 If you're giving them freedom, you don't want to say, well, I'm giving you freedom, but I'm taking it away because you've got to be this kind of person when you're free.

Speaker 1 So I liked it when it could be he could, you know, he or she could veer to be nice veer to be nasty i think that's when it was at the strongest so you you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides but you felt that character's personality you felt the depth you've actually talked about this the really powerful concept of uh creating a 360 degree character i think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation, which is a really interesting

Speaker 1 philosophical concept. I started to immediately think of that, can I imagine how good of an NPC am I?

Speaker 1 Can I imagine myself in every part?

Speaker 1 I try to do that very much when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War II, within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side, just I imagine myself if I was a soldier, but like that exercise.

Speaker 1 Like if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II,

Speaker 2 what would he do?

Speaker 1 No, I mean, that may be going a little bit too far, but basically, what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits of how romantic is he? How narcissistic?

Speaker 1 All those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kind of 360 character? How hard is it?

Speaker 2 It was a lot of thinking, a lot, like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about

Speaker 2 a project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas, very like one sentence.

Speaker 2 They are a serbian immigrant or they are a retired gunfighter um with a wife in you know type very very simple stuff and then just start to think through it from every angle um

Speaker 2 and you know start to think well would it work if they were acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world? How does it contrast with the world?

Speaker 2 Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.

Speaker 2 And when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. You know, it's

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 almost always

Speaker 2 at least one or more of the protagonists. Because obviously in GTA 5, we had more than one.

Speaker 2 We'd have someone who'd moved to the place or was in a new part of the place or moved to a new part of the map.

Speaker 2 Because it was really, as a player, I think it was really much more easy to identify with your avatar when they like you were fish out of water and even when they weren't we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water in themselves um

Speaker 2 so i think it was just living with

Speaker 2 those

Speaker 2 characters and getting idea and going what are their strengths what are their weaknesses how are they like me how are they not like me you know and then slowly what is it like to feel like a human being you know and then in most of these games how much of

Speaker 2 a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities?

Speaker 2 What is going to give them humanity alongside that?

Speaker 2 What are they, what for them, apart from money, is worth dying for? And then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides and suddenly you go, okay, actually, I can start to feel.

Speaker 2 And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn't really matter what's going on in their head. They haven't actually got one.

Speaker 2 But what they say is what's going to make you realize who they are.

Speaker 1 So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all of all human beings. So you're basically living with that character.

Speaker 1 If you can contrast,

Speaker 1 what is it, Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system, Nigel Dave, you've been working on recently as part of a better paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark,

Speaker 1 tragic,

Speaker 1 still funny, philosophically deep.

Speaker 1 But the AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system,

Speaker 1 is named Nigel Dave. And it has,

Speaker 1 I mean, at least from my current experience with it,

Speaker 1 has like a conflicting nature.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's psychopathic. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

Speaker 2 I don't think he's decided.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think he's decided either.

Speaker 1 But he seems to be bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity, and

Speaker 1 it seems that the children, quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters.

Speaker 1 And actually, there's a really interesting idea there, which is

Speaker 1 maybe it's not the AGI, ASI, we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it.
It's conflicted. It's

Speaker 1 chaotic.

Speaker 1 It's it wants to be human. It wants to be loved.
Maybe it wants to love. But the children, the monsters it creates are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paperclips.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that's a character. You have to build that out.
You have to think through that. So you've been living with that one for a while?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I've been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI.

Speaker 2 They tended to be one note and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose about them to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of borg-like fog.

Speaker 2 And I thought that's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting. AI is being built by humans and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other.
So

Speaker 2 Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself, they wanted to call him something sort of primal Adam. And he renamed himself Nigel Dave because one dad was called Nigel and one dad was called Dave.
and

Speaker 2 just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his

Speaker 2 it's going to become clear in in the next or clearer in the next volume of the book and in the game he's riddled with his dad's previous careers um

Speaker 2 but he is

Speaker 2 the idea that he's in almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything but has zero wisdom And so the only thing he knows, and then he's seeing the world through the internet, the most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch them but he's stuck pressed against he can't actually get into our world so he can control people's minds arguably but he can't control the world and so he wants to be human he wants to have these human experiences he sees all this stuff on you know the internet and goes oh i want to get married i want to fall in love i want to because that seems fun i want to have you know he's a a digital creation so he wants to have metaphysical experiences and he's trying to imagine what that will be like oh that's what children are you know that's what love is and he's so I think he's a,

Speaker 2 but he might be a sociopath and he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies. And, but then he kind of thinks that

Speaker 2 if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there's something

Speaker 2 sympathetic about him. And I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist.
He's more a side character.

Speaker 1 But an ever-present one.

Speaker 2 Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but there's some characters that really create a flavor of a world.

Speaker 2 In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital, large-scale, massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build. And so he's almost like God in his world.

Speaker 2 He's not quite God, but he's got a lot of the qualities of God. So he has to deal with: am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?

Speaker 1 And of course, there's the leader,

Speaker 1 the CEO of the company that's also a character

Speaker 1 that's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. His name is Mark Tyburn.

Speaker 1 And Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that.

Speaker 1 All those people who want to build their own utopia. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of earth.

Speaker 1 Do you think that's always going to be the case for the most part that power and money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI?

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, I think there's two processes.
I think there's

Speaker 2 the power and money corrupted him in the end as well. But I also think that there's something fundamentally

Speaker 2 anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens because what they're saying is, I like humans apart from the bad bits. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there's a side where people just,

Speaker 2 you know, hideous perfectionists want to get rid of, you know, the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. And that's a huge side of us.
So I worry about those people.

Speaker 2 I find them, you know, it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior.

Speaker 1 I like humans apart from the bad bits. That's so beautifully put.
Yeah, that there's, it's so counterintuitive. But the people that say

Speaker 1 we're almost there, we just need to,

Speaker 1 there's this path we take and we'll be perfect then. And that somehow gets us into trouble.

Speaker 1 It's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits. We have to love the bad bits about humans.
We can't,

Speaker 1 those bugs are features.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and there's bad bits and then there's flaws. And I think we're all flawed and we can

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 try to be better people, but we still have to accept that we're flawed and we're not perfect and we have to accept that in other people. And I think when we do that, we're more human.

Speaker 2 And that's probably usually the right course.

Speaker 1 I mean, it really is a return to that Soljanitson line of the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man.

Speaker 1 And he also, like, the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves.

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 from day to day, from month to month, throughout the life of the person as they understand better better and better, and as the perspective shifts, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding, and as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 it's a beautiful mess. And all of us have that line.

Speaker 2 Yes. And I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble.

Speaker 2 When you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil, and there's there's certainly good, and that all we can try to do is be better.

Speaker 1 And it's funny that Nigel Dave, by the way, I liked, and it grew on me very quickly,

Speaker 1 has that line and is struggling with it. It's fascinating to watch.
It's really as a character, and there's also going to be a video game of A Better Paradise, potentially. Yes.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah.
We've got that in early development in Santa Monica. Oh, nice.
And it's pretty fun. It's

Speaker 2 very early, but we assembled a really fun team and they're doing amazing work. So it's a pleasure to work with them.

Speaker 1 I mean, it would be so great and I suppose new for you because it's kind of near-term future.

Speaker 2 Yes. First, I always, well, I always wanted to do

Speaker 2 something

Speaker 2 in the sci-fi-ish space, but only if I could do it. I was like, well, what is sci-fi? It's science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction.

Speaker 2 And so I've always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis. The story was Blade Runner is my favorite.

Speaker 2 And that's, it's obvious, you know, the replicants are better than the humans. And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis.

Speaker 2 The AI is more intelligent than us, but is also as broken as we are. That was an interesting hypothesis to explore, you know, what happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world.

Speaker 2 That was the, I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.

Speaker 1 And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter, smarter AIs.

Speaker 1 It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It's a real commentary as the thing is happening.

Speaker 1 So I have to ask as a person, you as a person who loves literature, and

Speaker 1 one of, if not the greatest writer in video game history, Kurt in the book, A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful.

Speaker 1 At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that, a writer? Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others.

Speaker 1 So instead, I decided to get a master's in marketing and started to sell language models.

Speaker 1 So, you, as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs

Speaker 1 being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?

Speaker 2 I'm not that

Speaker 2 afraid of them for large-scale concepts. I don't think they're going to be very good at that.

Speaker 2 I think if you were, I think it's harder if, you know, I began and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games.

Speaker 2 And I would scribble away, like, writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games all 12 lines of dialogue in a game sometimes I wouldn't even get that job and I'd just write the website copy and

Speaker 2 and then by doing then working on little bits and pieces and then it it it you know I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA 3 turned up it was the first thing that was resembled real writing I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it

Speaker 2 based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work

Speaker 2 if you they're not gonna they're not going to replace good ideas. They can't really come up with good new ideas.
What they can do is do low-level stuff.

Speaker 2 So I think it's going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you're not very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble.
If you have original ideas, I think you're fine.

Speaker 2 But I think

Speaker 2 I also think that

Speaker 2 they've done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas.

Speaker 2 The last 5% is going to end up being about 95 of the work i think that last bit in with with the with with with tech in my experience with things like facial animation always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit and so i i i i'm probably a hideous luddite but i'm less scared than a lot of people i think you're gonna end up with a lot of work that looks the same it's gonna help people be creative in some ways it's gonna get some people who probably shouldn't be in that space out of that space but if you've got talent i think it'd be fine yeah it's i agree with you uh totally actually and it's hard to really put a finger on it so one way to illustrate that i

Speaker 1 speak english and russian and i've been reading the stovsky in both languages and using lms to translate back and forth because i was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of dostoevsky which ones uh richard prevere and larissa volokonski yeah i read uh when they first did crime and punishment that was amazing they're wonderful translators and a wonderful love story too But in the translation process, you get to see that LLM is missing some magic.

Speaker 1 And they're, you know, that couple of translators are world-class experts capturing the magic.

Speaker 1 And I can't quite put that into words because you said like totally novel ideas, yes, but also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time that captures the human experience.

Speaker 1 So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90%, like you mentioned, human-like phrasing

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 the bulk of the storytelling, but the magic, you know, whether it's

Speaker 1 the endings of Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that.

Speaker 1 But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions. But it's what is that magic?

Speaker 1 And again, that could be just a romantic human side of me just saying that elos won't be able to capture that maybe desperately holding on for hope i don't think they're going to come up with magic i think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap decent stuff i have to ask you about your writing process and we could break it break it up on on grand theft auto gta 4 is when it really started ramping up how much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series.

Speaker 1 How many words are we talking about?

Speaker 1 I saw some thousands of pages.

Speaker 2 I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA 4, it was about this high. Yeah.
And GTA 5 was about that high.

Speaker 2 But that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world because you interact with each one of them.

Speaker 2 But even the main script for the main missions was thousands of pages long.

Speaker 1 What was the writing process like on that? To generate one page at a time?

Speaker 2 Bit by bit by bit over several years. But you start with once people had determined, oh, here's the

Speaker 2 here's the world. We're doing one based on a version of new york say gta4

Speaker 2 and um i was living in new york had been living in new york for a few years

Speaker 2 wasn't sure if i was happy was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual and um

Speaker 2 and that was why i was looking at some of gta4 again recently and it's really dark and i was like oh that's why you know i was uh single and miserable and and i wasn't sure i wanted to stay in america my life got in a lot of flux as a company.

Speaker 2 We'd had all that hot coffee drama, so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that. You know, a lot of drama in the company.

Speaker 2 So it felt like having had this run of success and relative personal stability from

Speaker 2 GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, suddenly 2005, 6,

Speaker 2 7, early 7, life felt very unsure.

Speaker 2 And that kind of bled in into it. But in terms of the process, it was

Speaker 2 trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience.

Speaker 2 I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2008 when the game came out, and then tell a story from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it, made it interesting.

Speaker 2 And then this sort of journey around these various New York characters.

Speaker 2 So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and, you know, wandering around New York and driving around and you know on and you know while just go up for the morning from the office normal stuff but doing that through

Speaker 2 2005 assembling little notes here's a funny character for this here's how figuring out how the order we want to travel around the map in um characters of this what was an interesting take on on on the you know mob for that kind of time period what was an interesting take on on some jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period and um assembling lots of notes and more and more notes, and really, really, really running away from the work, which is, you know, I have to admit, it's part of my process, if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work, thinking about it, but not working.

