Dan Houser on Lex Fridman: How GTA III Made a Sim Feel Real

Lex Fridman 0:00 You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done. I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

Dan Houser 0:12 People searching for meaning within amongst the violence. I think that the West and all of the themes around the West really lend itself to that. And then the, the gunplay was fantastic and the horses were incredible. I think we got to spend... A smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game that I think was helpful. Like, we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.

Lex Fridman 0:38 You lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and-

Dan Houser 0:42 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 0:42 ... crushed Diet Cokes?

Dan Houser 0:43 Yeah. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 0:43 Is this accurate information?

Dan Houser 0:44 Very accurate.

Lex Fridman 0:45 Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA 6?

Dan Houser 0:50 I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating. The games always felt different, you know. People have very strong feelings. "I like this one. I didn't like that one as much." 'Cause they are pretty different. So you would... There would be simultaneously where you know what's gonna happen. It's a Grand Theft Auto, you know it's gonna be a game about being a criminal. But the way it's gonna be a game is gonna change quite a lot.

Lex Fridman 1:08 The number one question from the internet, it is so ridiculous but I must ask-

Dan Houser 1:12 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:13 ... have you seen Gavin?

Lex Fridman 1:17 The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest, most complex and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some, uh, incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games. That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super intelligent AI, American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world, and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action-adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being. I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Dan Houser.

Lex Fridman 3:03 You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in the late '70s and '80s, open world video games wasn't a thing, so you've credited, uh, literature and film as, uh, early inspiration. So let's talk about, uh, film first, if we can.

Dan Houser 3:23 Sure.

Lex Fridman 3:24 What to you are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time? Maybe films that were highly influential on you. I mean, Godfather.

Dan Houser 3:32 God- well, I think for me, probably Godfather II more than Godfather I, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather II. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho, I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the, uh, the sections in Sicily. So I think... And the bit, Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot, it's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.

Lex Fridman 4:04 How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing, how much is the cinematography, and how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got young Pacino.

Dan Houser 4:14 Well, Coppola 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. Well, 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 is 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, uh, uh, you know, define what you think about things. You know, it's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about The Godfather.

Lex Fridman 4:43 What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have, you have movies like 2001: Space Odyssey, slow.

Dan Houser 4:49 Yes.

Lex Fridman 4:49 It used to be, back in my day, (laughs) it used to be slower.

Dan Houser 4:53 Life got faster. Life just got... You know-

Lex Fridman 4:55 Yeah.

Dan Houser 4:55 ... as, I think as we moved from the '70s into the '80s, into the '90s, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker, you could show a look and just that meant you realized that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with, with modern, you know, high quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're rewatching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

Lex Fridman 5:28 Speaking of faster, life getting faster, uh, I'm sure another influential movie was, uh, Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right?

Dan Houser 5:37 Yes.

Lex Fridman 5:38 A mixture of crime and humor.

Dan Houser 5:40 And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. You see... You know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of ta- tail end of the '80s, early '90s more than any other film. And it's, it's so iconic. I- i- in some ways I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino, you know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people. You know, it changed everything. I mean, The Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas.

Lex Fridman 6:12 Yeah, Casino has...... first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.

Dan Houser 6:17 The look, the clothes-

Lex Fridman 6:18 Yeah.

Dan Houser 6:18 ... the music.

Lex Fridman 6:20 I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me, uh, is the meeting in the desert. I mean, just the drama building up to that between-

Dan Houser 6:28 Dig another hole. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:30 (laughs) Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city.

Dan Houser 6:34 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 6:34 It's one of the great Vegas films.

Dan Houser 6:36 I think the great Vegas film. There are bits that I always... that I love. At the end, when everything's wrapping up, and on the one hand you see the Robert De Niro character, he's still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the, uh, the mob bosses from, uh, back home, they're discussing all these people who, who, who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's that incredibly cold line where one of them... They're thinking about the, the old, uh, you know... I think it was the casino manager, and one of them just goes, "Ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?" And then the next thing, he's just shot. Right? The brutality of it all is just brilliant.

Lex Fridman 7:13 I don't know. I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors. You got, um, what, Nicholas Cage leaving Las Vegas? I mean, falling in love with a prostitute, you're also... (laughs) You- you've written some of the great crime stories ever.

Dan Houser 7:25 Thank you.

Lex Fridman 7:26 And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about being, uh, a bit of a romantic yourself, uh, appreciating the depth of love stories in literature, uh, at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and prostitute. He got an Oscar for that.

Dan Houser 7:46 I think he did for that, didn't he?

Lex Fridman 7:47 Plus there's the caricature of the drug world of, uh, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

Dan Houser 7:52 I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18.

Lex Fridman 7:56 Yeah.

Dan Houser 7:57 And I enjoyed the film, but I- I preferred the book.

Lex Fridman 7:59 Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?

Dan Houser 8:03 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. Um, but he's kind of... It's hard. I- if you, if you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.

Lex Fridman 8:19 Is this an American caper?

Dan Houser 8:21 No, it's in this animated show we're developing in the, this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdaverse, and it's in one of the stories in that.

Lex Fridman 8:29 What is Absurdaverse?

Dan Houser 8:31 Absurdaverse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open-world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated TV shows or, or possibly animated movies. We're still thinking that all through. And we're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment, and it's early days, but it's, uh, looking very exciting, and it's trying to be... Like, trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.

Lex Fridman 9:02 Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges, or is it pure comedy?

Dan Houser 9:06 I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours, it won't work.

Lex Fridman 9:17 Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.

Dan Houser 9:19 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.

Lex Fridman 9:34 And there's going to be an open-world video game-

Dan Houser 9:36 Yes.

Lex Fridman 9:37 ... in that world.

Dan Houser 9:37 Yes.

Lex Fridman 9:39 When?

Dan Houser 9:39 Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through.

Lex Fridman 9:42 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?

Dan Houser 9:48 That's an interesting question. I think if you... The scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way, why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building, in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. You know, these things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways, and I- I think, uh, I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 10:15 We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent-

Dan Houser 10:18 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:18 ... but, um, I have to, uh, return to some films.

Dan Houser 10:21 Yes.

