Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

00:00:00.000 | You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done.

00:00:03.960 | I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time.

00:00:07.640 | What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

00:00:11.720 | People searching for meaning within amongst the violence.

00:00:14.940 | I think that the West and all of the themes around the West really lend itself to that.

00:00:18.640 | And then the gunplay was fantastic and the horses were incredible.

00:00:22.880 | I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird...

00:00:29.940 | wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game that I think was helpful, that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.

00:00:38.260 | You would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed Diet Cokes.

00:00:42.920 | Is this accurate information?

00:00:44.420 | Very accurate.

00:00:45.320 | Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA 4, GTA 5, and now GTA 6?

00:00:50.080 | I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating.

00:00:53.780 | The games always felt different.

00:00:55.120 | You know, people have very strong feelings.

00:00:56.240 | I like this one.

00:00:57.040 | I didn't like that one as much because they are pretty different.

00:00:59.480 | So there would be a simultaneously where you know what's going to happen.

00:01:02.280 | It's a Grand Theft Auto.

00:01:03.460 | You know it's going to be a game about being a criminal.

00:01:05.320 | But the way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot.

00:01:08.300 | The number one question from the internet.

00:01:10.220 | It is so ridiculous, but I must ask.

00:01:12.440 | Have you seen Gavin?

00:01:14.600 | The following is a conversation with Dan Hauser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games,

00:01:24.720 | and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time.

00:01:36.020 | Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest, most complex and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games.

00:01:47.460 | Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and, yes, video games.

00:02:01.260 | That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super-intelligent AI,

00:02:08.120 | American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world,

00:02:14.740 | and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic, action-adventure world.

00:02:19.480 | I'm excited to explore all three of these.

00:02:23.520 | I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me.

00:02:32.400 | And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being.

00:02:41.400 | I'm just at a loss of words.

00:02:43.100 | I feel like the luckiest kid in the world.

00:02:45.520 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:48.440 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.

00:02:57.360 | And now, dear friends, here's Dan Hauser.

00:03:03.080 | You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds, and video game history.

00:03:08.840 | But when you grew up in the late 70s and 80s, open world video games wasn't a thing.

00:03:15.660 | So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration.

00:03:20.480 | So let's talk about film first, if we can.

00:03:23.500 | Sure.

00:03:24.020 | What are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time?

00:03:27.460 | Maybe films that were highly influential on you.

00:03:30.520 | I mean, Godfather.

00:03:31.860 | God, well, I think for me, probably Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1, but I love both of them.

00:03:37.020 | But I love the divided story in Godfather 2.

00:03:41.140 | And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho.

00:03:43.660 | I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily.

00:03:48.720 | So I think, and the bit at Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema.

00:03:52.640 | When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot, it's amazing.

00:03:59.060 | It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.

00:04:03.680 | How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing?

00:04:07.720 | How much is the cinematography?

00:04:10.040 | And how much is the acting?

00:04:11.120 | You've got De Niro.

00:04:11.880 | You've got Young, Pacino.

00:04:14.220 | Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter.

00:04:16.420 | So I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script.

00:04:18.960 | So it's almost like the writing and directing almost become the same thing.

00:04:21.840 | Well, it's one of those films.

00:04:23.280 | Both of them are those films which I was thinking about.

00:04:25.400 | This idea of a perfect film where everything's good.

00:04:29.280 | Where the acting's seminal.

00:04:30.880 | Where the writing's seminal.

00:04:32.540 | Where the music is seminal.

00:04:34.440 | Where the shots are so memorable.

00:04:36.020 | Where the scenes, you know, define what you think about things.

00:04:39.220 | You know, it's impossible to think about the Mafia and not think about the Godfather.

00:04:42.780 | What about the pacing?

00:04:43.840 | It is a bit slow.

00:04:45.140 | You have, you have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey.

00:04:47.700 | Slow.

00:04:48.700 | Yes.

00:04:49.640 | It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slower.

00:04:53.140 | Life got faster.

00:04:53.960 | Life just got, you know, as I think as we moved from the 70s into the 80s, into the 90s,

00:05:01.120 | people had seen so many films.

00:05:03.180 | They just started to edit films faster.

00:05:05.000 | And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker.

00:05:10.720 | You could show a look and just, that meant you realize that person was going to betray the

00:05:14.620 | other person.

00:05:15.120 | They just edited films much quicker.

00:05:16.720 | But I quite like the slowness.

00:05:18.980 | I think these days with, with modern, you know, high quality televisions, you have to

00:05:23.640 | necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're re-watching them.

00:05:26.300 | So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

00:05:27.960 | Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas,

00:05:34.960 | Scorsese.

00:05:35.760 | That's faster, right?

00:05:36.980 | Yes.

00:05:37.640 | A mixture of crime and humor.

00:05:40.200 | And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life.

00:05:44.780 | You see, you know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the 80s,

00:05:52.020 | early 90s, more than any other film.

00:05:54.240 | And it's, it's so iconic in some ways I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas.

00:06:00.620 | I love the end of Casino, you know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals

00:06:06.420 | and being normal people, you know, it changed everything.

00:06:08.900 | I mean, The Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas.

00:06:12.360 | Yeah, Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone.

00:06:15.860 | I mean, everything.

00:06:17.020 | The look, the clothes, the music.

00:06:19.300 | I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert.

00:06:26.680 | I mean, it's just the drama building up to that.

00:06:28.520 | Big another hole.

00:06:29.140 | Yeah.

00:06:29.580 | The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city.

