Dan Houser

I mean, it's that and the world building in games.

I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taking on these narrative adventures.

When that combines, you've got the amazing experience.

Yeah, in a game.

I wanted to reverse it.

So there were a couple other themes that matched that.

So there are guys from the Wild West, but they're being pushed ever further east.

So it was almost like an anti-Western, an Eastern.

You're traveling east.

You're traveling into civilization.

And I don't think I would have been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career.

Because this idea of getting a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting.

Yeah, I thought that was really... It's part of the story.

Really fun thing to play with.

John dies in Red Dead 1 and wanted to top that with Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way.

And so the idea that John's death is fairly sudden.

And so if he's got this long drawn out death and then I'd always been...

obsessed by tb as diseases go it's a great literary device you know because it is this long drawn out slow death but in which you are also getting weaker and my grandfather actually had tb before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he was just after he'd had his child my father and survived but only three of them out of like 35 survived so i was always uh

captivated and by tb as an illness it felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea this this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal he was the protagonist in a video game he could not die and suddenly he is becoming mortal and and you know but that helps him see stuff i thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game yeah do you think it's the the greatest character you've ever created

I think he's the best lead character.