Lex Fridman 10:21 Let me just list a few of my favorites.

Dan Houser 10:22 Okay.

Lex Fridman 10:22 So first of all, you said you love great war books-

Dan Houser 10:26 Yes.

Lex Fridman 10:27 ... and movies.

Dan Houser 10:27 Yes.

Lex Fridman 10:28 So we have to throw in, uh, Platoon from Oliver Stone and, uh, Apocalypse Now, for me at least.

Dan Houser 10:34 Of course.

Lex Fridman 10:35 There's more crime, fast-moving crime movies-

Dan Houser 10:39 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:39 ... like Scarface. I also love True Romance.

Dan Houser 10:42 Love True Romance. Possibly the best... One of the best scripts ever written.

Lex Fridman 10:46 Written, of course-

Dan Houser 10:47 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:47 ... by Quentin Tarantino.

Dan Houser 10:49 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:49 Uh, what do you love about True Romance? I think... I sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made.

Dan Houser 10:59 Yeah, I- I mean, I... 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 just... It- it's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about, like, you know, what do I... you like about films? It's the idea to be in a world. You want to... They're ne- they're not real. They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.

Lex Fridman 11:34 And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters, and I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with, uh, sort of legendary super racist, uh-

Dan Houser 11:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 11:44 ... uh, discussion.

Dan Houser 11:46 Rant.

Lex Fridman 11:46 Rant.

Dan Houser 11:46 And Dennis Hopper as your sort of dream dad.

Lex Fridman 11:48 Yeah, yeah, dream dad.

Dan Houser 11:50 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 11:50 And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on the couch.

Dan Houser 11:56 (laughs) Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 11:57 Uh-

Dan Houser 11:57 Gary Oldman-

Lex Fridman 11:58 (laughs) Gary Oldman.

Dan Houser 11:58 ... as a rasta. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 11:59 Yeah, and uh, you have, I mean, a real love story.

Dan Houser 12:03 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 12:03 Like a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.

Dan Houser 12:08 And it's just sweet. Their love story is very-

Lex Fridman 12:10 Sweet.

Dan Houser 12:10 ... sweet in that film.

Lex Fridman 12:11 Yeah.

Dan Houser 12:11 It's endearing.

Lex Fridman 12:12 The... Elvis is a character.

Dan Houser 12:14 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 12:14 It's kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the- the love, the-

Dan Houser 12:19 Yeah, and it's all crossed with Play Again Sam. So it feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

Lex Fridman 12:23 What about greatest war film? What, what, what would it be for you?

Dan Houser 12:27 Greatest war film, if I'm feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See.

Lex Fridman 12:32 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 12:33 Which is probably the most intense film ever made. And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always wanna 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, and works the best.

Lex Fridman 12:49 Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, I think, madness.

Dan Houser 12:54 Yeah, from your first-

Lex Fridman 12:55 Yeah.

Dan Houser 12:56 ... scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece and, again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue.

Lex Fridman 13:04 Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems. And, and there's different ways of doing that, um, and you've talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another, uh, book-

Dan Houser 13:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 13:17 ... and movie that shows that.

Dan Houser 13:19 Yeah, yeah, and I, I watched the movie years before I read the book, and I didn't understand the movie. 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 'cause the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way th- they're spread apart by ages in the book to assemble... I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. It would've been as 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. But it's, uh, still very beautiful, the film.

Lex Fridman 14:00 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.

Dan Houser 14:09 I think for me it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year, Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch.

Lex Fridman 14:15 I love Robert Redford. Rest in peace.

Dan Houser 14:17 That film, it's just, it's impossible to imagine any buddy film without Butch Cassidy.

Lex Fridman 14:23 Was Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you also? Has that im- impacted your writing on Red Dead?

Dan Houser 14:29 I, 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. You know, I, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit a- quite a bit about Westerns. And then it, it, 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 no more Westerns and just think about 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. And I think, uh, Red Dead 1 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, didn't just feel like more

Dan Houser 15:16 of the same.

Lex Fridman 15:17 From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love.

Dan Houser 15:24 Uh, I mean, f- no, films.

Lex Fridman 15:26 Films.

Dan Houser 15:26 Films was always the, was always... Well, what I loved first as a kid was films. Um, older... began reading books properly aged about eight. Was watching films long before that.

Lex Fridman 15:40 Nice.

Dan Houser 15:40 And then probably it was always bouncing between the two which I preferred. I think they're good at different things. Games, 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. Um, and I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They're responsive. They're alive. And that's captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun, or, you know, beating this, beating that, winning this, that was fun as well. Um, sometimes obsessively so. You know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I was, shoulda been studying, for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy. You know, and 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. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them probably as late as like 2001.

Lex Fridman 16:40 Oh, wow.

Dan Houser 16:41 And when I suddenly began to see, first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making 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," and that's when I really fell in love with... I, I, I could see it in moments, and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me.

Lex Fridman 17:12 Yeah, of course because you're a pioneer of open-world games that are so narrative-driven. So it's like you didn't have too many examples.

Dan Houser 17:21 Yeah, before that it was PS1 or befo- even before that, games looked terrible. You know, that you would be like, "It's eight pixels. It's a car." You know, it was not a car. 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 all they were about, you know, i- i- very surreal subject matter 'cause you couldn't make them remotely real.

Lex Fridman 17:44 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 17:45 And suddenly we had, we're able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive. And, and we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life. A- and yet you see you could tell a story in three or, you know, using time, in four dimensions, and that felt very inspiring.

Lex Fridman 18:07 Yeah, I think, uh, GTA III 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, th- there was like these looming skyscrapers, there was the 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-

Dan Houser 18:33 Yes.

Lex Fridman 18:33 ... in a way that didn't feel scripted.

Dan Houser 18:34 Yes, and it wasn't scripted. It was, 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, it was a, 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. Um, so you could push and see, and the world would push you back to, to what, what, in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this, I think the re- one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed.

Lex Fridman 19:09 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 19:09 Or I could act in quite a passive way, I could just listen to the radio, I could re- look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians and the world, not in GTA III, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. Um, and the world was there and existing, and so it was i- idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games, um, the idea of being a digital tourist, you know, you were in, you were in 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. Of course you had started it, but that feeling I think was, uh, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating was, "I'm in a, I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist."