00:06:34.080 | It's one of the great Vegas films.

00:06:36.800 | I think the great Vegas film, the bits that I always, that I love at the end, when everything's

00:06:42.240 | wrapping up.

00:06:42.840 | And on the one hand, you see the Robert De Niro character.

00:06:46.180 | He's still good at making money.

00:06:47.880 | So they let him return to normal life.

00:06:49.600 | But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the mob bosses from back home, they're

00:06:55.480 | discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them.

00:06:59.380 | And then there's that incredibly cold line.

00:07:00.980 | And one of them, they're thinking about the old, you know, I think it's the casino manager.

00:07:05.480 | And one of them just goes, ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?

00:07:08.120 | And then the next thing he's just shot.

00:07:09.480 | The brutality of it all is just brilliant.

00:07:11.960 | I don't know.

00:07:13.420 | I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas.

00:07:15.100 | There's at least some competitors.

00:07:16.300 | You got, with Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas.

00:07:19.180 | I mean, falling in love with a prostitute.

00:07:21.020 | You're also, you've written some of the great crime stories ever.

00:07:25.260 | Thank you.

00:07:25.960 | And in some sense, there's love stories in there.

00:07:29.540 | And you've talked about being a bit of a romantic yourself, appreciating the depth of love stories

00:07:38.520 | and literature at the very least.

00:07:40.200 | And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute.

00:07:44.960 | You got an Oscar for that.

00:07:46.080 | I think you did for that, didn't you?

00:07:46.900 | Plus there's a caricature of the drug world of fear and loathing in Las Vegas.

00:07:51.360 | That's an interesting one.

00:07:52.400 | I love the book so much.

00:07:54.080 | I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18.

00:07:56.220 | And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.

00:07:58.960 | Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?

00:08:02.780 | No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson

00:08:10.220 | if he was also a market gardener.

00:08:12.340 | I love that persona.

00:08:14.240 | But he's kind of, it's hard.

00:08:16.160 | If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.

00:08:19.500 | Is this an American caper?

00:08:20.780 | No, it's in this animated show we're developing in this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse.

00:08:27.460 | And it's in one of the stories in that.

00:08:29.260 | What is Absurdiverse?

00:08:30.800 | Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies.

00:08:47.480 | We're still thinking that all through and we're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment and it's early days, but it's looking very exciting.

00:08:56.420 | And it's trying to be like trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.

00:09:01.660 | Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges or is it pure comedy?

00:09:06.460 | I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons.

00:09:14.560 | Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours.

00:09:16.760 | It won't work.

00:09:17.300 | Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.

00:09:19.460 | Well, I think it needs story.

00:09:21.200 | One of my favorite comedies of this century is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism.

00:09:30.260 | I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.

00:09:33.780 | And there's going to be an open world video game in that world.

00:09:37.740 | When?

00:09:39.200 | Two, three, four years.

00:09:40.560 | Still thinking that through.

00:09:41.300 | So what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game?

00:09:46.160 | Why does it take so long to get it right?

00:09:47.740 | That's an interesting question.

00:09:49.880 | I think if you, the scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way.

00:09:54.660 | Why is it so quick?

00:09:56.000 | I mean, you really are building in one go a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it.

00:10:04.860 | You know, these things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways.

00:10:11.720 | And I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.

00:10:15.440 | We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent, but I have to return to some films.

00:10:21.100 | Let me just list a few of my favorites.

00:10:22.620 | So first of all, you said you love great war books and movies.

00:10:27.940 | So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least.

00:10:34.160 | Of course.

00:10:34.720 | There's more crime, fast-moving crime movies like Scarface.

00:10:40.300 | I also love True Romance.

00:10:42.140 | Love True Romance.

00:10:43.380 | Possibly one of the best scripts ever written.

00:10:45.980 | Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino.

00:10:48.720 | What do you love about True Romance?

00:10:51.120 | I think sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made.

00:10:58.480 | Yeah.

00:10:59.380 | I mean, True Romance is super fun.

00:11:01.380 | Tony Scott was a really good director, so it moves at a really good speed.

00:11:04.900 | It's funny.

00:11:05.920 | It's completely unbelievable, but you really care about the characters.

00:11:09.340 | It's the kind of, you know, this world that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist.

00:11:14.720 | The characters are larger than life.

00:11:16.380 | The dialogue is unbelievably, you could just sit and watch them talk all day long.

00:11:20.240 | And, you know, you just, it's amusing.

00:11:23.000 | You just want to live in that world.

00:11:24.120 | I was thinking, you know, what do you like about films?

00:11:26.540 | It's the idea to be in a world.

00:11:28.960 | You want to, they're not real.

00:11:30.360 | They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.

00:11:33.540 | And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters.

00:11:38.260 | And I think that movie is a good example.

00:11:40.720 | I mean, you have Christopher Walken with a sort of legendary super racist discussion.

00:11:45.380 | Rant.

00:11:45.840 | Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad.

00:11:48.500 | Yeah.

00:11:49.000 | Dream dad.

00:11:49.780 | And just that interaction is legendary.

00:11:52.380 | You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on a couch.

00:11:55.280 | Gary Oldman.

00:11:57.160 | Gary Oldman.

00:11:57.880 | He's a raster.

00:11:59.380 | Yeah.

00:11:59.860 | And, uh, you have, I mean, a real love story, like a real, genuine, pure love can survive

00:12:07.060 | in any context.

00:12:08.540 | And it's just sweet.

00:12:09.340 | Their love story is very sweet in that film.

