Dan Houser

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 that we 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

I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA 4, but it just can't... Once you're setting things in the modern world, they're too frenetic.

You can't get some of that slightly operatic feel that I love, that some people think is maybe a little over the top, but I love this kind of...

people searching for meaning within amongst the violence i think that 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 very very strong team and really strong material where did you have to go to in your mind maybe philosophically maybe spiritually to be able to create the rdr world

No drugs.

Okay.

Stop the drugs long before.

Okay.

That's why I did all that work.

I had nothing else to do.

Open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way.

Kept me busy.

um but uh red so red i'll tell you i'll give you the my version now games are made by big teams yeah so 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 been a capcom game and they didn't want to finish it so we finished it and they released in japan and we released it

in the u.s in i think 2004 um and decided we would start work on open world cowboy game for ps3 um didn't think too much more about it and that was a bunch of other stuff to work on and slowly 2005 2006 the game started to come to life began to uh meet with uh

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

And again, was being lazy or procrastinating.

They look like either a yellow pad or a BlackBerry in those days or an iPhone in these days.

I'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note.

Here's a good idea.

Or you might be scribbling on a pad.