Dan Houser

Yeah, but it just, again, I went...

The actor was so good.

And we've already seen a bunch of his work by then.

He had such a good, he was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us, that you could feel with that point.

Like, I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy.

And so I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

Yeah, and I think all of those actors on Red Dead Redemption 1 were so strong that they really brought that game to life.

If them and Rod the director hadn't done such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell.

I think because for the story to work, I mean, just from a technical challenge, for the story to work, he had to die.

But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die.

It was probably the four, fifth or sixth open world game I'd worked on.

And I'd spent all these years before that working at how these stories worked, how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could.

And

suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end of the game, you're free in the character to go and wrap up all the side stories to play forever.

We're not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead and we're going to have to have you play as a different character.

And the narrative is going to...

the if we've done a good job compelling enough where you're not going to care about that and um or you're going to be upset that he's dead but you're going to actually have this emotional moment um so i think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that and then it worked so i think that was something very full of fear and it put and it worked it worked out okay

I mean, I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because they didn't think it was going to happen.

But I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, which is that kind of creative moment, you know, transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we've always aspired to giving people.

Well, I would like to have at the end of GTA 4 killed Nico, but you couldn't do it.