Lex Fridman 19:53 So there's these, uh, two concepts that I was, uh, reading about, just to put names on them, uh, one is, uh, systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox, uh, video games, and the systemic is from the environment perspective, uh, which means that there is these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent, uh, behavior-

Dan Houser 20:17 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 20:17 ... and that emergent behavior is what creates the feeling like there's a living world-

Dan Houser 20:22 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 20:22 ... and then the sandbox aspect, uh, which is overlapping but different, it's from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything. And when those two things combine, the feeling like you can do anything and the feeling like there's a world that full, that, that is also doing anything it wants, that's a, creates this incredible feeling of like this w- world is alive.

Dan Houser 20:49 And I'm in it.

Lex Fridman 20:50 And I'm in it.

Dan Houser 20:50 And it's the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful, and I think with GTA III, you know, for me, it, it came at a really interesting time in my, my life (laughs) personally, and I was very able to engage in it probably the first time professionally, actually awake and do something, and, um, it, uh, 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 so as you, as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and m- and, and interesting.

Lex Fridman 21:26 Uh, there's often been attention to your work between, uh, an open world to have freedom, and then narrative...

Dan Houser 21:33 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 21:34 ... driven storytelling, and I think you've often, maybe always, gotten the balance right. So w- what is the, (laughs) what is the value of each and how do you get the balance right?

Dan Houser 21:47 Well, I think the, the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom, and, and certainly I think at various points, we, we, we, we debated or, or w- you know, I had theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other 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. I think, um, for me, I would always come back to going, story can be incre- if done well, can be incredibly compelling and it gives you some structure. So I think, uh, y- and, and something to do, and it, it helps you, fr- from a, uh, a game design perspective, unlock the features. It means we know the fe- the, the, the big features 'cause they, you know, essentially when you put someone in, 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. You know, playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience, the, the, even than reading a movie, you know, reading a book or, or watching a movie. You've got to engage in it properly, so how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world i- there's an art and a skill to that, um, 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, people are looking in their lives for story. I think story's very important and very powerful, and when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But it is a, you know, there is a tension always there. I think in, in a game like GTA IV, 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. I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead II, or when playing as Trevor in GTA V if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked, the character, absolute freedom because also you didn't want in any game, you don't really want to compel the player. If you're giving them freedom, you don't want to say, "Well, I'm giving you freedom, but then I'm taking away, 'cause you've got to be this kind of person when you're free."

Lex Fridman 23:57 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 23:57 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 its strongest so you, you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides.

Lex Fridman 24:10 But you felt that character's personality-

Dan Houser 24:13 Yes.

Lex Fridman 24:13 ... you felt the depth, you've actually m- talked about this, the really powerful concept of, uh, creating a 360-degree character.

Dan Houser 24:20 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 24:20 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-

Dan Houser 24:27 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 24:27 ... which is a really interesting philosophical concept.I started to immediately think of, like, can I imagine (smacks table) how good of an NPC am I?

Dan Houser 24:35 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 24:35 Ca- ca- can I imagine myself in every p- I, I try to do that very much when I...

Dan Houser 24:39 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 24:39 ...when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire-

Dan Houser 24:41 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 24:41 ...when I look at World War II, uh, 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, like if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II (laughs) , what, what would he do?

Dan Houser 24:56 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 24:56 No, I mean, that may be going-

Dan Houser 24:57 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:57 ...a little bit too far, but basically what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits of, uh, how romantic is he, how narcissistic? All those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kinda 360 character? How hard is it?

Dan Houser 25:14 Um, it was a lot of thinking, a lot, like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about... a project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas very, like one sentence they are a Serbian immigrant or they are a retired gunfighter, um, with a wife in, you know, uh, uh, type. Very, very simple stuff. And then just start to think through it from every angle, um, and, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world? 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. And when th- when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. You know, uh, it's, uh... so almost always at least one or more of the protagonists, because obviously in, in GTA V we had more than one, um, 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 because it was really, as a, as a player I think it was really easy to, much more easy to identify with your avatar when they, like you, were fish out of water. Mm-hmm. And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water themselves. Um, so I, I think it was just living with those 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 th- and slowly what is it like to feel like a human being, you know? And then in most of these games (laughs) , how much of, of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities? What, what is gonna give them humanity? Alongside that, what do they... what, what, what do they... what, 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..." And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally doesn't really matter what's going on in their head. They haven't actually got one, but what they say is what's gonna make you realize who they are.

Lex Fridman 27:30 So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all-

Dan Houser 27:37 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 27:37 ...of all human beings. So you're basically living with that character.

Lex Fridman 27:40 Then if, if we can contrast, uh, what is it, Niko 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-

Dan Houser 27:52 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 27:52 ...as part of a, A Better Paradise world which is more dystopian, dark, tragic-

Dan Houser 27:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 27:58 ...still funny, philosophical-

Dan Houser 28:00 100%.

Lex Fridman 28:00 ...deep. Uh, but the AI, AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, uh, is named Nigel Dave.

Dan Houser 28:08 Yes.

Lex Fridman 28:08 And it has, I mean, at least from my current experience with it, um, has like a conflicting nature. Um, maybe it's psychopathic. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

Dan Houser 28:19 I don't think he's decided.

Lex Fridman 28:21 Yeah, I don't think he's decided either. Uh, but he seems to be, uh, bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity and it seems that the "children," quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. Uh, and actually there's a really interesting idea there which is 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, and it's chaotic. It's... it tr- it wants to be human. It wants to be loved. Maybe it wants-

Dan Houser 29:00 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 29:00 ...to love, but the children, the monsters it creates are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paper clips. Anyways, 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?

Dan Houser 29:14 Yeah, I was living... I've been living with him for the last few years on and off.

Lex Fridman 29:18 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 29:18 I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one note and AI was sort of infinitely clever but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody and was just this kind of, sort of Borg-like fog.

Lex Fridman 29:32 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 29:32 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, and built by computer engineers, 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 N- so 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-

Lex Fridman 29:59 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 29:59 ...and one dad was called Dave.