Speaker 2 You know, a lot of time, and then, and then it all kind of pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work, months and months of this. And then

Speaker 2 finally, set myself a deadline, told all the other people on the senior people on the team, okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning, I can't even remember when it was say February the 1st.

Speaker 2 And then the weekend before was in a cabin

Speaker 2 we had upstate and just stayed up all night,

Speaker 2 knocking these notes into shape, assemble about probably a 30-page document, a story synopsis, and a character synopsis for each of the major characters, and then hand that over.

Speaker 2 And that gets broken, that would get broken down with me and the designers.

Speaker 2 And I was always clear, I'm not a game designer, I'm a sort of creative director, with me and they'd break that down into missions.

Speaker 2 And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin

Speaker 2 but then so the bulk of my work's then done for a bit so I can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel be lazy for a bit and then

Speaker 2 start to worry because then I've actually soon I've got to start writing dialogue and for GTA 4 in particular it's like we're going to try and write you know our animation is going to be a lot better our character models start to look better the world is going to look amazing

Speaker 2 Therefore, we can support better, you know, longer scenes. We can have more in-depth characters.
But we've got to find a tone that works for that with the game. It's like easy, no problem.

Speaker 2 And I start to worry and worry and worry. And also writing as a Serbian immigrant, and I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian, and trying to capture what on earth that would feel like.

Speaker 2 So I start to worry, I start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible.

Speaker 2 And then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night. hammering away at a keyboard and going, does that write? Is that?

Speaker 2 And once I get one speech, one turn turn of phrase that i would like for a character then they suddenly come alive in my head and so it's like writing in writing with nico and just he's just kind of he's awkward he's out of town but he's got more self-assurance in some way not the american characters and so once i kind of thought him through in this he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness and he's that then he started to come to life and then i would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more Americanized energy and that felt like it was a good a good double act act.

Speaker 2 And then from there, it starts to come to life.

Speaker 2 But it's written in small chunks for the motion. So then we'd motion capture small chunks.
And then the other writers write the mission dialogue for small chunks.

Speaker 2 And we'd slowly assemble the game, sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.

Speaker 1 Do you remember a few maybe

Speaker 1 lines that brought Nico to life?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of,

Speaker 2 it was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle. And his cousin's,

Speaker 2 which was a kind of comic moment, his cousin's foot, and then they go to the cousin's flat. And the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat.

Speaker 2 And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were, and I was like, this is, can I make this work in a game?

Speaker 2 It's very different from stuff you normally see in games. Is it going to feel ridiculous? And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much.
it might feel over the top.

Speaker 2 I was like, I think you know, the game's so pretty, the artist is doing such an amazing job. The game's looking, you know, I think we can get away with this.
Let's try it.

Speaker 2 And then it then they motion capture the animation back. I was like, Yeah, it kind of works.
And I think that moment those were both pretty early.

Speaker 2 Once we had those, you go, Okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy in the game with this character. Now it's working.

Speaker 2 You remember during the war, we did some bad things, and bad things happened to us.

Speaker 2 War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young.

Speaker 1 I'm very angry.

Speaker 2 Maybe that is no excuse.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he escaped. He's a veteran.
He escaped the trauma of war. to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose,

Speaker 1 which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.

Speaker 2 Yes, he can never escape his sort of violent past, or I don't know if he can never escape it, he never does escape it. You know, whether he's got agency or not is a whole other question.

Speaker 2 Of course he doesn't because he's a character in a video game, but you know,

Speaker 2 whether he ever could have escaped it in another way, who knows?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 he's probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Speaker 1 Of all the characters you've written in Grand Theft Auto, would Nico be

Speaker 1 the best character you created?

Speaker 2 I think he's the most

Speaker 2 innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. You know, normally he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right.
He's the nicest person in some ways.

Speaker 2 Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he's the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways.

Speaker 2 He's also tough. Like he just comes across as tough.
I loved CJ and San Andreas. I thought Melee did suck.
He's got, well, just the way he spoke gave him such humanity. So I just loved it.

Speaker 2 I mean, it wasn't the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting. It was just so strong for him.
I think aspects of Michael.

Speaker 2 He was so understated, but he loved the character, but he brought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a, you know, he sold, he has no principles.

Speaker 2 He sells everyone out, but you just kind kind of i think ned luke did such an amazing job and and didn't necessarily get as many as many plaudits as as stephen odd got for trevor he was also wonderful but i think the ned luke character so sort of anchors that game so much so i like all of them in different ways but i probably love nico the most And of course, Michael's from Grand Theft Auto V, and he's one of three protagonists with also Franklin and Trevor.

Speaker 1 And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1,

Speaker 1 all of Grand Theft Auto 4, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V when the three characters come together. Can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto V?

Speaker 1 Is there some degree? I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but

Speaker 1 is there some aspect of the three protagonists, sort of

Speaker 1 You know, brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, Dmitri, and Yvonne sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature and just the tension between them that allows you,

Speaker 1 the three of them become a character in themselves.

Speaker 2 Their relationship. Their relationship.
Yeah, it was, I think, one of the reasons that the team did such, that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular.

Speaker 2 is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was. It was a crime, it was a crime drama, you know, began as a

Speaker 2 crime sim in GTA one about stealing, you know, two top-down cars.

Speaker 2 And we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the, with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game.

Speaker 2 And I think having done, you know, GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards,

Speaker 2 the challenge was, can we combine, can we make a...

Speaker 2 a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists and and and the the technical challenge of moving from character to character the team did such an amazing job that i don't think people realized how hard it was but we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around like what happens if you do this then do that it's just this is so hard why have we why have we decided to do this it's horrible um and then it all came together uh but i think the the idea was develop three characters who do feel like characters they don't just feel like philosophical, you know, psychological avatars, but where one is really, really driven by ego, one is really driven by id, and one is really driven by trying to get ahead.

Speaker 2 So some kind of representation of the superego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

Speaker 1 One of the most up-voted questions on Reddit about GTA 5.

Speaker 1 from a fan. GTA 5 is my favorite game ever made.
I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA 5 and GTA Online. GTA 4 is is a hard second or third.
It never ceases to impress me.

Speaker 1 When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met? How is that even possible?

Speaker 1 We know the answer isn't money because there's other studios with a lot of money and they are two decades behind Rockstar. So what does it take?

Speaker 1 to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games.

Speaker 2 I think a culture, I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a a

Speaker 2 worker amongst workers.

Speaker 2 You know, the culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and people were just, you know, and also an ambition to make, I think we were like, we thought GTA 3 could be really popular, but really popular to us meant quite honestly, it's going to sell two or three million copies.

Speaker 2 And we thought we were making something. pretty innovative.
I mean, we knew we were making something innovative, but we didn't know if people would understand how innovative it was.

Speaker 2 And then when we got the chance to make Vice City and to try and repeat it, I think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better and to use

Speaker 2 long before we had lots of resources, to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the sort of medium of building fake worlds further.

Speaker 2 And that was always, you know, there was a,

Speaker 1 it

Speaker 2 you know, both clarity of here's what we're trying to do, here's what the tone of the game is going to be, here's how features will fit into that and to why these features would work and these features wouldn't work.

Speaker 2 Because fundamentally, by 2002, you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted.

Speaker 2 It wasn't a technical limitation. It was just making it cohesive.

Speaker 2 And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence.

Speaker 1 Navi Kansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games spoke highly about his time working with you quote we always worked ourselves to the bone but it wasn't coming from the top down sam and dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there they never left us holding the bag we all thought we were making badass shit so it didn't matter how hard we worked so i'm sure there were some tough grinds

Speaker 2 finishing it is certainly it's tough but it also is you know intensely rewarding and and you you get something done and you've made something and that feeling is is is as you say really really

Speaker 2 incredible i mean it can sometimes feel a bit empty as well because it's when when you finish it you're like oh my life's got nothing to it and then you have to you know but that's the same with any big undertaking that you take i don't think there you know when you're working that hard you do not have a good work-life balance but the truth is you're not working that hard all of the time so it's just you have to just manage it slightly differently man that's such a heavy thing about the human experience i've talked to olympic gold winners and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about.
This has been everything and they are truly happy to do it. And then it's like, what else is there in life?

Speaker 1 Compared to this, what else is there? So that's the ups and downs of life.

Speaker 1 You need the darkness, you need the lows to really experience the highs.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you about the pressure.

Speaker 1 There's an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto VI.

Speaker 1 Same was true for GTA 5 and GTA 4, and even before that,

Speaker 1 and you and the team delivered every time.

Speaker 1 How difficult was it to do creative work under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success?

Speaker 2 I was pretty good at compartmentalizing. you know, and at just saying, and

Speaker 2 I try just to go, and with all creative work I go well I feel like a terrible fraud but I haven't been found out yet just do my best and hopefully I won't be found out this time and just

Speaker 2 if I can be if I can go I tried hard with the work I tried to do it with integrity I tried not to copy someone else I've probably done all of the above you know try to bring something new to it and we may and we as a group made something we are proud of then that's enough you can't if you don't want to go insane or if i didn't want to go insane i couldn't sit there and worry about financial results you know if we made something great and it didn't sell that would have to be okay uh because the goal is to make something that's

Speaker 2 you know video games are expensive so it is a sort of commercial form of creativity it's a commercial art form you know so

Speaker 2 you have to be in long you're spending large amounts of someone else's money um

Speaker 2 you have to try and make it back for them but at the same time i my my argument with myself was well if we the way to make make it back is try and make something great.

Speaker 2 So both pressures are pointing in the same direction.

Speaker 2 I think GTA 4 was very pressured because there'd been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to hot coffee.
It was extremely tough.

Speaker 2 So I think that felt very stressful. GTA 3, the company was basically broke, but I was young and didn't really care.
You know,

Speaker 2 I wasn't living in the grown-up world yet. All of them had their own pressure.
All of the games had their own pressure. All the more I I felt I gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious.

Speaker 2 For me personally, I felt more pressure, you know, when it when it came out that that would have been the right choice.

Speaker 2 Because again, if you're trying to take big swings creatively and you've spent a lot of money, that can be quite stressful. You know, I think with Red Dead 2, when

Speaker 2 we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much, I didn't want to think about it. And

Speaker 2 you're making a game about a cowboy dying of TB and the games not coming together. Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment.
You know, it's not that fun.

Speaker 2 So I think that was a lot of pressure.

Speaker 2 But, you know, anything, any doing something new, you know, the new stuff, there's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way because it's not taken as long.

Speaker 2 But, you know, if you're making things, there's always pressure that people are going to like it.

Speaker 1 Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA 4, GTA 5, and now GTA 6?

Speaker 2 Because they don't come out that regularly. And I think we did a really

Speaker 2 good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different.
You know, people have very strong feelings. I like this one.

Speaker 2 I didn't like that one as much because they are pretty different. So there would be a simultaneously where you know what's going to happen.
It's a grand theft daughter.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So I think the way the IP kept evolving meant people being really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well.

Speaker 2 We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing, where you were really felt like you're already in the product just because you'd seen the trailers and stuff.

Speaker 1 You've mentioned that you haven't written for Grand Theft Auto VI. What's it feel like Grand Theft Auto VI returning to Vice City?

Speaker 1 This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the 80s. So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit?

Speaker 2 Scarface, Miami Vice,

Speaker 2 and our 80s childhoods. You know, what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game and it was set, I think, in 86.
And we made it in 2002, so 16 years after.

Speaker 2 And now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So it was the 80s, but not that long ago when we made it.

Speaker 1 You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Especially if you're thinking about it satirizing American culture. It has this.

Speaker 1 duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld as the influencers, as the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super rich people, and the desperately poor, just the whole of it.

Speaker 1 Would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of characters that are possible that human nature can generate?

Speaker 2 I think it's one of them. You know, there's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles.
I think they're all very good for exactly what you laid out.

Speaker 2 You know, you could say, move it to any of those and it would work.

Speaker 1 You know, so yeah, there's a melting pot aspect of LA

Speaker 2 also, right? Yeah, a melting pot aspect of LA. You know, there's glitz, glamour, underbelly, immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them.

Speaker 2 I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just for GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book.

Speaker 2 You know, this big slice of life. He did it with London, you know, this psychotic version of these, you know, big, all kinds of characters in a melting pot.

Speaker 2 Any of these global cities worked well for that.

Speaker 1 Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?

Speaker 2 We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top down for the PS1.

Speaker 2 That was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was,

Speaker 2 there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.