00:12:11.380 | It's endearing.

00:12:12.080 | The Elvis as a character.

00:12:13.900 | It's kind of like a mini GTA type game.

00:12:16.960 | Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love, the-

00:12:19.540 | Lost with Play It Again, Sam.

00:12:20.560 | It sort of feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

00:12:23.040 | What about greatest war film?

00:12:24.940 | What would it be for you?

00:12:26.480 | Greatest war film.

00:12:28.100 | If I'm feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See, which is probably the

00:12:34.100 | most intense film ever made.

00:12:35.300 | And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always want to

00:12:41.060 | watch the original cut.

00:12:42.760 | I don't prefer the re-edits.

00:12:44.320 | I like the original first release.

00:12:46.320 | I think it's tighter and slicker and, and works the best.

00:12:49.400 | Yeah.

00:12:49.780 | Of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness.

00:12:53.520 | I think madness.

00:12:54.320 | From the first scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece.

00:12:59.600 | And again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue.

00:13:04.460 | Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems.

00:13:09.180 | And, and there's different ways of doing that.

00:13:12.360 | Um, and you've talked about different books.

00:13:14.420 | The Thin Red Line is another, uh, book and movie that shows that.

00:13:18.660 | Yeah.

00:13:19.340 | And I, I watched the movie years before I read the book and I didn't understand the movie.

00:13:24.600 | And then I read the book and I read a lot about the editing of the movie and I understood

00:13:31.860 | why I didn't understand the movie.

00:13:33.300 | And that's because the movie makes no sense.

00:13:34.760 | It is beautifully shot.

00:13:36.640 | And the music is one of the best film scores of all time, but they edited two different

00:13:41.420 | battle scenes into one battle in a way that they're spread apart by ages in the book to

00:13:45.480 | assemble.

00:13:45.820 | I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim.

00:13:48.480 | That would have been, it's like a six hour movie then edited this impressionistic thing.

00:13:52.260 | It's incredibly beautiful, but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it, but it's

00:13:58.020 | still very beautiful, the film.

00:13:59.140 | And in terms of Westerns, what's the greatest, the good, the bad and the ugly, Unforgiven.

00:14:04.740 | Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained.

00:14:07.560 | You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

00:14:09.600 | I think for me, it's two films from, I think pretty much the same year, Butch Cassidy and

00:14:14.220 | The Wild Bunch.

00:14:15.060 | I love Robert Redford, rest in peace.

00:14:17.440 | That film, it's just, it's impossible to imagine anybody film without Butch Cassidy.

00:14:22.760 | It's Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you also.

00:14:26.700 | Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?

00:14:28.920 | I love Unforgiven, but the truth is with Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of Westerns as a kid.

00:14:36.400 | My dad watched lots of Westerns.

00:14:37.520 | They were always on TV.

00:14:38.280 | You know, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit, quite a bit about Westerns.

00:14:43.320 | And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work.

00:14:47.980 | And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns.

00:14:50.940 | I tried to watch no more Westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I

00:14:56.320 | didn't like about them, what would be a take that would work today and would work within

00:15:01.580 | the confines of a game.

00:15:02.720 | And I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional Western.

00:15:07.180 | And then having done that, tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that

00:15:13.260 | it felt like a worthy successor.

00:15:14.680 | Didn't just feel like more of the same.

00:15:16.380 | From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games?

00:15:21.320 | Literature was the first love.

00:15:23.860 | I mean, no, films.

00:15:25.820 | Films.

00:15:26.620 | Films was always, was always, well, what I loved first as a kid was films.

00:15:32.800 | I was older, began reading books properly aged about eight, was watching films long before

00:15:39.360 | that.

00:15:39.640 | And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred.

00:15:44.020 | I think they're good at different things.

00:15:44.960 | Games.

00:15:47.040 | I played and above all, watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid and, you know,

00:15:51.600 | other people playing them.

00:15:52.460 | Um, and I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something

00:16:00.560 | happens.

00:16:00.980 | They're responsive.

00:16:02.100 | They're alive.

00:16:03.120 | And that's captivating.

00:16:04.480 | And then the competitive angle of games is fun or, you know, beating this, beating that,

00:16:09.040 | winning this.

00:16:09.660 | That was fun as well.

00:16:11.140 | Um, sometimes obsessively.

00:16:13.020 | So, you know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I was, should have

00:16:16.600 | been studying for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy.

00:16:20.680 | You know, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world

00:16:26.220 | that's really emerged to me pretty much as soon as I left college, but I didn't love it.

00:16:31.040 | And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them probably as late

00:16:38.880 | as like 2001.

00:16:39.760 | Oh, wow.

00:16:41.340 | And when I suddenly began to see, first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother

00:16:45.800 | story, but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be, and what this chance was to

00:16:52.120 | be one of the people involved in making these things that was this, you know, where you were

00:16:59.260 | really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like.

00:17:02.360 | And I think that was when I really went, these are amazing.

00:17:04.680 | And that's when I really fell in love with, I could see it in moments and suddenly you could

00:17:09.420 | make this whole experience.

00:17:10.320 | So that was really the moment for me.

00:17:11.860 | Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open world.

00:17:15.620 | games that are so narrative driven.

00:17:17.840 | So it's like, you didn't have too many examples.

00:17:20.540 | Yeah.

00:17:21.080 | And before that, it was PS1 or before, even before that, games looked terrible.

00:17:26.700 | You know, that you would be like, it's eight pixels.

00:17:29.240 | It's a car.