Lex Fridman 30:00 (laughs)

Dan Houser 30:01 And, um, just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his... uh, it's gonna become clear in, in, in the next, or clearer, in the next, uh, volume of the book and, and, and in the game he's riddled with his dad's previous careers. Um, but he is... I... with the idea of he's inf- almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything but has zero wisdom.And so the only thing he ne- And then he's seeing the world through the internet. The most he can do to be in th- 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's, 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, goes, "Oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to..." 'Cause that seems fun. "I want to have..." You know, he's a, 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, uh, so I think he's a... But he might be a sociopath, and he might, he certainly has sociopathic tendencies. And, uh, but then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So, I think there's something sympathetic about him, and I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's gonna be the protagonist. He's more a side character.

Lex Fridman 31:27 But an, an ever-present one.

Dan Houser 31:29 Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally he sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.

Lex Fridman 31:34 Yeah, but there's some, some characters that really create a flavor of a world.

Dan Houser 31:38 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. 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?"

Lex Fridman 31:56 And of course there's the leader of the, the, the, the, the CEO of the company-

Dan Houser 32:01 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 32:01 ... uh, that's also a character. Uh, that's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. Uh, his name is Mark Tyburn. And Kurt, one of the employees-

Dan Houser 32:15 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 32:15 ... uh, of the company talks about Tyburn as, "He hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that, all those people who want to build their own utopia. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of Earth." Uh, do you think that's always gonna be the case w- for, for the most part, that power and money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI?

Dan Houser 32:40 Yes. I mean, I think there's two processes. I think there's, it, the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there's something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, 'cause what they're saying is, "I like humans apart from the bad bits."

Lex Fridman 33:04 Yeah.

Dan Houser 33:04 And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people, and I think there's a side where people are perfe- you know, hideous perfectionists, want to get rid of, you know, the, uh, the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty, and that's a huge side of us.

Lex Fridman 33:19 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 33:19 So, I, I, I worry about those people. I find them, you know, it's, it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior.

Lex Fridman 33:26 "I like humans apart from the bad bits." That's so beautifully put.

Dan Houser 33:29 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 33:29 Yeah, that there's, it's so counterintuitive, but the people that say, "We're, we're, we're almost there. We just need to, there's this path we take and we'll be perfect then-"

Dan Houser 33:40 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 33:40 ... and that somehow gets us into trouble. It's, it's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits, we have to love the bad bits about humans. We can't... That those, those bugs are features.

Dan Houser 33:50 Yeah, and there's, there's, there's bad bits and then there's flaws, and I think we're all flawed and we can really 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, when we do that, we're more human, and that's probably usually the right course.

Lex Fridman 34:12 I mean, it really is that return to that Solzhenitsyn line of, "The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man."

Dan Houser 34:19 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 34:19 And he also like, th- the full description of that is really powerful, which is, "The line moves as f- from day to day, from month to month throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better." And as the percep- uh, perspectives shift, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding-

Dan Houser 34:39 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 34:39 ... and as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection, so yeah, it's (laughs) -

Dan Houser 34:47 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 34:47 ... it's, it's a beautiful mess. And all of us have that line.

Dan Houser 34:50 Yes, and I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. 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 certainly good, and that, that all we can try to do is be better.

Lex Fridman 35:05 And i- it's funny that Naito Dave... By the way, I like the name. Grew on me very quickly.

Dan Houser 35:09 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:09 Um, uh, has that line and is struggling with it.

Dan Houser 35:14 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 35:14 It's fascinating to watch, but it's really... As a character, uh, and there's also going to be a video game of A Better Paradise potentially?

Dan Houser 35:20 Yes.

Lex Fridman 35:21 Okay.

Dan Houser 35:21 Yeah. We've got that in, uh, early development in Santa Monica.

Lex Fridman 35:25 Oh, nice.

Dan Houser 35:25 And it's pretty fun. It's, uh, ve- very early, but we assembled a really fun team and they're doing amazing work, so it's a pleasure to work with them.

Lex Fridman 35:35 I mean, it would be so great and I suppose new for you because it's kind of near-term future.

Dan Houser 35:42 Yes. First, I always, well, I always wanted to do something 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, a theory plus fiction.

Lex Fridman 35:57 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 35:57 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, the story was, Blade Runner is my favorite, and that's, it's obvious, you know, the, the replicants are better than the humans.

Lex Fridman 36:10 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 36:11 And so this I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis. The AI is more intelligent than us, but it's 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?That was the, I felt that we had a, a, a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.

Lex Fridman 36:36 And, uh, it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and smarter AIs. 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.

Dan Houser 36:52 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 36:52 So I have to ask as a person, you as a person who loves literature, and, uh, one of if not the greatest writer in video game history. Uh, Kurt, in the book-

Dan Houser 37:03 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 37:03 ... A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful. "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. So instead, I decided to get a master's in marketing, and started to sell language models." So you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives-

Dan Houser 37:27 Thank you.

Lex Fridman 37:28 ... in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to, uh, write in a way that looks awfully human?

Dan Houser 37:38 I'm not that afraid of them for large scale concepts. I don't think they're gonna be very good at that. I think if you were, I think it's harder if, you know, I, I, I begun and I, I was too shy to tell anyone I wanted to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away like writing manuals and, and writing on like PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialog in a game. Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job and I'd just write the website copy.

Lex Fridman 38:06 (laughs)

Dan Houser 38:07 And, um, and then by do- and then working on little bits and pieces, and then it, it, it, it, you know, I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA3 turned up was the first thing that re- resembled real writing, I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it. Um, based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, if you've, they're not gonna, they're not gonna replace good ideas. They can't really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low level stuff. So I think it's gonna be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you're not a very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you're fine. But I think, uh, I also think that the fir- they, they've done the s- sort of first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is gonna end up being about 95% of the work.

Lex Fridman 39:02 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 39:02 I think that last bit in, wi- 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'll be fine.

Lex Fridman 39:29 Yeah, it's, I agree with you, uh, totally actually. And it's hard to really put a finger on it. So one, one way to illustrate that, I s- speak English and Russian, and, and I've been, I'm reading Dostoevsky in both languages, and using LLMs to translate back and forth, because I was preparing-

Dan Houser 39:47 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 39:47 ... to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky.