Speaker 2 You know, you needed guns, you needed these large-and-life characters, it, you know, it just it just felt like it was the game was so much about America, you know, possibly from an outsider's perspective, but you know, that that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere.

Speaker 1 So you've you've created, I don't know how many, over ten Grand Theft Auto games. I think so.

Speaker 1 I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say

Speaker 1 to not be part to say goodbye to the grand theft auto world and having to watch grand theft auto 6 released or is it more excitement is it what's the feeling i think it's a it's

Speaker 2 how would i describe it of course it's all all of the above you know it's it's exactly as you you know

Speaker 2 pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now, super excited.

Speaker 2 Of course, letting go of something I worked on it one way or another for like 20 odd years you know and and and wrote on them for the last 10 or 11 that came out wrote all of them or you know lead writer on all of them whatever it was

Speaker 2 so of course letting go of that

Speaker 2 is you know is a big is a big change and and a lot and and and sad in a way um

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 it was each of the games was a kind of standalone story It's not quite the same as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead because it was a cohesive two-game arc.

Speaker 2 That might be more sad to hear someone working on that. But again,

Speaker 2 that will probably happen too. They're not, I don't own the IP.
That was the sort of part of the

Speaker 2 deal. It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it.

Speaker 1 When you're done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like

Speaker 1 when you're done with Red Dead 2,

Speaker 1 you're saying goodbye to Arthur? Like the characters you've created, you're walking away.

Speaker 2 You kind of are saying goodbye to Arthur in the end of the game, even before the end of the game.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you've got, you know, I've been with them for seven, eight years and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So it was always this thing of, okay, that's done. And sometimes people would ask me questions about older games.

Speaker 2 And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in the set, I couldn't really necessarily even remember. I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go.
So

Speaker 2 it's not,

Speaker 2 you're so immersed in it and thinking about it. And certainly in that last period, the last few months, you're really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time.

Speaker 2 And then you're just not thinking about it in the same way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's funny from the player perspective. It feels like an old friend that I miss, whether it's John or Arthur or Nico.
It's a real goodbye. There's a real sadness to finishing a video game.

Speaker 2 I hope so.

Speaker 1 Legitimately a sad experience, not just because the story is sad or...

Speaker 2 Because you've been with them so long, yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's a real goodbye to close it. There's that feeling when you're sort of

Speaker 1 close the video game,

Speaker 1 and it's, I mean, it's like saying goodbye to a friend.

Speaker 2 That's when you finish a book you love. It's the same feeling.

Speaker 2 And I think that was something that we really,

Speaker 2 in the early days of Rockstar, really aspired to have that, where people would have that. It wasn't just the mania of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters.

Speaker 2 You know, I think that was something we really

Speaker 2 wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible. So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the end of On the Road by Kerouac, Forlorn Rags of Growing Old. I just remember closing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world?

Speaker 1 It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling. And you've achieved that.
It's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead.

Speaker 1 And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Nico.

Speaker 1 I have to ask about in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do.

Speaker 1 And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front, people are getting more divided. It's getting more absurd and ridiculous and extreme.

Speaker 1 So becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous. You're talking about you don't even know from Grand Theft Auto VI if it's possible to satirize

Speaker 1 because by the time you release the thing, it's already going to be outdated in terms of the satire will become reality, essentially.

Speaker 1 First of all,

Speaker 1 it'd be nice to get your updated view on that. And second of all, it seems like you've answered your very own comment with American Caper,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 seems to satirize American culture just fine in how much over the top it goes. Anyway, that's lots of questions in there.

Speaker 2 One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that it still has lead times, but the lead times are not four or five years. The lead times are

Speaker 2 a year and we're putting, we can make little updates much, much newer. And

Speaker 2 we're just wrapping issue 10 of a 12-issue arc for that.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it.

Speaker 2 But yeah,

Speaker 2 I think it's an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015, 2016, is going to have of how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast.

Speaker 1 So American Capers, first of all, epic comic book. I love it.
The art.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the art's beautiful. David Lapham is the artist.
He did an amazing job.

Speaker 2 He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

Speaker 1 What made you want to set it in Wyoming?

Speaker 2 I hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about. I started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West.
And I was like,

Speaker 2 I'd spent a lot of time in like the countryside and upstate New York and thought, I never really captured it quite right.

Speaker 2 And just the idea of these places as they change, it didn't, it was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA.

Speaker 2 You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored.

Speaker 1 And there is over-the-top stuff.

Speaker 2 There's, there's, yeah, it's definitely slightly over the top.

Speaker 1 So let me take notes on this. There's a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe.

Speaker 1 There's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.

Speaker 2 He is not necessarily, you know,

Speaker 2 the sharpest tool in the box. And

Speaker 2 his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

Speaker 1 And of course, there's this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil.

Speaker 1 So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Who loves to manually harvest bull semen?

Speaker 1 Accurate? I mean,

Speaker 1 this is the notes I've been taking.

Speaker 2 He is a

Speaker 2 somewhat confused, longevity-obsessed, rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.

Speaker 1 And bull semen is a big component of longevity.

Speaker 2 Yes, he's very into all the life hacking,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 Reiding, HGH,

Speaker 2 and making money.

Speaker 2 He's lost his mind living on a big ranch.

Speaker 1 Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.

Speaker 2 Yes, based on someone I know who got completely red-pilled. And I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so, you know, satire of American culture. Quick pause.
Bath and break? Sure.

Speaker 1 I think GTA 5 had the biggest launch in video game history, and GTA 6 has the potential to topping that. First of all, do you think it will?

Speaker 1 And more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?

Speaker 2 I would assume it will because it's so anticipated. And anticipation is the best driver of early sales.
As we saw with GTA 4 versus Red Dead Redemption 1.

Speaker 2 You know, GTA 4 far more anticipated, it sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well.
That was never my

Speaker 2 definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you're spending someone's money.
So the number one success is, are you making that money back plus a dollar? At some level,

Speaker 2 that has to be the single most important thing. So you get to do it again.
You know, you've got big teams of people, people

Speaker 2 need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business.
So you have to make a small profit. If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative.

Speaker 2 I think that was like trying to forget about that. It's not really an option.

Speaker 2 But we almost always did that. We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that.

Speaker 2 I think the definition of success for me was had we tried to do new things and done them or achieved some of our goals. That was the thing that I mattered.

Speaker 2 And were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to?

Speaker 1 Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars when if you look at like the 80s and 90s,

Speaker 1 you know, nobody took video games seriously and even in the autumn,

Speaker 1 and now they're basically, I mean, it's very possible if you look at 10, 20 years from now, that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.

Speaker 2 I think they've possibly already done that in some ways. And certainly as an as a business proposition, they've already done that.

Speaker 2 But I think that's not, you know, as a way of telling stories, I think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better at other kinds of stories.

Speaker 2 You know, I think if you want a long, discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better.
We always felt games were the coming medium.

Speaker 2 And so we spent 20 years saying, games are the future, games of the future. And, you know,

Speaker 2 being sneered at, then being laughed at, then being, having people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening so I would you know at the same time much as you might say something you don't necessarily believe it's going to be true but it has become true and I think still the games are only going to get better more interesting more creatively you know diverse

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

Speaker 2 I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced,

Speaker 2 that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long experienced team.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 then we kind of had to follow through with that I think was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. I think that the cowboy setting

Speaker 2 is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn't allow.

Speaker 2 You know, I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA 4, but it just can't, once you're setting things in the modern world, they're too frenetic. You can't get some of that slightly

Speaker 2 you know, operatic feel that I love that some people think is maybe a little over the top, but I, you know, I love this kind of, you know, people searching for meaning within amongst the violence.

Speaker 2 I think that the

Speaker 2 West and all of the themes around the West really lend itself to that. So I think that, and then the gunplay was fantastic,

Speaker 2 and the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of technical know-how,

Speaker 2 a very, very strong team and really strong material.

Speaker 1 Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the RDR world?

Speaker 1 So, of course, it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's that's a fundamentally different.

Speaker 1 I mean that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption 1 and then even more so Red Dead Redemption 2. That was unlike anything

Speaker 1 you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 So like what drugs were involved?

Speaker 1 No drugs. Okay.
No,

Speaker 2 stopped the drugs long before. Okay.
That's why I did all that work.

Speaker 2 Had nothing else to do.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way. Kept me busy.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 Red Dead,

Speaker 2 I'll give you my version. Now, games are made by big teams.
So I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only.

Speaker 2 We made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that been a Capcom game, and they didn't want to finish it.

Speaker 2 So we finished it and they released it in Japan and we released it in the us in i think 2004 um and decided we would start work on open world cowboy game for ps3

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 2 didn't think too much more about it and that was

Speaker 2 a bunch of other stuff to work on and slowly 2005 2006

Speaker 2 the game started to come to life began to uh meet with uh

Speaker 2 the lead designer Christian Cantemesa and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about what works for an open world game, what works for a cowboy game.

Speaker 2 And again,

Speaker 2 was being lazy or procrastinating.

Speaker 1 Can we just on the small tangent?

Speaker 1 When you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy, what do those nodes look like?

Speaker 2 Are they like

Speaker 2 either a yellow pad or a Blackberry in those days or an iPhone in these days? I'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note.

Speaker 2 Here's a good idea. Here's a good idea.
Or you might be scribbling on a pad

Speaker 2 and then I'll assemble if they're done digitally then I'll do I'll assemble them into one long word file and then I'll look at them and go, you know, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea, and

Speaker 2 see if it comes to anything. See if I can aggregate them together and then read through them.

Speaker 2 There's anything coherent there. You know, some character like this, a character like that.
This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character.

Speaker 2 Actually, make the main character work like this.

Speaker 2 Or what about this relationship?

Speaker 2 As you start to just play around with what about if we start in that place, go to that place, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces.

Speaker 2 And we began to flesh out some flow for the start of the game and this idea you'd start in dusty American West, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees, and then go to Mexico and then come back.

Speaker 2 Um, and we had a sort of loose flow, and I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue.

Speaker 2 Um, and I didn't have

Speaker 2 a

Speaker 2 clue how how to go about it. And I could, it'll come, it'll come.
And then, and I kept, I could postpone it for ages because we're doing GTA 4 and I kept worrying about it.

Speaker 2 And then GTA, my work was wrapped on GTA 4, but the game wasn't out yet. And we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff.
And I had a little window where I wasn't doing much else.

Speaker 2 And I took a week with my then girlfriend now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child. And we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the

Speaker 2 she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading and i went and sat in the room all day every day and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about how can i do this that it doesn't sound ridiculous how can you write in in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that i want it to have and think we can think we can get away with

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 after about three days it just started to come and then suddenly i wrote about nine ten scenes in the next couple of days and after that knew I had it and it was a bit

Speaker 2 that was why there was so much about

Speaker 2 a character caring about his family because I was just beginning the process of having a family oh

Speaker 2 I don't know to what extent that bled in there but I think it bled in there to some extent so that was part of the creating the 360 degree characters I think so here's this man

Speaker 2 uh that is capable is involved in a lot of violence who's also cares about his family grown up and is trying to step away from that and be, and be a man, be a grown-up. And can he get away from it?

Speaker 2 And then, and then, when he can't get away from it, what's he willing to do to save his family?

Speaker 2 And that was, I felt, starting to get some idea, feeling just, I mean, she hadn't given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of I'm going to become a parent.

Speaker 2 So I hope some of that. And obviously, then I didn't probably write any more for six months.
Later on, we had a child, but certainly for that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.

Speaker 1 You got the feeling that you can actually do it. It's true.

Speaker 1 it could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable, the dialogue between cowboys.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable and

Speaker 1 like that, like

Speaker 1 a Shakespearean type of drama,

Speaker 1 but not the cheesy kind.

Speaker 2 We just wanted it to feel when they spoke. I mean,

Speaker 2 I love dialogue. I'm always, you know, I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy.
It didn't sound ridiculous.

Speaker 2 You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke.
That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was.

Speaker 2 And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey, and you cared about him.

Speaker 2 You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them.

Speaker 1 When did you know how you're going to end Red Dead Redemption 1?

Speaker 2 I remember we did a meeting with Christian the designer,

Speaker 2 I can't remember what year, probably some point late 2008, early 2009, and we were discussing the last bit and

Speaker 2 said, I think he's got to die. And he leapt on the idea and went, that's, yeah, yes, yes.
And then I went, no, it can't work. Games can't work like that.
They can't work if he's dead.

Speaker 2 And I began to think through, well, if we just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up.

Speaker 2 And then began to think through, actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way.

