Dan Houser

he was so understated but he loved the character but he brought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed who is such a you know he sold has no principles he sells everyone out we just kind of i think ned luke did such an amazing job and and didn't necessarily get as many as many plaudits as steven odd got for trevor and he was also wonderful but i think the ned luke character so sort of anchors that game so much so i like all of them in different ways but i probably love nico the most

their relationship their relationship yeah it was it was I think one of the reasons 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 crime sim in GTA 1 about stealing you know two top down cars and we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the art direction innovate with every piece of the game and

And I think having done, you know, GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards, the challenge was, can we combine, can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists?

And the technical challenge of...

moving from character to character the team did such an amazing job that i don't think people realized how hard it was but we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around like what happens if you do this then do that it's just this is so hard why have we why have we decided to do this it's horrible um and then it all came together and

I think the idea was develop three characters who do feel like characters.

They don't just feel like philosophical or psychological avatars, but where one is 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 superego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a...

Worker amongst workers.

You know, the culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and people were just, you know, and also an ambition to make.

I think we were like, we thought GTA 3 could be really popular, but really popular to us meant quite honestly, it's going to sell two or three million copies.

And we thought we were making something pretty innovative.

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

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

And to use, 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.

And that was always, you know, there was a... 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 why these features would work and these features wouldn't work.