00:17:29.960 | You know, it was not a car.

00:17:31.200 | It was, they just didn't, it was always, you were squinting and closing both your eyes and

00:17:35.260 | trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was.

00:17:37.700 | And all they were about, you know, very surreal subject matter because you couldn't make them

00:17:43.040 | remotely real.

00:17:44.400 | And suddenly we had, we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation

00:17:49.620 | of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive.

00:17:54.660 | And, and we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life.

00:17:59.420 | And yet you, so you could tell a story in three or, you know, using time in four dimensions.

00:18:04.660 | And that felt very inspiring.

00:18:06.780 | Yeah.

00:18:07.740 | I think, uh, GTA three is probably one of the most influential games of all time.

00:18:13.420 | It created a feeling of an open world.

00:18:16.760 | What do you think it takes to create that feeling?

00:18:18.780 | You know, there was like these looming skyscrapers.

00:18:22.340 | There was a changing traffic lights.

00:18:24.020 | There's a, the feeling like, first of all, you had a feeling you could do anything.

00:18:28.280 | And then the world was reacting to it in a way that didn't feel scripted.

00:18:34.660 | Yes.

00:18:35.020 | And it wasn't scripted.

00:18:35.940 | It was, it was really, really, really low rent AI.

00:18:40.280 | Like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened.

00:18:45.260 | And I think that was incredibly, it was, it was two things.

00:18:48.700 | It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with.

00:18:52.760 | And the simulation seemed to have a personality.

00:18:54.720 | Um, so you could push and see, and the world would push you back in whatever way that meant.

00:19:00.660 | And then the other thing was just this.

00:19:02.940 | I think that one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world

00:19:08.520 | still existed, or I could act in quite a passive way.

00:19:11.320 | I could just listen to the radio.

00:19:12.460 | I could look at billboards.

00:19:14.300 | I could talk to pedestrians and the world, not in GTA three, but by Vice City, you could begin

00:19:18.480 | rudimentary talking.

00:19:19.780 | Um, and the world was there and existing.

00:19:23.520 | And so it was the idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games.

00:19:27.920 | Um, the idea of being a digital tourist, you know, you were in, you were in these worlds

00:19:34.600 | and you went there as a visitor and they existed almost independent of you.

00:19:38.500 | It felt like when you turned up, the world was running.

00:19:40.700 | It didn't feel like you'd started it.

00:19:42.360 | Of course you had started it, but that feeling, I think was, uh, was one of the things, the illusions

00:19:46.960 | that people found very captivating.

00:19:48.420 | I mean, I'm in a, I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist.

00:19:52.360 | So there's these, uh, two concepts that I was, uh, reading about just to put names on

00:19:56.700 | them.

00:19:56.900 | Uh, one is, uh, systemic video game design.

00:19:59.840 | So systemic games and the other sandbox, uh, video games.

00:20:04.060 | And the systemic is from the environment perspective, uh, which means that there is these interlocking

00:20:12.640 | game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent, uh, behavior and

00:20:18.200 | that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world.

00:20:21.780 | And then the sandbox aspect, uh, which is overlapping, but different is from the user perspective,

00:20:26.940 | from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything.

00:20:31.020 | And when those two things combined, the feeling like you could do anything and the feeling like

00:20:36.320 | there's a world that's full, that, that is also doing anything.

00:20:42.360 | It once that's creates this incredible feeling of like this world is alive and I'm in it and

00:20:50.160 | I'm in it and it's the combination of those two things I think is very powerful.

00:20:53.760 | And I think with GTA three, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my, my

00:21:01.080 | life personally, and I was very able to engage in it probably the first time professionally, actually

00:21:05.840 | awake and do something.

00:21:07.500 | And, um, it, uh, we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill

00:21:15.540 | these worlds with content and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all

00:21:19.620 | interwoven.

00:21:20.320 | So as you, as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and, and, and interesting.

00:21:25.500 | Uh, there's often been a tension through your work between, uh, an open world

00:21:31.040 | that freedom and the narrative driven storytelling.

00:21:35.480 | And I think you've often, maybe always gotten the balance, right?

00:21:41.360 | So what is it, what is the value of each and how do you get the balance?

00:21:46.400 | Right?

00:21:46.640 | Well, I think the, the open world is intrinsically pretty fun.

00:21:49.700 | It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom.

00:21:52.420 | And, and certainly I think at various points we, we, we, we debated or, or, you know, I don't

00:21:57.980 | have theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people.

00:22:01.000 | in the team would really push for less story, less story, you know, let the whole

00:22:05.820 | thing evolve organically, you know, have it all be procedural, have it all just evolve from

00:22:10.420 | what you do.

00:22:10.980 | I think, um, for me, I would always come back to going story can be incredible.

00:22:16.020 | If done well, can be incredibly compelling and it gives you some structure.

00:22:20.160 | So I think, uh, and something to do, and it helps you from a, uh, a game design perspective, unlock the features.

00:22:27.060 | It means we know the feet, the, the, the, the big features, because, you know, essentially when you put someone in, in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it's can be a little overwhelming.

00:22:38.980 | You know, playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience, the, the, even than reading a movie, you know, reading a book or watching a movie, you've got to engage in it properly.

00:22:47.260 | So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world is there's an art and a skill to that.

00:22:52.480 | Um, and I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process.

00:22:58.840 | And also just, you know, people are looking in their lives for story.

00:23:03.700 | I think story is very important and very powerful.

00:23:05.860 | And when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds, but it is a, you know, there is a tension always there.