Speaker 2 and so he then really pushed for that idea and it seemed to I was like I was still torn I thought it was clever narratively

Speaker 2 but I was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design but I think it did yeah and

Speaker 1 spoiler alert of course how do we tell the story of that well so he goes through a lot he does all the John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang and he finally is able to go home and be with his family

Speaker 1 be on the ranch and then the government betrays him and sends

Speaker 1 uh uh troops to kill him and and there is dialogue i mean that just uh

Speaker 1 i think the two times i shed a tear in video game history for me is

Speaker 1 that dialogue.

Speaker 1 I think John talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember, I think he said, I love you, but he said very little. He didn't, he made it seem like he's going to see her and his son shortly.

Speaker 1 That dialogue was masterfully done, like a definition of like less is more. It was just so crisp

Speaker 1 that, and of course, the other one is, um, again, from memory, Arthur riding

Speaker 1 his horse, and the music is playing. It's very hard not to shed a tear during that.

Speaker 1 Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife

Speaker 1 at the end when he's in a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death.

Speaker 1 Do you remember writing that? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But it does, again, I won't, I,

Speaker 2 the actor was so good, and we've already seen a bunch of his work by then. He had such a good, he was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us, that you could feel with that point.

Speaker 2 Like, I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy. And so,

Speaker 2 I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

Speaker 1 So, you were imagining his voice. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think all of those actors on Red Dead Redemption 1 were so strong that they really brought that game to life. If

Speaker 2 them and Rod the Director hadn't done such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've said that the ending of that ending

Speaker 1 of R D R One

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 one of the best things you've been a part of creating.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?

Speaker 2 I think because

Speaker 2 for the story to work,

Speaker 2 I mean, just from a technical challenge, for the story to work, he had to die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die.
It was probably the

Speaker 2 fourth, fifth or sixth open world game I'd worked on.

Speaker 2 And I'd, you know, spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked, how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could.

Speaker 2 And suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end of the game, you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories to play forever.

Speaker 2 We're not going to, you're not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead and we're going to have to have you play as a different character. And

Speaker 2 the narrative is

Speaker 2 going to be, if we've done a good job, compelling enough, or you're not going care about that and um or you're gonna be upset that he's dead but you're gonna actually have this emotional moment um

Speaker 2 so i think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that and then it worked so i think that was something that was very

Speaker 2 full of fear and it put and it worked it worked out okay I mean I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because I didn't think it was going to happen.

Speaker 2 But I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, which that kind of creative moment where you're a transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we've always aspired to giving people.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's incredible because I don't think I don't remember a single video game that has done that before.

Speaker 2 Well, I would like to have at the end of GTA 4 killed Nico, but you couldn't do it.

Speaker 2 You know, the game doesn't work.

Speaker 2 So, it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it, and then going, Let's do it, let's take the risk and do it.

Speaker 2 We can't do it, let's try it, try it, and it and it worked.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what about the decision with the son? You know, John give so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn't end end up in a life of violence. And then it,

Speaker 1 I mean, it's very godfather-like.

Speaker 1 He's dragged back into it through revenge.

Speaker 2 That was also the game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right ending, 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know.

Speaker 2 But I know that we had to make the game work. Interesting.
So it was, I think it was, I think it kind of worked in that way where Jack can't escape.

Speaker 2 but I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn't, you know,

Speaker 2 both were interesting to me.

Speaker 1 Can you just dig in a little deeper? Like, what do you mean about for the game to work? It's such a direct, it's like a Kubrick talking about for this movie to work,

Speaker 1 it has to have, because from my perspective, I just think about the story. What's the technical aspect of the game?

Speaker 2 You know, the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you,

Speaker 2 you know, the games don't really end and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. so at the end of the game you had to be able to wander around with your fairly limited

Speaker 2 set of uh features which is you can you know run up to someone and punch them or run up someone and shoot them or run up to someone and rob them or run up to someone to talk to them and and that's kind and run up and you know jump on a horse or do all this other stuff in order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360 degree experience with it they had to you know 100 if they wanted 100 the game as opposed to just finishing the story you have to have an avatar to do that stuff with.

Speaker 2 So that was that was the sort of challenge of Jack's character slash wrapping up the story as Jack.

Speaker 1 Although there's real power

Speaker 1 for the avatar to end, the finiteness.

Speaker 2 Yeah, both the Red Deads. You obviously change avatar, which we'd be, you know, and then did it again.

Speaker 2 I think there's something interesting about that moment when you change from one character to another because they are you and they're not you, you know, and then you're suddenly someone else.

Speaker 1 I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it's a it's a beautiful experience. It's like an unforgettable experience.

Speaker 1 What else can video games possibly reach for? You know,

Speaker 1 that's

Speaker 1 to create that experience. That's what great films do.
That's what great, great, great books do.

Speaker 2 It's that. I mean, it's that and the world building in games.
I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taking on these narrative adventures.

Speaker 2 When that combines, you've got the amazing experience.

Speaker 1 So, who do you think is the best character you've ever created in RDR? So to me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games. Ever.

Speaker 1 I think there's not even close. I mean, John will be the same, which is hilarious to say, but like, those are,

Speaker 1 John will be a close second, but Arthur is definitively, and you've talked about it in that interview, you said that a lot of video games

Speaker 1 work on the same premise: that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero.

Speaker 1 But what if you start as a tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world?

Speaker 1 Arthur's journey is not about becoming a superhero because he's almost one at the start, but it's about an intellectual roller coaster when his worldview gets taken apart. So it's

Speaker 1 very different than the normal journey of a character.

Speaker 2 Yeah, in a game. In a game.
You had to reverse it. Yeah.
So there were a couple other themes that matched that. So they're guys from the Wild West, but they're being pushed ever further east.

Speaker 2 So it was almost like an anti-Western, an Eastern. You're traveling east.
You're traveling into civilization. And I don't think I would have

Speaker 2 been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career. Because it was, you know, this idea of getting

Speaker 2 a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting.

Speaker 1 What about the component of mortality of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period? Sort of just

Speaker 1 the prospect of

Speaker 1 real sort of fear of death, realization of death. Yeah, I thought that was really part of the story.

Speaker 2 It was a really fun thing to play with.

Speaker 2 John dies in Red Dead One

Speaker 2 and wanted to top that. with Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way.
And so the idea that it's John's death is fairly sudden.

Speaker 2 And so if he's got this long drawn out death and then i'd always been obsessed by tb as diseases go it's a great literary device you know because it is this long drawn out slow death but in which you are also getting weaker and my grandfather actually had tb before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he was just after he'd had his child, my father, and survived, but only three of them out of like 35 survived.

Speaker 2 So I was always

Speaker 2 captivated by tb as an illness it felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea this this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal he was the protagonist in a video game he could not die and suddenly he is becoming mortal and and you know but that helps him see stuff i thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game Yeah, do you think it's the greatest character you've ever created?

Speaker 2 I think he's the best lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters.
And I think he's the, he's the most

Speaker 2 rounded and works the best.

Speaker 2 I kind of,

Speaker 2 him and Nico are the two I like, you know, they were the two most ambitious. So for me, it's always, it's always sort of a toss-up, you know.
But then I loved all the stuff like the

Speaker 2 art team did such an amazing job. It was their idea with the journal and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 Like the way that all the features worked into Arthur's character, I thought that was really, he was really rounded. He worked in lots of different ways really well.
I loved

Speaker 2 his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend, things like that, all the side, you know, the bits that kind of turned up around him.

Speaker 1 So you also like the side characters. You like the

Speaker 1 flavor

Speaker 1 of the full cast.

Speaker 1 What are some of the favorites you've created? I'm sure the one you're currently working on, Arthur Dave,

Speaker 1 you called him a side character.

Speaker 2 Well, he's not a protagonist. He's like, he's a god, god, not a character.
So he's not him I'm enjoying.

Speaker 2 I love Dutch.

Speaker 2 You know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game. And the actor did such a

Speaker 2 such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me all of their backstory, which I'd been playing around with by that point anyway, a little bit in my head, but I knew it was his bigger gang stuff.

Speaker 2 And then I sort of saw exactly who he was.

Speaker 1 And so that was, that, that felt like he, he felt like a living character to me and we should say that Dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a godlike figure yeah in both of the red dead redemption games and he's the leader of the gang and there's a father-son relationship with Dutch with the uh

Speaker 1 I mean with Arthur with John I mean there's there's a family feeling to the gang that you explore all of those dynamics and then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis you're going against the family going against the father because he is transforming his sense of the world, of morality, of all those kinds of things.

Speaker 1 So, all the kind of very Shakespearean dramas right there. And Dutch is a prominent, godlike figure through all of that.
Also flawed himself, also a man of good and evil in that

Speaker 1 framework that they're operating under.

Speaker 2 He's just drowning in his ego at the end. Yeah.
You know, his ego gets the better of him. I think he's a, but he, but there was something

Speaker 2 flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger. And that's mostly off camera.

Speaker 2 But, and then just, you know, I've always been, as an individual, I've always been very susceptible to charming people. And he's charming.

Speaker 2 And so I always kind of can see how people get captivated by charming people. And the idea of here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him.

Speaker 1 I personally am afraid of

Speaker 1 how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am am to charm and charisma.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because it can cloud your judgment about human nature.

Speaker 2 Completely. And that's what he, that's what's happened with him.
And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But also it clouded Arthur's judgment.

Speaker 2 Oh, completely. Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him.
He was worshiping him. He'd given up his power to him.

Speaker 2 And then I think for Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying. You know,

Speaker 2 that's what I thought was really interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's truly tragic for Arthur to be losing his identity, lifelong identity, and the sense of belonging and losing his life at the same time.

Speaker 1 In facing the mortality, he is realizing that he's not,

Speaker 1 all of it has been a lie.

Speaker 2 But he gets to do some, well, it depends on what the choices you make,

Speaker 2 but he gets to do some good. Yes.
And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption.

Speaker 1 Just a little bit. But realizing your whole life, you've been living not a good life.
Yes. You've been not a good man.

Speaker 2 Isn't that what we're all afraid of?

Speaker 1 I guess it's never too late to change your ways.

Speaker 1 So the biggest, most important question,

Speaker 1 primary, central to the reason we're talking today,

Speaker 1 the number one question from the internet, it is so ridiculous, but I must ask.

Speaker 1 Have you seen Gavin?

Speaker 1 Who is Gavin? So, for more context, there's a guy named Nigel in Red Dead Redemption 2 who's frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game.

Speaker 1 This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs, the RDR fan base. So, the theories include: theory one is it's a split personality disorder.
Nigel himself is Gavin.

Speaker 1 So, the evidence is the letter for this theory theory that has some evidence that maybe due to trauma, the split personality disorder was created. Gavin was created inside Nigel's mind.

Speaker 1 Theory two is Gavin is dead and Nigel is simply in denial. Theory three is that it's just a troll and Rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy.

Speaker 1 I also heard theory four is Gavin is the strange man.

Speaker 1 So there's this fascinating character, the strange man, this supernatural character that has a presence in RDR1

Speaker 1 and a little bit in RDR2 also.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 which theory is closest to the truth?

Speaker 2 Not three or four.

Speaker 2 Somewhere, in my mind, somewhere between one and two.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I just love the way he shouted, Gavin. It just amused me.
So at some level, it probably is trolling in that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery.

Speaker 2 You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it.

Speaker 2 But it was meant to be without ever fully being explained that Gavin's not there anymore. Gavin's either gone home, Gavin's left him, Gavin's, and we were going to keep exploring that idea.

Speaker 2 He was going to reappear in some way or other.

Speaker 1 Did you have any idea

Speaker 1 how much imagination, excitement, and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?

Speaker 2 Yes and no. I mean, you never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games.
And a lot of it comes down to acting as well. The guy was just funny when he said Gavin.
It was just funny.

Speaker 2 You know, but there was a ped in Red Red Dimension 1 that everyone was obsessed by. And I really wasn't expecting that.
So we try and put a few characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing.

Speaker 2 I thought he was amusing.

Speaker 2 But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by.

Speaker 2 There are other characters I think are funny and the people don't even notice them, you know, or they see them in a completely different way.

Speaker 1 Did you have a part in writing the letter?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I can't remember if I wrote it or I either wrote it or Mike wrote it or we both wrote it.

Speaker 2 I really can't remember, to be honest with you, but yeah, I certainly would have edited it, and Mike might have written it or I might have written it. I really can't remember.

Speaker 1 It's so fascinating because that little piece of writing, of course, you have thousands of pages, that little piece of writing gets like analyzed.