Dan Houser 39:49 Which ones?

Lex Fridman 39:50 Uh, Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonskaya.

Dan Houser 39:53 Yeah. I read, uh, cri- there, when they first did Crime and Punishment.

Lex Fridman 39:55 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 39:56 That was amazing.

Lex Fridman 39:57 They're wonderful translators. And a wonderful love story too. But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic.

Dan Houser 40:06 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 40:06 And th- their, you know, that couple of translators are world-class experts-

Dan Houser 40:12 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 40:12 ... at capturing the magic. 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-

Dan Houser 40:24 Yeah, the phra- the phrasing.

Lex Fridman 40:24 ... that captures the human experience.

Dan Houser 40:26 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 40:26 So it, they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90% like you mentioned, human-like phrasing, uh, about s- th- like the bulk of the storytelling. But the magic, you know, whether it's, you know, the, the endings of Red Dead Redemption one and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that. But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds-

Dan Houser 40:53 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 40:53 ... of math competitions.

Dan Houser 40:54 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 40:54 But it's, what is that magic? Uh, and again, that could be just a romantic human side of me just saying that LLMs won't be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope.

Dan Houser 41:06 I don't think they're gonna come up with magic. I think they're gonna be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.

Lex Fridman 41:12 I have to ask you about your writing process. And we can break it, break it up. On, on Grand Theft Auto-

Dan Houser 41:17 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 41:17 GTA4 is when they really started ramping up. How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series? How many words are we talking about? I th- I saw some thousands of pages.

Dan Houser 41:28 I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA4, it was about this high.

Lex Fridman 41:34 Yeah.

Dan Houser 41:34 And GTA5 was about that high. But that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world. 'Cause you, 'cause you interact with each one of them. But even, even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long.

Lex Fridman 41:48 What was the writing process like on that to generate one page at a time?

Dan Houser 41:52 Bit by bit by bit over several years. But you start with once people are determined, oh, here's the, here's the world. We're doing one based on a version of New York, so GTA4. And, um, I was living in New York, had been living in New York for a few years. Wasn't sure if I was happy. I was going through a lot of (laughs) personal dramas as usual. And, um, 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, uh, single and miserable and, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay in America. My life f- are in a lot of flux as a company. We'd had all that Hot Coffee drama, so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that. You know, the, lot of drama in the company, so it felt like having had this run of-... success and, and, and relative personal stability from, uh, GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas. Suddenly 2005, '06, seven, early seven, life felt very unsure. Um, and that kind of bled in- into it. But in terms of the process, it was, uh, trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience that I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant (laughs) experience was in 2008 when the game came out, and then tell it, sorry, from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it, made it interesting. Um, and then this sort of journey around these various New York characters. 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 o- you know, while, just go up for the morning from the office. Normal stuff. But doing that through 2005, assembling little notes, "Here's a funny character for this, here's how... figuring out how, the order we wanna 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-

Lex Fridman 44:10 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 44:10 ... thinking about it, but not working, you know, a lot of time. And then, and then it all (laughs) kind of just pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work, months and months of this. And then, um, finally set myself a deadline. Told all the other people on, on, the senior people on the team, "Okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning," I can't remember what, say February the 1st. And then (laughs) the, the weekend before was in a, in a cabin we, we, we, we had upstate, and just stayed up all night, grab- knocking these notes into shape, assemble about probably a 30-page document, so story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters. And then hand that over, and that gets broken, that would get broken down with, with me and the designers. Um, and I was always clear, I'm not a game designer, I'm a sort of creative director. Uh, we mean to break that down into missions, and then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin... but then, so, bu- bu- the bulk of my work's then done for a bit so I can relax and, and, and offer opinions on other people's work and feel, be lazy for a bit.

Lex Fridman 45:10 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 45:10 And then, um, start to worry 'cause then I've actually, soon I've got to start writing dialogue. And for GTA IV in particular, it was like, "Well, we're gonna try and write, you know, our animation is gonna be a lot better. Our character model's gonna start look better. The world is gonna look amazing. Uh, therefore we can support better, you know, longer scenes." We can have more in-depth characters, uh, but we've gotta find a tone that works with that with the game. It's not easy. No problem. And I start to worry and worry and worry-

Lex Fridman 45:36 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 45:36 ... and, and then also writing as a, as a Serbian immigrant, and I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian. (laughs) And trying to capture what on earth that would feel like, so I start to worry, I start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible. Um, and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night.

Lex Fridman 45:54 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 45:54 Hammering away at a keyboard and going, "Does that right? Is that..." And once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. And so it's like, right then w- writing with Niko and just he's this 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 talked him through in this, he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness.

Lex Fridman 46:20 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 46:20 And he's, that... and 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. And then from there, it starts to come to life. And, and ju- but it's written in small chunks, uh, for the motion cap- so then, then we'd motion capture small chunks and then the other, other writer to write the mission dialogue for small chunks. And we'd slowly assemble the game sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.

Lex Fridman 46:50 Do you remember a few maybe lines that, uh, brought Niko to life?

Dan Houser 46:56 Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of... 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 f- it was so, which was a kind of comic moment, and his cousin's fo- 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. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were, and I was like, "Yeah, this is... can I make this work in a game?" It's very different from stuff you normally see in games. Is it gonna feel ridiculous? And I remember being very scared 'cause I thought it might be too much. It might feel over the top. But 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." And then it, then they motion capture it and the animation came out. I was like, "Yeah, it kind of works." And I think that moment, tha- those were both pretty early. Once we had those, you go, "Okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy in the ga- in, with this character. Now I, now it's working."

Narrator 47:55 You remember, during the war, we did some bad things and bad things happened to us. Huh, war is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry. Maybe that is no excuse.

Lex Fridman 48:18 Yeah. He escaped. He's a veteran.

Dan Houser 48:21 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 48:21 He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.

Dan Houser 48:32 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 nother question. Of course, he doesn't 'cause, you know, he's a character in a video game, but, you know, whe- whe- whether he ever could have escaped it in another way, who knows?