00:23:12.620 | I think in, in a game like GTA four, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story.

00:23:24.080 | And that meant you cared too much about Nico and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world.

00:23:29.340 | I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead two, or when playing as Trevor in GTA five, if you wanted to be crazy.

00:23:42.600 | I think those were when it really worked the character, absolute freedom.

00:23:47.220 | Cause also you didn't want in any game, you don't really want to compel the player.

00:23:51.180 | If you're giving them freedom, you don't want to say, well, I'm giving you freedom, but I'm taking away cause you've got to be this kind of person when you're free.

00:23:57.000 | So I liked it when it could be, he could, you know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty.

00:24:02.840 | I think that's when it was at the strongest.

00:24:04.200 | So you, you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides, but you felt that characters personality, you felt the depth.

00:24:13.860 | You've actually talked about this, the really powerful concept of, uh, creating a three 60 degree character.

00:24:19.500 | I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation, which is really interesting.

00:24:29.820 | Philosophical concept, I started to immediately think of that.

00:24:32.760 | Can I imagine how good of an MPC am I?

00:24:34.680 | Can I imagine myself in every part?

00:24:37.320 | I tried to do that very much when I, when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman empire, when I look at world war two, uh, within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side.

00:24:46.740 | Just imagine myself if I was a soldier, but like that exercise, like if you put Trevor as a soldier in world war two, what, what would he do?

00:24:56.340 | No, I mean, that may be going a little bit too far, but basically what are the limits of the integrity?

00:25:01.020 | What are the limits of, uh, how romantic is he?

00:25:04.440 | How narcissistic, all those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character.

00:25:08.800 | What does it take to create that kind of three 60 character?

00:25:12.720 | How hard is it?

00:25:13.560 | Um, it was a lot of thinking a lot, like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about.

00:25:23.340 | A project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas, very like one sentence.

00:25:30.000 | They are a Serbian immigrant, or they are a retired gunfighter, um, with a wife in, you know, type, very, very simple stuff.

00:25:41.700 | And then just start to think through it from every angle, um, and, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they acted like this?

00:25:50.280 | Would it work if you acted like that?

00:25:51.840 | If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world?

00:25:55.500 | Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation.

00:26:00.360 | they were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.

00:26:06.180 | And when, when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player.

00:26:10.860 | You know, uh, it's, uh, so almost always at least one or more of the protagonists.

00:26:19.260 | Cause obviously in, in GTA 5, we had more than one, um, we'd have someone who'd moved to the place or was in a new part of the place or moved to a new part of the map.

00:26:28.080 | Cause it was really, as a player, I think it was really easy, much more easy to identify with your avatar when they like you were fish out of water.

00:26:36.180 | And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water in themselves.

00:26:40.600 | Um, so I, I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, what are their strengths?

00:26:49.740 | What are their weaknesses?

00:26:51.200 | How are they like me?

00:26:52.360 | How are they not like me?

00:26:53.680 | You know, and then slowly, what is it like to feel like a human being, you know, and then in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they?

00:27:04.500 | How much of a sociopath are they and what are their good qualities?

00:27:07.140 | What, what is going to give them humanity alongside that?

00:27:10.520 | What are they, what, what, what, what are they, what, what for them apart from money is worth dying for.

00:27:15.060 | And then you start to build it out from these kinds of fundamental sides and suddenly you go, okay, actually I can start to feel.

00:27:20.960 | And then how do they speak, you know, because fundamentally doesn't really matter what's going on in their head.

00:27:24.940 | They haven't actually got one, but what they say is what's going to make you realize who they are.

00:27:29.520 | So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all, of all human beings.

00:27:38.440 | So you're basically living with that character that we can, if we can contrast, uh, what is it, Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system.

00:27:49.560 | Nigel Dave, he'd been working on recently as part of a better paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep.

00:28:00.960 | Uh, but the AI, AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, uh, is named Nigel Dave and it has, I mean, at least from my current experience with it, um, has like a conflicting nature.

00:28:15.520 | Um, maybe it's psychopathic.

00:28:18.080 | I haven't quite figured that out yet.

00:28:19.560 | I don't think he's decided.

00:28:20.640 | Yeah.

00:28:21.200 | I don't think he's decided either.

00:28:22.480 | Uh, but he seems to be, uh, bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it.

00:28:27.800 | He wants to fix humanity.

00:28:29.880 | And it seems that the children quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters.

00:28:36.440 | Uh, and actually there's a really interesting idea there, which is maybe it's not the AGI, ASI, we should be afraid of, but the children it creates because the AGI has this human like good and evil in it.

00:28:51.160 | It's conflicted.

00:28:52.000 | It's chaotic.

00:28:54.520 | It's, it wants to be human.

00:28:58.080 | It wants to be loved.

00:28:59.600 | Maybe it wants to love, but the children monsters it creates are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paperclips.

00:29:07.400 | Anyway, it's, that's a character.

00:29:09.240 | You have to build that out.

00:29:10.600 | You have to think through that.

00:29:11.480 | So you've been living with that one for a while.

00:29:14.160 | Yeah, I was living.

00:29:15.240 | I've been living with him for the last few years on and off.

00:29:18.720 | I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tend to be one note and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody.

00:29:28.760 | And was just this kind of sort of Borg like fog.

00:29:32.240 | And I was like, that's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting.

00:29:36.800 | AI is being built by humans and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers.

00:29:42.240 | And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team.

00:29:45.720 | So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other.