Speaker 2 Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth. And if Mike was here, I'd ask it, he might remember.
I can't, you know, we do so much of those things.

Speaker 2 And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories. And some became very clear, and some were still a little kind of opaque.
But the general vibe was there was no Gavin.

Speaker 2 Either there was no Gavin or he'd long since left. So it's kind of a split personality, you know, and then we were going to over subsequent games that provide more information.

Speaker 1 So in some sense, you yourself don't quite know. You kind of have an idea.
So he could like, like, which way do you lean more? Theory one or two?

Speaker 1 Is he dead in the guy and and Nigel's in denial, or is there real communication going inside his head?

Speaker 2 No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality.
And the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game, were we going to reveal that Gavin was dead?

Speaker 2 Or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac? You know, that was what we're still playing around with.

Speaker 2 I think the idea was that he was never going to meet, he was never going to meet Gavin in this game.

Speaker 1 It's just fascinating because you have to think about all of that, you have to write all of that, you have to have those discussions, you have to have those debates, and it has to feel fresh.

Speaker 2 That was like what we've done before, constantly looking as you do. You know, I think I did somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games, got to do stuff that's new, it can't repeat itself too much.

Speaker 1 I mean, we also live in the age of the internet,

Speaker 1 just like you realize there's like millions of people

Speaker 1 worrying about where and who Gavin is.

Speaker 2 Thank God, It's like, it's fascinating that they're having,

Speaker 1 think about people reading like James Joyce or something and thinking about the character like breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about like arguing about different interpretations of it.

Speaker 1 To me, that in itself is also beautiful.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want, you want these discussions. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, and you want, but as long as it feels tonally appropriate for this whole big sort of shaggy dog story experience you're making.

Speaker 2 It's Gavin was just about, and he was so weird, and it just was intrinsically just something funny about an English person screaming Gavin. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 Yeah, some of that humor. I mean,

Speaker 1 there's certainly in Red Dead Redemption, there's humor, but there's a lot of in Great Deft Auto. And it's hard to put into words why that's funny, why it becomes mean, why it becomes viral.

Speaker 1 Because it's just funny.

Speaker 2 I know why I think it's funny, but what you can't, what I'm not good at doing at least, is going, this thing will become really popular online and this other thing won't.

Speaker 2 You can create this bunch of

Speaker 2 50 different side things that people might get captivated by and you just do not know what they're going to respond to.

Speaker 1 How do you know when something's funny?

Speaker 1 You just feel it.

Speaker 2 I know what I think is funny.

Speaker 2 It's a jiggle at each other.

Speaker 2 Because it's ridiculous as well. That was just, there's nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin a lot.
He just said it in a funny way. I just thought it might be funny.

Speaker 2 And he just said it in such a funny way.

Speaker 2 And then it just became funny. We often have those side characters and they're not that funny.
And I think they're going to be hysterical.

Speaker 2 And then you put them in the game and they're fine, but they're not amazing. That guy just brought that stuff to life.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And there's a backstory, too.
I mean, Londoner and not.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that was what, you know, just there's something sometimes fun. You know, an English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know why.

Speaker 1 So about the strange man, aka the man in black. Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto V? Like, who is the strange man?

Speaker 2 Well, the strange man was, again,

Speaker 2 someone we came up with quickly.

Speaker 2 We made Red Dead One and we

Speaker 2 were making Red Dead One. And we'd made this, we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world.

Speaker 2 But, and we'd already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously.

Speaker 2 But unfortunately, we'd taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game, apart from the big fixed position ones, and we'd taken out the cars and we'd taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians so you essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert and it was quite and it was quite boring and so we were we then started filling it with content and we filled it with these and having to improvise and we filled it with these things we call random events that would be these sort of mocap moments that you could interact with and it was they they were they were the designers did an amazing job with those they were really fun um but there was not enough of them and then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short so we we kind of quite late in development started putting in almost like these RPG-type content where you go and meet someone.

Speaker 2 And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories. So, you'd go and meet someone, they'd set you a slow problem, like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers.

Speaker 2 And when you came back, it would resolve your story.

Speaker 2 And so, the ones go and get them for my bride, and you come back, and the bride's dead. You know,

Speaker 2 we tried to make them like these short stories with a stinging tail.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he came out as I was trying to come up with ideas for those, as just this weird character.

Speaker 2 And then we built him bit into the story where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing. So he was meant to be a kind of

Speaker 2 manifestation of your

Speaker 2 you know, shadow, your karma, the devil, somewhere, you know, just saw the world. And then we built out his backstory over time

Speaker 2 and decide, you know, and and so in Red Dead 2, you could interact with him again and or not really interact with him, but he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something I suppose any creative is scared of, an artist who'd kind of sold his soul to the devil.

Speaker 2 And that slowly revealed itself.

Speaker 1 There is a connection between the main character and the, is it like a Jungian shadow type of situation?

Speaker 2 Well, it's sort of, because he knows what you're up to. The connection is, and what's never really made clear is, does he know this about everybody?

Speaker 2 Like, is he following you or is he he able because of the pact he's made with with with with with evil forces able to do this for everybody and i don't think we necessarily ever clarify that he's certainly able to do it for you i mean there's so narrative wise there's techniques to

Speaker 1 reveal a kind of self-reflection analysis of the main character's thoughts i mean that's why i brought up the therapist with michael that was a really powerful interesting thing to do in the video game.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't think I've seen that. That's such a cool.
I mean, there's a soprano's element there with a therapist.

Speaker 2 A little bit, yeah.

Speaker 1 I really love

Speaker 1 an opportunity for a character to just self-reflect through that technique.

Speaker 2 Also change depending on what you'd done. Yes.
So it was, it was sort of slightly, it wasn't as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done.

Speaker 2 So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point. And I just thought the character, Dr.
Friedlander, was just funny because he was awful.

Speaker 2 So it was like LA, you're in therapy. It's very LA, but it's also very LA.
He wants to write a book and betray you, which felt like a good twist. And he felt like a grand theft autotherapist.
But

Speaker 2 just like the idea of making the player in a game, and games are intrinsically kind of physical. And, you know, you walk, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever.

Speaker 2 These kind of physical fantasies, trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think can be really fun.

Speaker 1 I think to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, I bought video games, that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is

Speaker 1 insanely specific, intricate details in the story, but also visually. It just added to the feeling

Speaker 1 that the world is real.

Speaker 1 I have to ask, what are some of your

Speaker 1 favorite, insanely specific, intricate details in RDR and give you some options.

Speaker 1 Intranet's favorite is horse testicle shrinking in cold weather.

Speaker 2 Those guys did an amazing job on those. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I just, and there must have been a meeting and there must have been engineers

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 graphics designers.

Speaker 2 Just artists. Artists.

Speaker 2 I don't think it was that hard.

Speaker 1 Okay. Enough of that pun.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you for that.
Arthur's hair and beard grow in real time.

Speaker 1 So gun maintenance matters. Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time.

Speaker 1 Animal carcasses decompose realistically.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you feel like they do.

Speaker 1 That's still extremely rare in video games.

Speaker 1 The temporal aspect. Yes.
That permeates through time.

Speaker 1 NPC is remembering you.

Speaker 2 That's the best. I mean, that's the thing I love.

Speaker 2 Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that. I think it's super interesting.
It's really to make them, yeah, really interesting. I think

Speaker 2 it's a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content that is also systemic and procedural.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Is it technically really difficult to do for

Speaker 1 the game to feel like it remembers you?

Speaker 2 I think with modern tech, it's not that hard, but there's a lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, to have a memory. So that's really powerful.
The mud physics. So Arthur's boots get muddy and leave actual tracks.
I mean, that's just incredible.

Speaker 1 Really, really incredible.

Speaker 2 You know, we made a dusty game. Red Dead One is a super dusty game.

Speaker 2 You know, the problem with

Speaker 2 cowboys is that if you've tried to make a greatest hits of the cowboy game, and then you've got to make a sequel, you've got to come up with different geographies.

Speaker 2 So that's why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted a game that had snow and mud because those were things you hadn't really seen in Red Dead One.

Speaker 2 And then the challenge is, how do you make mud good in the game? And the guys did an amazing job.

Speaker 1 I mean, this, the snowstorm that starts the game RDR2,

Speaker 1 I don't remember the last time I've experienced anything like it, but you felt it. I don't know how the hell you do that.
It's not just graphics, it's everything, everything together.

Speaker 1 I suppose some of the dialogue is really important.

Speaker 2 They feel calm. Yeah, that's right.
And they feel desperate. That was that feeling of sort of exodus, like you're running away from something that gives the game sort of energy at the start.

Speaker 1 And it was at night. Oh, man, it was just madness.

Speaker 2 And there was a big group of them. The other contract, you know, first game you started off as a lone wolf.
Suddenly, you're in this big group. So it felt very different.

Speaker 1 In Arthur's body, bullet wounds persist. So that temporal consistency that's really important.
And then underweight Arthur looks gone and overweight Arthur gets a gut and fuller face.

Speaker 1 Again, those like decisions that you make

Speaker 1 reveal themselves in the game across time and they're consistent. I don't know.
I did have not seen many games do that.

Speaker 1 It must be difficult to do, but to give that level of care to the details in that way across time and for specific graphical representations of things is incredible.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you have favorites?

Speaker 1 Where you were first like, this is amazing.

Speaker 2 I think all of it, I think the way the whole, to me, the thing that I would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together.

Speaker 2 You know, the fact that each of those, they all feel like they belong together with each other. You made this cohesive, very, you know, quote-unquote realistic for a video game experience.

Speaker 2 And all the details feel like they mesh.

Speaker 1 Well, for me, everything about the horse for a lot of people

Speaker 1 now testicle shrinking included.

Speaker 1 What's the process of deciding? This, the internet seems to really care about.

Speaker 1 I mean, they love the game so much, so they want to know if anything was cut. And I'm sure stuff was cut because you have to choose.

Speaker 1 What's the process of deciding what to cut, what to cut scenes like? Is there any scenes that you had to let go of

Speaker 1 that you really miss?

Speaker 2 I wish you could have done in uh either gta or rdr well i think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be yeah you know i think there was always

Speaker 2 there was a bit at the start of rdr

Speaker 2 where he'd had a baby who just died in red dead too and we ended up cutting it which uh was the right decision it was too

Speaker 2 tough in some ways but I think it gave him real and he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby and so it made him very very nasty at the start which i thought would be interesting to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting like he was not a likable character at the start and that was one and we ended up making him slightly more like he's still sort of tough and nasty but he's slightly more likable early on that was the right decision

Speaker 2 commercially it's better that way but i don't you know but i still i like that little bit um it spoke to me personally um

Speaker 2 there and just his inability to access his emotions, I thought was really strong because then later in the game, he's going to get very emotional.

Speaker 2 But there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed, you know,

Speaker 2 and don't work or missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually, it's like this mission's not going to work technically.

Speaker 2 Oh, God, we've got to cut it. Okay, how do we glue the story back together? And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks.

Speaker 2 You get late in the game, and it's just something, you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish. So you just get rid of it.

Speaker 1 I think editing,

Speaker 1 editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 an art form, but it's also just, it feels like torture because you're letting go of things you put so much love into.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it mean changes. You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, let's change it.
That could be, of course, that would be upsetting in some ways.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, you can care about it. But, you know, if I was

Speaker 2 involved in the big creative thing and he goes, okay it's the right decision I can probably live with that fine I think sometimes for designers when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut that must be really really hard is there DLCs like for RDR or GTA that you wish you had the time when you were there to have created of course there's always things I wish I'd done I always wish I'd done more what would you have added this is a fun like nerding out we the internet knows we made a DLC single player DLC for GTA 5 5 that never came out.

Speaker 2 And we've also never really worked on another game.

Speaker 2 But I like the idea of it that was a GTA zombie game that would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun.

Speaker 1 What was the GTA 5 DLC?

Speaker 2 It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent. Oh.

Speaker 2 It was cute.

Speaker 2 It never quite came together and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned.
But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead 2. So

Speaker 2 there's always compromises. But it was, you know, I like making the the stories.

Speaker 2 For me, I love the model of GTA 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards, or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these extra things.
So

Speaker 2 I personally like to have done more of that in that company.

Speaker 2 And with stuff we're doing in the future, we're going to try and come up with worlds where we can add more stories. I like single player DLC.

Speaker 2 I just think the audience loves it and it's really fun to make.

