Dan Houser, who co-founded Rockstar and wrote the Grand Theft Auto games up to GTA 5, has not seen GTA 6, not even the Extended Look from August. “I haven’t seen it yet. I will try and avoid it because I always try and avoid stuff that’s going to distract or disrupt me creatively,” he told Variety’s Strictly Business podcast.
He stays away because of his own work: Houser now runs his own company, Absurd Ventures, and avoids anything that could steer it. Once work on Red Dead Redemption began, he says, he stopped watching Westerns, and he didn’t watch The Sopranos until after he left Rockstar, because it would have disrupted everything he did on GTA (IGN).
He rarely plays open-world games either. Playing one, he says, he ends up taking apart the strengths and weaknesses of the team that made it in real time, and that distracts him.
Absurd Ventures has two games in development: an open-world comedy built around comedy and character memory, with more news promised in the next few months, and a dystopian science fiction story about game development gone very wrong and a rogue AI that became sentient (Kotaku).
Houser left Rockstar in 2020. His brother Sam Houser still runs the studio.