Lex Fridman 48:50 I think, uh, he's probably the greatest character for me, created in the Grand Theft Auto series. What... Of all the characters you've written in Grand Theft Auto, would Nico be the, the best character you created?

Dan Houser 49:07 I think he's the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. You know, he normally f- he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right. He's the nicest person in some ways. Um, 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.

Lex Fridman 49:31 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 49:32 Um, he's also tough. Like, he just comes across as tough. I loved CJ in San Andreas. I thought Melee did s- he's got the- just the way he spoke gave him such humanity, so I just loved... I mean, it not, wasn't the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting, it was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael, he was so understated but he brought the character, but he brought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a, you know, he's so... has no principles. He sells everyone out. You just kind of... I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job, and, and didn't necessarily get as many, as many plaudits as, as Steven Ogg got for Trevor, who was also wonderful, but I think the Ned Luke character's so, sort of anchors that game so much. So I, I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Nico the most.

Lex Fridman 50:17 And of course, uh, uh, Michael's from Grand Theft Auto V.

Dan Houser 50:20 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 50:21 And he's one of three protagonists with also, uh, Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V when the three characters come together.

Dan Houser 50:42 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 50:43 Can you speak to the, the Grand Theft Auto V?

Dan Houser 50:45 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:45 Is there some degree... I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but-

Dan Houser 50:48 A little bit.

Lex Fridman 50:49 ... is there, is there some aspect of the three protagonists sort of, you know, Brothers Karamazov-

Dan Houser 50:56 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 50:56 Uh, uh, Alyosha, Dmitri, and Ivan sort of using the protagonists to explore the, the spectrum of human nature and just-

Dan Houser 51:04 Yes.

Lex Fridman 51:04 ... the tension between them-

Dan Houser 51:05 Oh-

Lex Fridman 51:05 ... that's, that allows you the, the, the three of them become a character in themselves?

Dan Houser 51:10 Their relationship.

Lex Fridman 51:11 Their relationship.

Dan Houser 51:12 Is al- yeah, it was, it was, I think, one of the reasons that, that, that the team did such... that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular, 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 crime, a crime sim in GTA 1 about stealing, you know, 2D top-down cars, and we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the, with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And, uh, I think having done, you know, GTA IV, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big league character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards, uh, the, uh, the, i- the, the, the, the, the challenge was can we combine... can we make a, 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 (laughs) why have we decided to do this? It's horrible. Um, and then it all came together. Uh, but I think the, 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, so some kind of representation of the super-ego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

Lex Fridman 52:47 One of the, uh, most upvoted questions on, uh, Reddit about GTA V, uh, from a fan, "GTA V is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA V and GTA Online. GTA IV is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me. When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met? How is that even possible? 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 to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games and stories?

Dan Houser 53:24 I think the cult- I mean, certainly when I wa- when I was at, at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. You know, the culture was, was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and, and people would just, you know... and also an ambition to make... I think we were like... we thought GTA III could be really popular, but really popular to us meant quite honestly it's going to sell two or three million copies. Um, and we thought we were making something pretty innovative. I mean, we, we knew we were making something innovative but we didn't know if people would understand how innovative it was. And then when we got the chance to make, 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 this 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.

Lex Fridman 54:28 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 54:28 And that was always, you know... there was a, it was a co- it was, 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 so why these features would work and these features wouldn't work 'cause fundamentally by 2002 you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted. Um, it wasn't a que- it wasn't a tech- there wasn't a technical limitation, it was just a making it cohesive. Um, and then it was also just, uh, everyone committing to a culture of excellence.

Lex Fridman 54:55 Naveem Kansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker-

Dan Houser 54:58 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 54:58 ... 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.

Dan Houser 55:24 I th- 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 incredible. And it can sometimes feel a bit empty as well 'cause 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 are... You know, when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work/life balance.

Lex Fridman 55:50 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 55:50 But the truth is you're not working that hard all of the time.

Lex Fridman 55:53 Yeah.

Dan Houser 55:53 So just you have to just manage it slightly differently.

Lex Fridman 55:55 Man, that's such a heavy thing about the human experience. I've talked to Olympic gold winners and many-

Dan Houser 56:01 Mm.

Lex Fridman 56:01 ... of them face real depression after they win the gold medal.

Dan Houser 56:05 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 56:05 Because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about. This has been everything and they're so truly happy to do it. And then it's like, "What else is there in life?" What... (laughs) Compared to this, what else is there? So that's the ups and downs of life. It's... You need the darkness and you need the lows to really experience the highs.

Lex Fridman 56:27 Uh, let me ask you about the pressure. (laughs) Uh, there's an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto VI. Uh, same was true for GTA V and GTA IV and even before that, and you and the team delivered every time. Uh, how difficult was it to, uh, do creative work under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success?

Dan Houser 56:53 I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and it just saying... And, uh, uh, I try just to go... And wh- with all creative work, I, I, 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 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 tri- have probably done all of the above," you know, try to bring something new to it. And we made... 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... 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 you have to be in your mind you're spending large amounts of someone else's money. Um, you have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, uh, my, my argument with myself was well if we... The way to make it back is try and make something great, so both pressures are pointing the same direction. Um, I think GTA IV was very pressured 'cause there'd been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times, uh, due to Hot Coffee. It was extremely tough, so I think that felt very stressful. GTA III the company was basically broke-

Lex Fridman 58:21 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 58:21 ... but I was young, I didn't really care.

Lex Fridman 58:22 (laughs)

Dan Houser 58:23 You know, it didn't... It wasn't... I wasn't living in, in, in, 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 felt I'd gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious, for me personally I felt more pressure, you know, when it, uh, when it came out that, that, that would, that would have been the right choice. 'Cause 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, with, with Red Dead 2 when, you know, we, we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much I didn't even wanna think about it. And you're making a game about a cowboy dying of TB and the game's not coming together. Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment, you know, it's not that fun. So I think, uh, that was a lot of pressure. Um, but all... You know, anything, any... If you're doing something new, you know, the new stuff there's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book all... in the same way 'cause it's not taken as long, but there, you know... If you're making things, there's always pressure that people are gonna like it.

Lex Fridman 59:20 Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?

