Dan Houser

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 a single and miserable and i wasn't sure i wanted to stay in america my life thought 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 relative personal stability from uh gta3 vice city san andreas suddenly 2005 six seven early seven life felt very unsure um and that kind of bled into it but in terms of the process it was uh

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

I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2000 and when the game came out and then tell it story 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 off, you know, while just go up 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 want to travel around the map in um characters 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, 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, um, 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 remember what it was, say February the 1st.

And then the weekend before was in a cabin we had upstate and just stayed up all night, 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.

And that would get broken down with me and the designers.

And I was always clear, I'm not a game designer.

I'm a sort of creative director.

With me, it would break that down into missions.

And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin... The bulk of my work is then done for a bit so I can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and be lazy for a bit.