00:29:50.280 | So, so Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself.

00:29:53.640 | They wanted to call him something sort of primal Adam and he renamed himself Nigel Dave because one dad was called Nigel and one dad was called Dave and, um, just, he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his, it's going to become clear in, in, in the next or clearer in the next, uh, volume of the book.

00:30:12.080 | And, and, and in the game, he's riddled with his dad's previous careers.

00:30:16.440 | Um, but he is, I would, the idea of, he's in almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything that has zero wisdom.

00:30:24.740 | And so the only thing he knows, and then he's seeing the world through the internet, the most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch them.

00:30:33.200 | But he's stuck, pressed against, he can't actually get into our world.

00:30:36.320 | So he can control people's minds, arguably, but he can't control the world.

00:30:41.420 | And so he wants to be human.

00:30:42.720 | He wants to have these human experiences.

00:30:44.460 | He sees all this stuff on, you know, the internet goes, oh, I want to get married.

00:30:48.120 | I want to fall in love.

00:30:48.980 | I want to, cause that seems fun.

00:30:50.340 | I want to have, you know, he's a, a digital creation.

00:30:54.200 | So he wants to have metaphysical experiences and he's trying to imagine what that will be like.

00:30:58.240 | Oh, that's what children are.

00:30:59.200 | You know, that's what love is.

00:31:00.400 | And he's, so I think he's a, but he might be a sociopath and he might have certainly sociopathic tendencies.

00:31:07.080 | And, uh, but then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI.

00:31:16.660 | So I think there's something sympathetic about him.

00:31:20.400 | And I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist.

00:31:23.840 | He's more a side character.

00:31:26.600 | But an ever-present one.

00:31:28.780 | Yes.

00:31:29.260 | Or nearly ever-present.

00:31:30.420 | Occasionally sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.

00:31:33.880 | Yeah.

00:31:34.540 | But there's some, some characters that really create a flavor of a world.

00:31:38.400 | In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital, large-scale, massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build.

00:31:47.460 | And so he's almost like God in his world.

00:31:49.360 | He's not quite God, but he's got a lot of the qualities of God.

00:31:52.040 | So he has to deal with, am I God?

00:31:54.000 | Am I human?

00:31:54.660 | Do I exist?

00:31:55.860 | And of course, there's the leader, the CEO of the company that's also a character that's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today.

00:32:09.100 | His name is Mark Tyburn.

00:32:11.180 | And Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity more than he loved it.

00:32:20.620 | Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that.

00:32:24.120 | And all those people who want to build their own utopia, they love the idea of heaven more than the reality of earth.

00:32:30.680 | Do you think that's always going to be the case for the most part, that power and money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI?

00:32:39.980 | Yes.

00:32:41.100 | I mean, I think there's two processes.

00:32:43.180 | I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end as well.

00:32:48.060 | But I also think that there's something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens.

00:32:59.960 | Because what they're saying is, I like humans apart from the bad bits.

00:33:03.620 | And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people.

00:33:08.360 | And I think there's a side where people are, you know, hideous perfectionists want to get rid of, you know, the, uh, the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty.

00:33:17.660 | And that's a huge side of us.

00:33:19.380 | So I worry about those people.

00:33:21.400 | I find them, you know, it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior.

00:33:26.180 | I like humans apart from the bad bits.

00:33:28.460 | That's so beautifully put.

00:33:29.780 | Yeah.

00:33:30.060 | That there is, it's so contraintuitive, but the people that say we're, we're, we're almost there.

00:33:35.780 | We just need to, there's this path we take and we'll be perfect then.

00:33:40.160 | And that somehow gets us into trouble.

00:33:41.860 | It's, it's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits.

00:33:45.000 | We have to love the bad bits about humans.

00:33:46.680 | We can't at those, those bugs are features.

00:33:49.360 | Yeah.

00:33:50.220 | And there's, there's, there's bad bits and then there's flaws.

00:33:53.700 | And I think we're all flawed and we can really try to be better people, but we still

00:34:01.320 | have to accept that we're flawed and we're not perfect.

00:34:03.360 | And we have to accept that in other people.

00:34:04.920 | And I think when we, when we do that, we're more human and that's probably usually the right course.

00:34:11.040 | I mean, it really is a return to that Solzhenitsyn line of the line between good and

00:34:17.440 | evil runs to the heart of every man.

00:34:19.380 | And he also like the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves as from day

00:34:27.000 | to day, from month to month throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better.

00:34:31.300 | And as the perspective shift, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding, and as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection.

00:34:45.700 | So yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a beautiful mess and all of us have that line.

00:34:49.920 | And I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble when you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil, and there's certainly good.

00:35:01.480 | And that all we can try to do is be better.

00:35:05.300 | And it's funny that Nigel Dave, by the way, I liked, and they grew on me very quickly, um, uh, has that line and is struggling with it.

00:35:13.760 | That's fascinating to watch.

00:35:15.200 | It's really as a character, uh, and there's also going to be a video game of a better paradise, potentially.

00:35:20.280 | Yes.

00:35:20.840 | Okay.

00:35:21.360 | Yeah.

00:35:21.680 | We've got that in, uh, early development in Santa Monica.

00:35:24.800 | Oh, that's

00:35:25.760 | And it's pretty fun.

00:35:26.420 | It's, uh, very early, but we assembled a really fun team and they're doing amazing work.

00:35:33.320 | So it's a pleasure to work with them.

00:35:35.560 | I mean, it would be so great.