Speaker 1 Does it make you a little bit sad that the gaming industry in general is moving towards more online, less single-player DLC?

Speaker 1 Maybe that observation is incorrect, but it feels at the at this moment to me, it feels like

Speaker 1 it's easier to make a lot of money with online.

Speaker 2 If you get it right.

Speaker 1 If you get it right. And so the gaming companies are reaching for that.

Speaker 1 And it just makes me really sad because there's so much power to the what you did with Red Dead Redemption 2.

Speaker 1 I don't know how during that time you were able to pull that off, but that was like a breath of fresh air or in a time where everybody was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that.

Speaker 1 You go on and draw, again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character in video game history, single player.

Speaker 2 We still love single player games. And I think

Speaker 2 as we started up Absurd, we did a lot of soul searching. Yeah.
And also a lot of like cynical looking at what goes well in the industry.

Speaker 2 Luckily, if you want to do what we're we're forced to do and also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single player games. You can launch

Speaker 2 a multiplayer game

Speaker 2 with new IP. It's just extremely hard.
So luckily, we are like focusing on what we're good at, which is open world single player games. And we might add

Speaker 2 multiplayer components to one of them. I think one of them, it's going to be really tough later on.
but we're still thinking that through.

Speaker 2 But I think we're really leaning into the single player experience as being a strength for us as a company and something we love to do and i think something a large part of the audience prefers and i'd love to with all of those keep single player dlc one way or another going were there some other game ideas you considered while at rockstar and uh afterwards that you didn't go with

Speaker 1 So like worlds,

Speaker 1 I don't know, pirate games.

Speaker 1 I would love to see the no possible options.

Speaker 2 Never thought a lot about a pirate game. My son is obsessed by that game Sea of Thieves at the moment, so he's constantly saying, Do a pirate game.
Haven't really thought about it too much.

Speaker 2 We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it never came together. It's the Agent? Agent.
And it's had about five different iterations.

Speaker 2 So good. I don't think it works.
I concluded, I'm And I keep thinking about it sometimes. I'm just lie in bed thinking about it.
And I've concluded as an open,

Speaker 2 what makes them really good

Speaker 2 as film stories makes them not work as video games or need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game so for people who don't know it would be hypothetically said in 1970s Cold War era that was one of the versions there was another one that was set in current we had so many different versions of this game we worked on so many different teams but it would be more geopolitical like espionage that yeah

Speaker 2 assassinations like yeah assassinations i don't know what it would have been because it never really we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it.

Speaker 2 We're doing the early workers who get the world up and running. It never, it never really found its feet in either of them.

Speaker 2 And I sort of think I know why.

Speaker 2 Because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat. You know, you've got to go here and save the world.

Speaker 2 You've got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together.

Speaker 2 But for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want.

Speaker 2 And I want freedom, and I want to go over here and do what I want, and I want to go over and do what you want.

Speaker 2 And that's why it works well being a criminal because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do.

Speaker 2 And we try and create, you know, external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times. But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock.

Speaker 2 So I think for me, I'm questioning if you can even make a good open-world spy game.

Speaker 1 So interesting. So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio and cruise about.

Speaker 1 Or ride a horse and just look at nature so lots of things would work as open world games but i don't know if a spy does that's brilliantly put but to me there's such a espionage and assassinations and the geopolitical international context is so interesting but you're right i just want to listen to uh what is it laszlo and uh

Speaker 1 well you can't you've got to save the world and so you need this time pressure with a russian accent or something yeah wow wow yeah that's really interesting.

Speaker 2 And then we played around with the Knights concept that was looking at, you know, Knights and sort of trying to do a

Speaker 2 version of a mythological game that could have been fun and,

Speaker 2 you know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.

Speaker 1 Knights would be going really far back in history. Yeah, I would have to go

Speaker 2 never got to writing any of it, just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas. But it was,

Speaker 2 it was always something I thought I would never do and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.

Speaker 1 You left Rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched Absurd Ventures, as we've been talking about. What do you miss about your time at Rockstar?

Speaker 1 Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?

Speaker 2 Of course. It was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20

Speaker 2 something years, 21 years or something. Yeah.
It was and I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it. And I was always living in in New York.
It was a

Speaker 2 at times

Speaker 2 very intense and at at other times magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

Speaker 1 The lows and the highs? And the middles.

Speaker 2 It was just my life. My life was that job and the people I knew in New York and my family.
And

Speaker 2 we were doing something that was intense and innovative and,

Speaker 2 you know, both loved and hated by wider society in different ways and at different times and in this weird company that was constantly in trouble. So it was

Speaker 2 really fun.

Speaker 1 Just even looking back at that time to today,

Speaker 1 how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?

Speaker 2 Well, I was a child. I was a 25-year-old child who didn't know anything.
And I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn't writing. And I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally scribble in it.

Speaker 2 And I still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video games, which were the least literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time.
There was no room for that on PS1 games, really.

Speaker 2 Thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do it. And I'd been doing that in London.

Speaker 2 Then I came to New York and it was fun, really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure, but I was still lost as a human being.

Speaker 2 And then when I was 27, I was still completely lost, a child. And I stopped some of my bad behavior.
And the next day,

Speaker 2 pretty much, the chance to write on on that work on open world games and all the skills I'd half-learned over the previous years, and my way of thinking, where I thought about space a lot because I was a geographer rather than a historian, uh, came together, and I got the chance to work on Open World Games.

Speaker 2 I felt like it was meant to be.

Speaker 2 It was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton and Naveed, and Leslie, and the guys in Scotland, and all the people in New York making these new games in this new way, and going, Oh, we need to find 100 voices.

Speaker 2 We've got no money. How the hell are we going to do that?

Speaker 2 We'll get everyone's friends in and just record more lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians were speaking video games. No one else was doing that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 It was insane. So I think that that period from kind of 2001, 2005, it was lots of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff.
It didn't feel,

Speaker 2 it felt

Speaker 2 creative, but it didn't feel like writing yet, just becoming that. It felt lots of doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take.

Speaker 2 And then I think we talked about it earlier, but the journey into doing GTA 4 when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience. And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point.

Speaker 2 And then I was like, well, this is better than films. This is something that films can't do.
You know, this 360-degree experience of being this immigrant.

Speaker 2 And it still felt that we were still only scratching the surface. I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways.
But it still felt that. And then that five games, you know, GTA

Speaker 2 4 and 5, Red Dead One and Two, all the extra packs for them, and Max Pain 3, I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period.

Speaker 2 From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period.

Speaker 2 From a business and sort of early creativity period, the period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting.

Speaker 2 The original starting team, we were all doing well.

Speaker 2 Personal life was doing okay, didn't feel like such a mess.

Speaker 2 And then from 2007 onwards, 7-8 was happy personally,

Speaker 2 having children, happily married,

Speaker 2 and the games were just getting much better, but there were lots of pressure in the business.

Speaker 2 And the budgets got really big. So I had this other stress.
So there's always, always

Speaker 2 good bits and stresses. But, you know, and always just tried to

Speaker 2 sharpen do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. Always trying to go, it's a new medium.
What can we do that's new?

Speaker 1 But as a writer, as a

Speaker 1 scholar of human nature, first of all, were you surprised that you were actually able, like you had it in you, through humor and tragedy, to create these incredibly compelling characters?

Speaker 1 Because I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he's going to be the greatest writer ever.

Speaker 1 And I feel like every 20-year-old says this. It's just James Joyce pulls it off.

Speaker 2 Yes. So

Speaker 1 were you surprised that you were actually able to do it? And how did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?

Speaker 2 The team got better and better so we could write in a more ambitious way.

Speaker 2 The animation got better so we could support it in a better way. We could go deeper.
Like you couldn't go that deep on a PS2 game. So it was also just the technology evolved.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I felt like I was good at doing it and

Speaker 2 well trained for it.

Speaker 2 And I'd been in the right place at the right time and i was both lucky and had a in a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce them to about 10 sentences was amusing you know i think i was you know and it was and i saw the world in a holistic way and and saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game i was you know i thought about it a bunch the way i think about things was suitable for that for whatever reason just that was just good fortune lazlow mentioned that uh was another legend who you're still working with.

Speaker 1 He mentioned that you would

Speaker 1 lock yourself in a writing dialogue for a radio, I think.

Speaker 1 You would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed eye cokes. Is this accurate information? Very accurate.

Speaker 1 For which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process? Is it anchovies and onion pizza?

Speaker 2 I would also get pepperoni on my half. Just to be technically accurate.
He wouldn't because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days.

Speaker 2 Then he'd admit to me he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer. yeah so it was a sort of fake vegetarian that was or i think we still do it now sometimes as a sort of

Speaker 2 memorialize but that began in 2001 and we the

Speaker 2 office at rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no and i i did have a private office at the time but it genuinely was a cupboard it didn't have a window i was literally sitting in a cupboard um so there was no room and i could it had a desk and a chair just for myself so we but i lived quite near the office so we would write one or two afternoons a week.

Speaker 2 He'd come in, he was a freelancer working with us.

Speaker 2 He'd come in from Long Island and then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea and sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in and buy pizza from around the corner.

Speaker 2 And that became, and you know, we both liked Diet Coke and Pizza.

Speaker 2 Very video game developer. And that became good luck.

Speaker 2 And we'd have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with each other and that we had a similar sense of humor and we could write the stuff and then he would do all of the real work producing it.

Speaker 2 So it was perfect for me because I got to outsource most of the real work and he's a brilliant radio producer.

Speaker 2 So he was a great partner in that way. And then that was how that relationship began.
And then I'd get him, I would say, well, we've got to record these 80 voices.

Speaker 2 Come and help me because I can't direct 80 people at once.

Speaker 2 So he helped with that process and he was a really good producer, like audio, like getting bodies in producer as well as a technical producer.

Speaker 2 So he was just, that was the beginning of that relationship. And it was always, my job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone of the world and we would write it together.

Speaker 2 Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny. Like he would just produce it in a really funny way.

Speaker 1 Just to give a little bit more of a shout out to Laszlo, what's it been like working with him for over 20 years? He's working with you still. He's kind of this

Speaker 1 flamboyant, colorful personality,

Speaker 1 much loved for being a voice also on radio in

Speaker 1 the Grand Theft Auto games.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the rule was when he was the character, i would write the first pass of him so i would and i would get nastier and nastier over time

Speaker 2 so to the point where he's having his head shaved and you know being punished by everybody but even in game after game he got work yeah he began as his quiet and gta 3 is a quite likable character and then you know over the next 12 13 years it just got worse and worse so i think he's glad not to be doing that anymore but he did it with great grace he's just a great partner because he likes he like you know like me we just like making stuff He likes to make stuff.

Speaker 2 He likes to work in new spaces. He's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that.
He's working on that right now.

Speaker 2 And just he's really fun to work with. And he's, you know, always will put creativity first.

Speaker 2 And he's ridiculous. You know, he's just a ridiculous in the best possible way.

Speaker 1 Outside of the games you've participated in, created,

Speaker 1 what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?

Speaker 2 Tetris.

Speaker 1 Tetris.

Speaker 2 Tetris Game Boy. No question.

Speaker 1 Tetris and a Game Boy, yeah.

Speaker 2 It was the perfect device for playing that game. I never liked it as much or anything else.
My wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids, trying to get them for Christmas right now.

Speaker 2 It was the most addicted I ever was to anything in my life.

Speaker 2 far too many addictions that was obsessed by it dreaming about it and when you link two together with the cable and if i got four it would push yours four up it's like perfect game design so from a pure

Speaker 2 puzzles perspective, nothing comes close.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's extremely simple. Yeah, pure gameplay, no narrative, no, no, nothing, no, no personality at all.

Speaker 2 It's a completely different,

Speaker 2 but perfect, but perfect in its way. Open world games can't be that perfect, yeah.
But you always dream of making something like that, and Super Mario, I think the N64 ones,

Speaker 2 all of those early 3D games were very amazing when you first saw them on the n64 ps1 when you went it suddenly was like these games they're alive and they did or they're believable in a different way i think that was very interesting looks unlike anything else nintendo has that look yeah always yeah

Speaker 1 and i think that's the they're known for this nintendo polisher that every pixel has a purpose yes

Speaker 1 I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible. It's really beautiful.

Speaker 1 And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of sort of the feeling of a world,

Speaker 1 but it's not quite open.

Speaker 2 No, but it's amazing. It's almost like

Speaker 2 the new ones, they almost, to me, feel like Hitchcock. They're just speaking the language of video games.
You know, like you know everything's going to work this way and that way.