Dan Houser 59:25 Because they don't come out that regularly. And I think we did a really 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. I didn't like that one as much." 'Cause they are pretty different. So you... There would be simultaneously where you know what's gonna happen, it's a Grand Theft Auto, you know it's gonna be a game about being a criminal, but the way it's gonna be a game is gonna change quite a lot. So I think the way the, the IP kept evolving made people being really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well. We, 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.

Lex Fridman 1:00:06 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? This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the '80s.

Dan Houser 1:00:18 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:00:19 So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit?

Dan Houser 1:00:22 Scarface, Miami Vice-

Lex Fridman 1:00:24 Miami Vice.

Dan Houser 1:00:25 ... and our '80s childhoods.

Lex Fridman 1:00:28 (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:00:28 You know, the... What I realized quite a while ago unfortunately was that we made that game and it was set, I think, in '86 and it... we made it in 2002 so it's 16 years after.

Lex Fridman 1:00:40 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 1:00:40 And now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So it was, uh... The '80s were not that long ago when we made it.

Lex Fridman 1:00:46 You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.

Dan Houser 1:00:49 Oh yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:00:50 Especially if you're thinking about it satirizing American culture, it has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld.

Dan Houser 1:00:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:00:57 It has the influencers, it has the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super rich people, and, uh, the desperately poor, just the whole of it. Would it be like the perfect (laughs) city to explore the full cast-... of, uh, characters that are possible, that human nature can generate?

Dan Houser 1:01:18 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.

Lex Fridman 1:01:28 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 1:01:28 You know, you could, you could say, "Move it to any of those," and it would work, you know?

Lex Fridman 1:01:32 So yeah, there's a melting pot aspect-

Dan Houser 1:01:33 Melting, yeah, melting-

Lex Fridman 1:01:34 ... to New York also, right?

Dan Houser 1:01:35 Yeah, a melting pot aspect to LA. You know, there's-

Lex Fridman 1:01:37 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:01:37 ... glitz, glamour, underbelly, immigrants, you know, r- enormous wealth in all of them. 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. You know, this big slice of life.

Lex Fridman 1:01:56 (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:01:56 He did it with London.

Lex Fridman 1:01:57 Yeah, yeah.

Dan Houser 1:01:57 You know, this psychotic version of, uh, of these, you know, big, all kinds of characters in a melting pot. Any of these global cities work well for that.

Lex Fridman 1:02:06 Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?

Dan Houser 1:02:11 We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top down for the PS1. Um, 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, uh, there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger than life characters. It, you know, it, 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.

Lex Fridman 1:02:52 So, you've, you've created, I don't know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games.

Dan Houser 1:02:56 I think so.

Lex Fridman 1:02:58 I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say, to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and having to watch Grand Theft Auto VI released? Or is it more excitement? Is it... What's the feeling?

Dan Houser 1:03:12 I think it's a, it's... 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... Pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now. Super excited. Um, of course, letting go of something I worked on it one way or another for like tw- twenty odd years, you know, and, and, and wrote on th- the last 10 or 11 that came out, wrote all of them, you know, lead writer on all of them, whatever it was. Um, so of course, letting go of that is, you know, (laughs) is a big, is a big change and, and lot, and, and, and sad in a way, um, because it was, each of the games was a kind of standalone story. It's not quite the same as, 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. That might be more sad to hear someone working on that. But again, not nee- that, that will probably happen too. They're not... I don't own the IP, that was the sort of part of the, the, the deal. It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it.

Lex Fridman 1:04:20 The, when you're done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like when you s- when you're done with, uh, Red Dead 2, is it like you're saying goodbye to Arthur? Like the characters-

Dan Houser 1:04:31 Mm-hmm. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:04:31 ... you created, you're walking away.

Dan Houser 1:04:32 You kind of are saying goodbye to Arthur in the end of the game-

Lex Fridman 1:04:35 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:04:35 ... even before the end of the game. Um, yeah, I think you've got, you know, I've been with them for seven, eight years and, and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one.

Lex Fridman 1:04:44 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:04:45 So there's always this thing of, of, "Okay, that's done." And sometimes people would ask me questions and I, about older games, and certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in the se- I just couldn't really necessarily even remember. And I've got a pretty good memory normally, because you kind of have to let it go. So I, it's, it's not, it, it's... 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, and then you're just not thinking about it in the same way.

Lex Fridman 1:05:12 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, there's a real sadness to finishing a video game. Like-

Dan Houser 1:05:24 I hope so.

Lex Fridman 1:05:24 ... legitimately-

Dan Houser 1:05:25 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:05:26 ... a sad ex- not just because the story is sad or-

Dan Houser 1:05:30 Because you've been with them so long.

Lex Fridman 1:05:31 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:05:32 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:05:32 And it's a real goodbye to close it. There's that feeling when you're sort of closed the video game and it's, I mean, it's like saying goodbye to a friend. And it's-

Dan Houser 1:05:43 That's when you finish a book you love.

Lex Fridman 1:05:45 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:05:45 It's the same feeling.

Lex Fridman 1:05:46 Same feeling.

Dan Houser 1:05:46 And I think that was something that we really, in the early days o- o- of Rockstar, really aspired to have that, where people would have that. It wasn't just the mania of, of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters. You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible. So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.

Lex Fridman 1:06:09 Yeah, the end of On The Road by Kerouac, "Forlorn rags of grown old." I just remember closing that and thinking, "What the fuck am I doing in this big world?" It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling. And you've achieved, that's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead, and for me it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Nico. I have to ask about in that 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto-

Dan Houser 1:06:35 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:06:35 ... was, was trying to do. 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, so becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous. You're talking about that you don't even know if a Grand Theft Auto VI, if it's possible to satirize, because by the time you release the thing, it's already going to be outdated in terms of the, the satire will become reality essentially. Uh, first of all, 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 the American Caper, which- (laughs) Seems to satirize American culture just fine in how much over the top it goes. Anyway, there's lots of questions in there.

Dan Houser 1:07:26 One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are m- it still has lead times, but the lead times are not four, five years. The lead times are, you know, w- w- a- a year when we're putting... We can make little updates much, much newer.