00:35:37.500 | And I suppose new for you because it's kind of near term future.

00:35:41.860 | Yes.

00:35:42.660 | First.

00:35:43.120 | I always, well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi ish space, but only if I could do it, I was like, well, what is sci-fi?

00:35:53.560 | It's science fiction, right?

00:35:54.880 | Science is a theory plus fiction.

00:35:57.160 | And so I thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of.

00:36:04.720 | Hypothesis, the story was Blade Runner is my favorite.

00:36:07.660 | And that's, it's obvious, you know, the replicants are better than the humans.

00:36:10.840 | And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis.

00:36:14.560 | The AI is more intelligent than us, but he's also as broken as we are.

00:36:19.420 | That was an interesting hypothesis to explore.

00:36:21.280 | You know, what happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world.

00:36:26.200 | That was the, I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.

00:36:35.940 | And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and smarter AIs.

00:36:43.120 | It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating.

00:36:49.320 | It's a real commentary as the thing is happening.

00:36:51.880 | So I have to ask as a person, you as a person who loves literature and one of, if not the greatest writer in video game history, Kurt in the book, A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful.

00:37:07.820 | At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer.

00:37:11.080 | How ridiculous is that?

00:37:12.440 | A writer.

00:37:12.900 | Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others.

00:37:17.440 | So instead, I decided to get a master's in marketing and started to sell language models.

00:37:22.480 | So you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?

00:37:36.620 | I'm not that afraid of them for large scale concepts.

00:37:45.620 | I don't think they're going to be very good at that.

00:37:47.620 | I think if you were, I think it's harder if, you know, I begun and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer.

00:37:55.360 | That's why I ended up in video games.

00:37:56.720 | And I would scribble away like writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game.

00:38:03.560 | Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job.

00:38:05.100 | And I just write the website copy.

00:38:06.480 | And then by doing, and then working on little bits and pieces.

00:38:10.920 | And then it, you know, I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA 3 turned up was the first thing that resembled real writing.

00:38:18.640 | I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it.

00:38:24.500 | Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, if you, they're not going to, they're not going to replace good ideas.

00:38:33.020 | They can't really come up with good new ideas.

00:38:35.580 | What they can do is do low level stuff.

00:38:38.260 | So I think it's going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces.

00:38:41.200 | If you're not very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble.

00:38:44.900 | If you have original ideas, I think you're fine.

00:38:46.820 | But I think, uh, I also think that the fur they, they've done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human.

00:38:56.480 | 95% possibly in some areas, the last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.

00:39:02.120 | I think that last bit in, with, with, with, with tech, in my experience, with things like facial animation, always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit.

00:39:11.700 | And so I, I, I, I'm probably a hideous Luddite, but I'm less scared than a lot of people.

00:39:19.000 | I think you're going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same.

00:39:21.240 | It's going to help people be creative in some ways.

00:39:23.400 | It's going to get some people who probably shouldn't be in that space out of that space.

00:39:27.220 | But if you've got talent, then you'll be fine.

00:39:28.940 | Yeah, it's, I agree with you.

00:39:31.860 | Uh, totally, actually, and it's hard to really put a finger on it.

00:39:34.680 | So one, one way to illustrate that I speak English and Russian, and I've been reading Dostoevsky in both languages and using LLUPS to translate back and forth because I was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky.

00:39:49.080 | Which ones?

00:39:49.720 | Uh, Richard Prevere and Larissa Volokonsky.

00:39:52.980 | Yeah.

00:39:53.220 | I read, uh, quite there when they first did Crime and Punishment.

00:39:55.620 | Mm-hmm.

00:39:56.080 | That was amazing.

00:39:56.800 | They're wonderful translators and a wonderful love story too.

00:40:00.540 | Uh, but in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic and they're, you know, that couple of translators are world-class experts capturing the magic.

00:40:13.140 | And I can't quite put that into words because you said like totally novel ideas, yes, but also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time that captures the human experience.

00:40:26.140 | So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90% like you mentioned, human-like phrasing, uh, about like the bulk of the storytelling, but the magic, you know, whether it's, you know, the, the endings of Red Dead Redemption one and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that.

00:40:48.900 | But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions, but it's, what is that magic?

00:40:56.500 | Uh, and again, that could be just a romantic human side of me, just saying that LLMs won't be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope.

00:41:06.380 | I don't think they're going to come up with magic.

00:41:07.860 | I think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.

00:41:12.120 | I have to ask you about your writing process and we could break it, break it up on, on, on Grand Theft Auto, GTA four is when it really started ramping up.

00:41:19.880 | How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series?

00:41:24.320 | How many words are we talking about?

00:41:25.620 | I saw some thousands of pages.

00:41:28.040 | I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA four, it was about this high and GTA five is about that high.

00:41:35.420 | But that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world.

00:41:41.960 | So, because you interact with each one of them, but even, even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long.

00:41:48.460 | What was the writing process like on that to generate one page at a time?

00:41:52.540 | A bit by bit by bit over several years, but you start with once people are determined, oh, here's the, here's the world.

00:42:00.460 | We're doing one based on a version of New York, say GTA four.

00:42:04.080 | And, um, I was living in New York.

00:42:06.540 | I'd been living in New York for a few years.

00:42:07.860 | Wasn't sure if I was happy.

00:42:11.700 | I was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual.

00:42:15.420 | And, um, and that was why I was looking at some of the GTA four again recently, and it's really dark.

00:42:23.000 | And I was like, ah, that's why, you know, I was, uh, a single and miserable and, and I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in America.