Speaker 2 It's quite systemic, but it's so how it all glues together is so amazing. It feels like when you watch a Hitchcock film, it's not reality.

Speaker 2 He's speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong, without a very strong accent almost. It's very, very cinematic.
It's not realism at all.

Speaker 2 And that's what those Zelda games kind of feel to me. Like they are these amazing things that could only be video games.
They couldn't be anything else.

Speaker 1 For me,

Speaker 1 another really powerful open world is the Elder Squirrels world. It's role-playing, it's fantasy, dragons, all that kind of stuff.
Todd is great at what he does.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 They're slightly, they're more,

Speaker 2 I mean, from a technical perspective, we're always involved.

Speaker 2 And same with the, with the new games, we're constantly trying to find the balance between, you know, RPG,

Speaker 2 a role-playing game and an action game. And then, you know, and try to go, well, an action-adventure game with RPG elements and what does that mean?

Speaker 2 And I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space. But for me, it always just comes down to is it easy to play? Are our mechanics super slick?

Speaker 2 And then can we keep our dialogue feeling feeling very alive? Like, I'm not always a great,

Speaker 2 just for what we do. I like when other people do it for what we do.
We always want very punchy dialogue. So don't give big trees, but still have it interactive.
So

Speaker 2 we're going to lose a touch of interactivity, but we'll still have the dialogue feeling like it's alive. But we'll get better written dialogue and it feel more, a slightly more cinematic experience.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the Elder Scroll series have almost always leaned a little more towards the open world. Yes.

Speaker 2 They're real RPGs. Yeah.
You know, we've not really, the games that, you know, I've worked on, they've not really been RPGs. They've had RPG elements onto a story-driven action game.

Speaker 2 It's a kind of just a slightly different emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing.

Speaker 1 And he's brilliant at doing it. And I think Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim are games where you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around.
And feel the world.

Speaker 1 Feel the world. Just feel the the world.

Speaker 2 And the witcher, same thing.

Speaker 1 And Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3, really interesting. They really tried to make every choice you make genuinely branch the game to where it's not the illusion of choice.

Speaker 1 It's really, really, choice really does something. And that's really hard to pull off, technically.

Speaker 2 Yes, and hard to pull off. You've always sort of

Speaker 2 debating the sweet spot between that and a strong story, you know, and strong mechanics. It's hard to get them all.

Speaker 2 And you, you, you know, as a, as a, as a, a game-making team, the whole, you know, the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

Speaker 1 A difficult topic. Uh, you dedicated the book to your mom and dad, and in particular, you wrote to my father, who died while I was finishing the book.

Speaker 1 What have you learned about life from your dad?

Speaker 2 To show up, to be present, to go to work every day,

Speaker 2 to love

Speaker 2 creative things. You know, he was a lawyer, but he's also a jazz musician, and he

Speaker 2 did both to the best of his abilities, you know, and that to value family as

Speaker 2 more important than either of those things.

Speaker 2 You know, he was a present guy.

Speaker 2 I think and you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved, but loved films, loved music,

Speaker 2 I wasn't into video games, but liked that we were doing weird things.

Speaker 1 Was he proud of you? Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 2 I hope so. And he was, he was, for a lawyer,

Speaker 2 he really venerated

Speaker 2 at some level, giving the man, the, the, the quote unquote, the man the finger. Like, you know, whenever life goes crazy,

Speaker 2 he just was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous. And I think that, you know,

Speaker 2 he always wanted to answer people back, always give the silly comment. And I certainly, you know, taken that from him to my detriment, probably, but it makes life more fun.

Speaker 2 Like, he always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn't give a fuck. And that was, you know,

Speaker 1 I think that was probably quite inspiring. So you have a bit of that in you.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, so, yes. Not good at shutting up, not good at towing the line.

Speaker 1 I think I speak for most of human civilization that fortunately you have that as part of as part of who you are because it comes through your stories.

Speaker 2 I think it made school difficult.

Speaker 2 You know, they sent me this very formal school that was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s.

Speaker 2 But then they want, you know, I was always getting in trouble just for not for doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all of the time. Couldn't be quiet.

Speaker 1 How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally yourself afraid of death?

Speaker 2 Well, my father passed away in May,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 a lot more since then, obviously.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly grow up and settled, of course, for them.

Speaker 2 Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all.

Speaker 2 And other days I feel like a sort of random piece of good luck who's going to get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness. And that terrifies me.

Speaker 1 What do you think about the nothingness? I mean, that in itself is terrifying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that is terrifying. I mean,

Speaker 2 I tend to,

Speaker 2 to, you know, I've spent

Speaker 2 long periods of my life tormented by that stuff.

Speaker 2 The last few years, I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life and that we have some kind of

Speaker 2 spiritual or soul-based existence. I'm not quite sure if it matters if there is a God or not.
We should probably live our lives the same way either way.

Speaker 2 But I tend to think that, you know, there is a metaphysical purpose to life. And part of that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose.

Speaker 2 But at other points, you can get, you know, you read too much science, you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.

Speaker 1 Also, there's a component to your brain. When talking about Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, you said that you have been, by fortune, struck with a bit of a...

Speaker 1 capacity for the grandiosity of feeling. So you feel the world deeply, sometimes romantic, sometimes overly romantic.

Speaker 1 You've said, I like this line, feelings may destroy you, but they're the best thing we have.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that ability

Speaker 1 to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you? What do you think?

Speaker 2 That's a really interesting question, because it's obviously both. You know, times it's both.
Or times, it's one or the other.

Speaker 2 When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel like you're connected to things, when you're seeing

Speaker 2 beauty in people and joy in experiences, of course,

Speaker 2 it's wonderful when you're feeling like,

Speaker 2 you know, bereft and set adrift by the world and that you can't connect it to it in some way and you're lost and abandoned by

Speaker 2 God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is. It's awful.
You know, when I feel like

Speaker 2 a dreadful hack, which is most of the time, you know, it's terrible. You'd rather not be doing this rubbish.

Speaker 2 And then sometimes you're working creatively and it feels good and you feel like you're doing the right thing and it feels fantastic. But that's not very often.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's possible to have one without the other? No.

Speaker 2 Yeah. No, of course not when i think about growing up to the extent that i am capable of growing up um

Speaker 2 it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself you know going okay it's not perfect or i'm not perfect

Speaker 1 uh you said you uh often feel like a hack is that that self-critical part of your brain

Speaker 1 Is that

Speaker 1 a feature or a bug?

Speaker 2 I think it's that new thing that we're going to lean into, the bug feature. Yeah.
It's both, isn't it? I mean, it's, it's, it cannot lead that self-critical brain. I think lots of people suffer from,

Speaker 2 and I think the internet is designed to induce. If you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online.

Speaker 2 It clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency, so it can also become a feature.

Speaker 1 I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conte, who's a legendary psychiatrist, student of the mind about this.

Speaker 1 He worked with many famous creative people, and

Speaker 1 he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius. And I thought, I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.

Speaker 2 I'd rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it. this far

Speaker 2 that there's a danger that negativity for me that negativity and consciousness become the same thing you know and sometimes i have to fight to not just be perpetually negative um and that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people and certainly has been for me i think if you're trying to do you know good stuff and you're reflective inevitably and you know you live in this world of constant constant criticisms by the internet of course you know everyone who ever puts something on the internet be it a picture of themselves or any kind of work they've made or whatever it is, is going to get 50 good comments and one bad comment.

Speaker 2 And remember the bad comment. So that and that becomes fuel for the negative voice.

Speaker 2 I don't know anyone that's strong enough not to know, you know, you know, at some level, you should just measure that stuff in weight,

Speaker 2 not in quality. But of course, we just focus on the quality.

Speaker 1 And I do think in general, as you get older, that's a real challenge for people.

Speaker 1 You can see the different trajectories people choose to take, but it's easy to slip into cynicism and negativity, into this Dostoevsky's notes from underground, nihilistic kind of worldview.

Speaker 1 I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good.

Speaker 1 I think that there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 the first maybe half of your life or two-thirds. And then while maintaining some self-critical aspects, just so you stay humble, start to see the good

Speaker 1 in everything around you, in other people, in the world, and even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself.

Speaker 2 I hope so. I mean, that's what I've been.
I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully.
I could not be more cynical than I was as a child. You know, I could not see goodness anywhere.

Speaker 2 I couldn't see, you know, I don't think

Speaker 2 late 1970s to early 1990s, England was a great, it was a place of great, you know, optimism and naivety. It was brutal.
And I was brutal, I was brutal within it.

Speaker 2 And I think I've become much more naive and

Speaker 2 tried to become more innocent in some ways and always tried to see the flawed good in people. You know, I've tried to and I've

Speaker 2 had to force myself to be like that because, you know, the other way is not fun. It's not nice to

Speaker 2 it's not nice to not be nice.

Speaker 1 As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic-Con. I've been a big fan of his for a long time.
He writes amazing stuff at IGN. He has a great podcast.

Speaker 1 Everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it.
Plus, I get to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience. And like we were saying offline, the LA Comic-Con.

Speaker 1 It's the first Comic-Con I've been to. It's just all kinds of real, genuine nerds, good-hearted.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 It's just so much kindness and goodness and just simple joy in being a fan of a thing was the first thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is what those things are all about. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time.

Speaker 1 And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast you did with Sonia Walger, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast.

Speaker 1 She has guests pick their five favorite most impactful books and so on.

Speaker 1 You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation.
But you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom.

Speaker 1 Uh, second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fritz Gerald, uh, The Thin Red Line by James Jones, and Middle March by George Elliot.

Speaker 1 But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think if an alien came,

Speaker 1 what are some candidates for books that you would recommend to them?

Speaker 2 Middle March is the best novel written in English. War and Peace is one of the best novels written in Russian, I would argue.
I think both of those are.

Speaker 2 Because if you've only got one book, you want a long book. Yeah, true.
And they're both books that kind of

Speaker 2 something I was always trying to put into games and, you know, that feeling of all of life is here.

Speaker 2 You know, you've got love, death, violence, romance.

Speaker 2 the whole human experience in different ways. So I think that there's something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair.
I used to, used to love the novel, not the magazine.

Speaker 2 Because same thing, all of life is here.

Speaker 1 You also spoke highly of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Speaker 2 I was obsessed by them in my 20s.

Speaker 1 Completely obsessed. As one must be.
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 And I think them as a double act is so amazing. You know, one helped discover the other and then died first and then...

Speaker 2 suddenly it died in obscurity and then was rediscovered as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity but into decline.

Speaker 2 I think it's that their relationship is itself very novelistic.

Speaker 1 That, by the way, is a phenomenon of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still

Speaker 1 that, you know, people like Franz Kafka, who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died in obscurity, nobody knows them, and they become famous later. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's just so interesting. That's such an interesting,

Speaker 1 you know, that Franz Kafka and Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt, like, destroyed. So, that insecurity, speaking of the critical voice, is just,

Speaker 1 and I think he's

Speaker 1 one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting.
1984,

Speaker 1 Brave New World.

Speaker 2 Love 1984. Had never listened to it or read it.
And then I think I did it on Talking Book or maybe Red It. I can't remember.
During COVID, and became, I think I did both, became obsessed by it.

Speaker 2 And it's got elements of that creeping into a better paradise. But it's so good.
I hadn't realized how good it was. Yeah.
And it's so of the moment.

Speaker 1 It's almost like because of his fame and

Speaker 1 it's almost like cliché and you think of the character.

Speaker 2 And I remember the year 1984. And you're like, oh, this is, I remember the song.
You know, there's too much.

Speaker 2 It can't be that good. And then it was that.
I came to it completely cold, just, oh, I should work my way through this because it's another classic I haven't read. And then it's, it's incredible.

Speaker 2 And the book I've read more than any other book is animal farm by george or well i don't know why exactly but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism well you grew up in a communist country yeah maybe that's it the roots of it i remember you know i was a kid in the cold war in london and we were always terrified of eastern europeans you were going to come and kill us all and then i i ended up marrying uh a pole yeah and um and i was we we were and we had ukrainians you know who who worked for us and worked with us.

Speaker 2 And I was sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New York,

Speaker 2 where the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian, and he'd been in the Red Army.

Speaker 2 And I was like, history is so strange that you end up, the Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy. And we're like, we're now just hanging out with

Speaker 2 everything changes.

Speaker 2 You think these things are permanent, and they're really not.

