Rockstar Games co-founder and former lead writer on many a Grand Theft Auto game, Dan Houser is trying his best to avoid GTA 6 so it doesn’t distract him from his own projects, including another open-world comedy in development at his new studio Absurd Ventures.
“I haven’t seen it yet,” Houser says of the biggest game of the year, in an interview with Variety. “I will try and avoid it because I always try and avoid stuff that’s going to distract or disrupt me creatively. And given that I spend a large amount of time trying to make open-world games, and the rest of my conscious time trying to figure out innovative ways to market them, I don’t need to see what other people are [doing]. I’m always trying to think about new ways of doing it, not sit there in some kind of comparison of what I would have done differently.”
Houser’s not singling out GTA, to be clear – he apparently doesn’t play many open-world games at all these days, but I imagine seeing GTA 6 would be particularly distracting, considering how deeply he was involved in almost every single game in franchise’s history.
His new company, Absurd Ventures, has multiple multi-media projects in the works. At least two of them are games. “One is an open-world comedy which is trying to really lean into comedy and character memory, and that we’ll have more information on in the next few months,” Houser says. The other is more of a “dystopian sci-fi about a video game development gone very wrong, and about a rogue AI that discovered sentience,” he adds. “But unfortunately, it was made by two people that didn’t like each other, so it doesn’t like itself.”
“It’s a privilege to be tied to stuff that was really successful and to have worked in great teams with great people and do innovative new things,” Houser goes on. “All we’re trying to do now is do a version of that for this period, and try and do it in a new way and see if there’s anything interesting we can say with new IP.”
Earlier this year, Absurd Ventures revealed some of the cast list for its AAA “story-driven” open-world project, Absurdaverse, featuring stars from 30 Rock and Billions.