Lex Fridman 1:07:40 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:07:40 And we're, you know, we're, we're just wrapping issue 10 of a, of a 12-issue arc for that. So it's not quite, it's not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it. Um, but yeah, I think it's, uh, 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?

Lex Fridman 1:08:07 So American Capers, first of all, epic comic book. I love it and the art.

Dan Houser 1:08:11 Yeah, the art's beautiful. David Lapham is the artist. He did an amazing job. He is a, he is a (laughs) wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

Lex Fridman 1:08:18 What made you set... want to set in Wyoming?

Dan Houser 1:08:21 I hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about. I'd started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West and I was like, "W- I'd spent a lot of time in, like, the countryside in Upstate New York and, and thought I'd never really captured it quite right." And just the idea of these places as they change didn't... It was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA. You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and under-explored.

Lex Fridman 1:08:49 And there is over-the-top stuff. There's, there is-

Dan Houser 1:08:51 Definitely. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:08:51 (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:08:51 Yeah, it's definitely slightly over the top.

Lex Fridman 1:08:53 So let me take notes on this. There's a, a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe.

Dan Houser 1:08:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:08:58 Uh, there's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.

Dan Houser 1:09:07 He's not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box, and his, uh, his, uh, his rather cynical boss is using his, uh, his religion and some of the mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

Lex Fridman 1:09:23 And of course, there's this (laughs) Shakespearean sort of two neighbors-

Dan Houser 1:09:26 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:09:26 ... situation, and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil. So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.

Dan Houser 1:09:36 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:09:37 Who loves to manually harvest bull semen.

Dan Houser 1:09:42 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:09:42 Accurate? I mean, I'm, uh-

Dan Houser 1:09:43 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:09:43 This is the notes I've been taking.

Dan Houser 1:09:45 Yes. He is a, um-

Lex Fridman 1:09:46 (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:09:46 He is a somewhat confused-

Lex Fridman 1:09:50 (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:09:50 ... longevity-obsessed-

Lex Fridman 1:09:51 Right.

Dan Houser 1:09:51 ... rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.

Lex Fridman 1:09:56 And bull semen is a big component of longevity.

Dan Houser 1:09:58 Yes. He's very into all the life hacking, uh, you know, roid- roiding, HGH, and, and making money.

Lex Fridman 1:10:06 And, uh-

Dan Houser 1:10:06 And has lost his mind living on a big ranch.

Lex Fridman 1:10:08 Uh, of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who, uh, sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.

Dan Houser 1:10:19 Yes, based on someone I know who got completely red-pilled, and I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

Lex Fridman 1:10:29 Yeah, so, you know, satire of American culture.

Dan Houser 1:10:32 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:10:32 Quick pause. Bathroom break?

Dan Houser 1:10:34 Sure.

Lex Fridman 1:10:35 I think GTA V had the biggest launch in video game history, and, uh, GTA VI has the potential to, uh, topping that. First of all, do you think it will? And more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?

Dan Houser 1:10:51 I would assume it will because it's so anticipated, and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA IV versus Red Dead Redemption 1. You know, GTA IV, far more anticipated, sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you're, you're spending someone's money, so the number one success is are you making that money back plus a dollar? It's, uh, at some level, that has to be, 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 b- 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. I think that was like... Trying to forget about that is not really an option. Um, but we almost always did that. We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that. 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.

Lex Fridman 1:11:51 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 1:11:52 That was the thing that I mat- Again, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to?

Lex Fridman 1:11:59 Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars when, you know, if you look at, like, the '80s and '90s, you know, nobody took video games seriously, and even in the aughts, and it, uh, (laughs) and now they're basically... I mean, it's very possible if we look out 10, 20 years from now that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.

Dan Houser 1:12:21 I think they've possibly already done that in some ways, and certainly as an, as a business proposition, they've already done that. But I think that's not... You know, as a s- 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. You know, I think, 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, and so spent 20 years saying, "Games are the future. Games are the future." And, you know, being sneered at, then being laughed at, then being every people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening. So I would, w- you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don't necessarily believe it's gonna be true. Um, but it has become true, and I think still that games are only gonna get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.

Lex Fridman 1:13:18 Uh, you said that Red Dead Redemption 2 in your opinion is the best thing you've ever done.I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

Dan Houser 1:13:30 I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, um, that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long experienced team. 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. And, uh, then we kind of had to follow through with that I think was helpful, like, we'd got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. I think that the cowboy setting, uh, is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn't allow. You know, I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA IV, 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, you know, operatic feel that I love. That, that, that some people think is maybe a little over the top, but I, I, (laughs) you know, I love this kind of, you know, people searching for meaning-

Lex Fridman 1:14:32 Mm-hmm.

Dan Houser 1:14:33 ... within, amongst the violence. I think that the, the, the West and all of the themes around the West really lend itself to that. So I think that, and then the, the gunplay was fantastic. Um, and the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of technical know-how, a, a very, very strong team, and really strong material.

Lex Fridman 1:14:51 Where did you have to go to in your mind maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually to be able to create the RDR world? So of course it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's-

Dan Houser 1:15:01 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:15:02 ... that, that's a fundamentally, uh, different... I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption one.

Dan Houser 1:15:11 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:15:11 And then even more so in Red Dead Redemption Two, that was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.

Dan Houser 1:15:21 Thank you.

Lex Fridman 1:15:22 So like what, uh, drugs were involved? (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:15:25 No drugs.

Lex Fridman 1:15:25 Okay. (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:15:26 No, no. Stopped the, stopped the drugs long before.

Lex Fridman 1:15:28 Okay.

Dan Houser 1:15:28 That's why I did all that work.

Lex Fridman 1:15:29 Yeah. (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:15:30 Um, had nothing else to do.

Lex Fridman 1:15:32 (laughs)

Dan Houser 1:15:32 Uh, so yeah open, open well video games were very good for my mental health in that way, kept me busy. Um, but uh, Red... So Red, I'll tell... I'll give you the, my version. Now games are made by big teams.

Lex Fridman 1:15:45 Yeah.

Dan Houser 1:15:45 So I, but I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. Um, we, we made Red Dead Revolver, decided that... Or finished Red Dead Revolver that being a Capcom game, and they didn't want to finish it so we finished it, and they released it in Japan, and we released it in the