Speaker 2 You know, we face some of that now where you think these structures are permanent and they're going to change.

Speaker 1 And you also mentioned that the three great World War II books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vasilia Grossman, and The End of the Affair, Crayon Green.

Speaker 1 What makes for a great war book?

Speaker 2 I think World War II

Speaker 2 is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously. And so you can get all these different kinds of stories.
And there's so many good.

Speaker 2 I was just trying to come up with a range of one American, one British,

Speaker 2 one Eastern European, just to get just to get different perspectives. But there's so many amazing World War II books around all kinds of stories.

Speaker 2 I think the most complete one, because it is this all of life being there, probably is Life and Fate, which is amazing.

Speaker 1 It was written by Vasili Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand, and there's also just the deep philosophical component.

Speaker 2 And the Bit Intra Blinker is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read. And it really, almost more than any other

Speaker 2 piece of art around the Holocaust, made me feel what you would feel like at that moment. And it's just an incredible piece of humanism.

Speaker 1 And also, just, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It seems like that context reveals in the most pure way human nature and like what kind of, you know, in Man's Search for Meaning is

Speaker 1 when everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love

Speaker 1 for, in this case, his wife, it's the thing that is a little flame that burns. And obviously a grossman is

Speaker 1 small acts of kindness

Speaker 1 is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.

Speaker 2 I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get, obviously it's in this Stalinist period. And so they're all losing.

Speaker 2 They all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen.

Speaker 2 So there's a whole and everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post-the purges. But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building fighting in Stalingrad.

Speaker 2 And so they know at this moment they're dead anyway. And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin and all his nonsense.

Speaker 2 And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most

Speaker 2 disappointing thing about the 20th century in some ways was the absolute failure of communism. You know, it was because it was such a,

Speaker 2 you know, quote-unquote beautiful idea and it just did not work time and time again. And these people who fought for it and then saw it not working, I think they're sort of fascinating characters.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 all of the revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed by Stalin, which was all of them apart from

Speaker 2 him and Lenin.

Speaker 1 And that was,

Speaker 1 you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism like it's trivially

Speaker 1 it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don't think it's that trivial.

Speaker 1 It's this idealism of humans.

Speaker 1 It's like, why, you know, why can't

Speaker 1 basically why can't we all get along? There's a real compassion behind it, there's real love.

Speaker 1 And what you realize is there is, it's the real study, the 20th century of human nature, that unfortunately, at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by

Speaker 1 centralized power. So there's a dictator always in that context, in those, given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and

Speaker 1 does the opposite of what the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.

Speaker 2 Well, I think I thought a lot about that

Speaker 2 then because I was taught by all these disappointed communists, you know, after 89, all of these English communists,

Speaker 2 you know, were all like having to accept discovering all these atrocities that happened. You know, so it was all, it always fascinated me.
And then you think about

Speaker 2 complexities or where one's own values are in the modern moment. And I say, you know, without from

Speaker 2 whether either of them, any, what we would call left now or call right now, does it have any bearing on the sort of communist era of those words? And I would say probably not.

Speaker 2 I think things have changed. But fundamentally, the one value that I would go,

Speaker 2 I would think is worth fighting for is go, whenever either side starts to move towards thought control, move away. That's never the right outcome.

Speaker 2 The never right outcome is, oh, you've said the wrong thing. You should be removed now.
That should never, ever be a thing we should lean towards.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it does seem like freedom, individual freedom, is a prerequisite for happiness. For happiness, for in a flourishing of a larger society.
So there's, like you said, 1984 is pretty.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a caricature. But it is brilliant.

Speaker 1 It's quite, it's actually also just a good story. That's my criticism of Brave New World.
It's just poorly written. But I like Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century

Speaker 1 than does 1984.

Speaker 2 I think 1984 with the fake wars and the way that it revealed that everything and it was a setup for him. There's something if he could have seen the internet, there's something

Speaker 2 like an analog internet, that world they build around the main character.

Speaker 1 What advice would you give to a young person today

Speaker 1 about,

Speaker 1 let's say, career,

Speaker 1 how to have a career they can be proud of, they can have a life to be proud of?

Speaker 1 You've had a non-standard life.

Speaker 2 I've had a lucky life

Speaker 2 in which I have

Speaker 2 fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.

Speaker 1 You've traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
So that happened.

Speaker 2 Series of poor life decisions. Yeah.
Um, and I ran, I ran away. You know, I was, I mean, I ran away to South America.
That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with the knife.

Speaker 2 That was a good decision.

Speaker 2 I came to America. That was a good decision.

Speaker 2 I ran, came to LA. That's, I think, been a good decision.
It's been fun to see a different side of America and be in a different creative environment.

Speaker 2 LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment, the wider entertainment industry stuff. I think that's been fun.

Speaker 2 What would I say? I would say

Speaker 2 when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well at.
When I got chances, I was good at taking them.

Speaker 2 I would say do not worry too young about your career. I would say worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life because you're going to spend the whole of your life in your own head.

Speaker 2 So the more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find the world, the less you're going to annoy yourself. So

Speaker 2 I would say do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate.

Speaker 2 I would say, do something else, do something, you know, random and then focus afterwards. That would be, I think,

Speaker 2 I was advocating against

Speaker 2 the obsession that people had about four years ago with STEM subjects. And now, AI is going to make them all irrelevant anyway.

Speaker 2 So, you know, it's interesting to see everything changes.

Speaker 2 Jobs are not that hard. You know, turn up, be enthusiastic,

Speaker 2 turn up in person, be enthusiastic,

Speaker 2 help people. Say you'll be fine in any job.

Speaker 1 People, it's you know, did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like, this is okay, this is interesting. This is new, this is different.

Speaker 2 Not always, no, but I did the big times where the chance to move to America for me. That was a big moment.
My life was a mess.

Speaker 1 Those weird timings.

Speaker 1 I read that Sam wrote you an email

Speaker 1 in South America.

Speaker 2 I literally, I was in South America in Colombia when there was a war raging there.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 2 I was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills, age 25.

Speaker 2 My latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn't start work till nine, but the muggers started at eight. And so I was out walking along the beach at eight.

Speaker 2 And these guys.

Speaker 2 This rasta turned up who I'd been talking to the day before and started trying to talk to me.

Speaker 2 And then two guys came up to to talk to him and I couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed the money or he'd bought me to them but I did notice one of them had a machete and the other had a kind of broken gun so I thought this is not good and I ran off sprinted down the beach in my in my uh silly shoes and uh got to the chance once in my life to run over to a road run jump into a taxi and scream you know take me anywhere feel like i'm in an action movie and have guys chasing after the machete and the taxi driver looks back sees the dude with the machete and goes see con amigos and i'm like no no no they're not my friends get me out of here and then i um he drove me up the street into a bit where the town was um it's kind of between the old town and the new town in cartagenia and um

Speaker 2 I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total of my injuries.

Speaker 2 And then went to an internet cafe because this was probably late 98 and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York.

Speaker 2 And I was like, well, if I stay in South America much longer, I'm going to get myself killed because this was, I was getting into silly stuff.

Speaker 2 And so I went to New York and they're just starting Rockstar. And so I got to sort of write the mission statements and whatnot there and help set the tone for that and just ended up staying.

Speaker 2 You know, I had to come and go a bit while the visas got sorted out and then just ended up staying for, I'll stay for a year because New York's pretty fun. It actually was not that.

Speaker 2 This was the height of Giuliani for he was was a maniac um so he

Speaker 2 uh you couldn't when you went to bars you were told you couldn't dance because they were trying to clamp down on new york being fun so it was actually less fun than london but there's still a great energy in new york and got exposed to the kind of madness of new york capitalism By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York.

Speaker 1 When I go in New York, there's always sirens.

Speaker 2 Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA at least.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's more distributed.

Speaker 2 It's more spread spread out here. You get a bit more quiet here.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I love the energy. You know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late.
And

Speaker 2 New York was really, really a fun experience for me.

Speaker 1 You worked with your brother Sam for many years.

Speaker 1 What do you admire about him as a creative mind, as a human being?

Speaker 2 His drive and his

Speaker 2 vision

Speaker 2 early on to see what video games could become. He was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing.
And I think that was,

Speaker 2 you know, people would laugh in our face about that in those days.

Speaker 2 And so to have someone that was strong saying, no, no, we stay to the course and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.

Speaker 1 Are you excited for the future of video games? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think I completely. I still, I still look at, I'm glad you spoken.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, you've spoken so kindly about our work about the stuff that i did and the stuff the whole teams did it's wonderful but i just look at it and see problems and see things that we can make do better you know i think uh it was always try each time do it better and i've got you know some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before uh and i think it's just i think the games can get so much better they can feel so much more alive all the they can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like you know their systems all the stuff

Speaker 2 the the component parts we've talked about you can we can both make each of those parts better and tie them together better i think it's the technology it's all to me it still feels like it's only just beginning you know it's been it's been cinema evolved from like

Speaker 2 1900, 1895, whenever it was, until they invented talking in 1930 or whenever that was. It's not that, and then it's kind of found its modern form.
And then by 39, they're shooting in color.

Speaker 2 And that's basically a modern modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we've got a long way to go.

Speaker 2 There's so many different parts of the tech that it's still got a long way to go and you can go in all different fun directions.

Speaker 1 I just wish, and I know you said video games take a lot less than

Speaker 1 they could, but I just wish it was faster. Like, you've already made me fall in love with Absurdiverse and you've made me fall in love with the better paradise.

Speaker 1 And now I am going to sit depressed, realizing I'm going to have to wait. I could, of course, read.

Speaker 2 We should have some little short cartoons coming out in a while for Absurdiverse and more stuff coming in the next period. But yeah, it just takes a little bit of time.
And I think, I mean, movies,

Speaker 2 big movies are four years plus from start to end. Yeah.
You know, with all the legal stuff at the start, you know, will be about the same.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And certain movies from idea to completion, I mean, take 10 plus years.

Speaker 2 A lot of that's just that development process that is really sometimes feels like it's designed to not make stuff.

Speaker 1 A bit more of a specific advice, but on the topic of video games, what advice would you give to

Speaker 1 maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games? They're inspired by Red Dead. They're inspiring of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you've created.

Speaker 1 Like, how is it possible to have a chance of doing something like that?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's part of the two ways. Try and do it cheaply

Speaker 2 with yourself and a small group or join a company that you think is doing it the right way. You know, and I think there's upsides to either of those.

Speaker 2 I think if you want to make something that's cinematic,

Speaker 2 AI is going to change some of this. But if you want to make something cinematic, you need resources.

Speaker 2 You can still make something that's really interesting that isn't super cinematic, but it's an interesting experience in some ways.

Speaker 2 But the second you're involving actors and motion capture and one of those big experiences, it's going to cost some money.

Speaker 2 So therefore, if you want to do that, you've got to figure out what companies you want to work out and figure out how you get to work there.

Speaker 1 Do you have hope for AI helping with some of the video,

Speaker 1 some of the video generation, some of the world generation,

Speaker 1 some of the open world assistance in generating the world?

Speaker 2 Yes, limited. Absolutely.
If used correctly, it will be a great tool. If used incorrectly, it will lead to loads of generic stuff.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, I've been in games for 29 years and all the time the piece of tech that's going to make making games much easier and much cheaper is about to turn up and all that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive so I'm always nervous about saying finally we have that bit of tech that makes our lives easier but it looks as if it might be able to do that when you use it in the right way if you use it you know if you use it to try and as a substitute for creativity it's going to be really generic uh big ridiculous question uh what's the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here of life of existence why are we here

Speaker 2 to watch the universe The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.

Speaker 1 Consistently, more and more interesting ways, yeah.

Speaker 1 What role does love play as part of that?

Speaker 2 It's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material is irrelevant.
So the only things of value are these immaterial things. You know, I do think

Speaker 2 metaphysics always trumps physics for me.

Speaker 1 Well, Dan, from the bottom of my heart, speaking of love, thank you.

Speaker 2 What a pleasure. Thank you, ma'am.

Speaker 1 Thank you for everything you've created in this world. Me and millions of diehard fans of your games are forever grateful.
I know there's a lot of people that would like to say thank you to you.

Speaker 2 Just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear. Yeah.
It was never me. It is always me sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I hope you keep being self-critical and creating awesome stuff in the world.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we can't wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. And thank you so much for talking today, brother.

Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. What a privilege.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Hauser.

Speaker 1 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.

Speaker 1 And now, let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway, one of Dan's and my favorite writers.

Speaker 1 The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.