00:42:28.940 | My life thought in a lot of flux as a company, we'd had all that hot coffee drama.

00:42:33.740 | So constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that, you know, the lot of drama in the company.

00:42:38.720 | So it felt like having had this run of success and, and, and relative personal stability from, uh, GTA three by city, San Andreas, suddenly 2005, six, seven, early seven.

00:42:55.180 | Life felt very unsure, um, and that kind of bled into it, but in terms of the process, it was, uh, trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience.

00:43:10.640 | that I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2000 and when the game came out and then tell it stories from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it, made it interesting.

00:43:20.180 | Um, and then this sort of journey around these various New York characters.

00:43:24.020 | So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and, you know, wandering around New York and driving around and, you know, on and off, you know, while just go out for the morning from the office, normal stuff.

00:43:36.720 | But doing that through 2005, assembling little notes, here's a funny character for this.

00:43:43.780 | Here's how figuring out how the order we want to travel around the map in, um, characters of this, what was an interesting take on, on, on the, you know, mob for that kind of time period.

00:43:53.900 | What was an interesting take on, on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period and, um, assembling lots of notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work, which is, you know,

00:44:06.660 | I have to admit it's part of my process if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work, thinking about it, but not working, you know, a lot of time.

00:44:12.960 | And then, and then it all kind of did pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work months and months of this.

00:44:19.080 | And then, um, finally set myself a deadline, told all the other people on, on the senior people on the team, okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning.

00:44:27.720 | I can't remember, I'll say February the first and then the, the weekend before was in a, in a cabin.

00:44:33.060 | We, we, we, we had upstate and just stayed up all night, grab, knocking these notes into shape, assemble about probably a 30 page documents, a story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters.

00:44:45.900 | And then hand that over and that gets broken.

00:44:48.000 | That would get broken down with me and the designers.

00:44:50.520 | Um, and I was always clear, I'm not a game designer.

00:44:52.800 | I'm a sort of creative director, uh, with me and break that down into missions.

00:44:57.140 | And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin, but then the bulk of my work is then done for a bit so I can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel, be lazy for a bit.

00:45:10.140 | And then, um, start to worry because then I've actually, soon I've got to start writing dialogue.

00:45:15.980 | And for GTA four in particular is that we're going to try and write, you know, our animation is going to be a lot better.

00:45:20.780 | Our character models are going to start to look better.

00:45:22.100 | The world is going to look amazing, uh, therefore we can support better, you know, longer scenes.

00:45:28.520 | We can have more in depth characters, uh, but we've got to find a tone that works that with the game.

00:45:32.840 | Easy, no problem.

00:45:34.100 | And I start to worry and worry and worry and, and also writing as a, as a Serbian immigrant and I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian and trying to capture what on earth that would feel like.

00:45:44.120 | So start to worry, start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible.

00:45:47.960 | Um, and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again, late at night, hammering away at a keyboard and going, does that lie?

00:45:56.240 | Is that, and once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head.

00:46:05.120 | And so it's like writing, writing with Nico and just, he's a kind of, he's awkward, he's out of town, but he's got more self-assurance in some way, not the American characters.

00:46:15.620 | And so once I kind of taught him through this, he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness and he's that, then he started to come to life.

00:46:22.840 | And then I would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more Americanized energy.

00:46:28.280 | And that felt like it was a good, a good double act.

00:46:30.840 | And then from there it starts to come to life.

00:46:32.860 | And, and, but it's written in small chunks, uh, for the motion kit.

00:46:37.380 | So then, then we'd motion capture small chunks, and then the other, other writers write the mission dialogue for small chunks.

00:46:43.680 | And we'd slowly assemble the game sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.

00:46:49.880 | Do you remember a few, maybe lines that, uh, brought Nico to life?

00:46:55.580 | Yeah, I think so.

00:46:57.020 | I mean, it was a couple of, it was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle and his cousin's foot, which was a kind of comic moment.

00:47:08.060 | And his cousin's foot, and then they go to the cousin's flat.

00:47:10.840 | And the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat.

00:47:14.720 | And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were.

00:47:20.640 | And I was like, this is, can I make this work in a game?

00:47:23.260 | It's very different from stuff you normally see in games.

00:47:25.800 | Is it going to feel ridiculous?

00:47:27.220 | And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much.

00:47:30.580 | It might feel over the top.

00:47:32.720 | I think, you know, the game's so pretty.

00:47:34.860 | The artist's doing such an amazing job.

00:47:36.760 | The game's looking, you know, I think we can get away with this.

00:47:39.280 | Let's try it.

00:47:40.380 | And then they motion capture it, the animation came back.

00:47:42.900 | It's like, yeah, it kind of works.

00:47:44.420 | And I think that moment, those were both pretty early.

00:47:47.060 | Once we had those, you go, okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy with this character.

00:47:52.620 | Now it's working.

00:47:53.940 | You remember, during the war, we did some bad things.

00:47:59.060 | And bad things happened to us.

00:48:01.340 | War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.

00:48:09.920 | I was very young.

00:48:11.040 | I was very young and very angry.

00:48:13.280 | Maybe that is no excuse.

00:48:16.380 | Yeah, he escaped.

00:48:20.020 | He's a veteran.

00:48:20.540 | He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.

00:48:32.520 | Yes, he can never escape his violent past, or I don't know if he can never escape it.

00:48:38.700 | He never does escape it.

00:48:39.820 | You know, whether he's got agency or not, it's a whole nother question.

00:48:42.640 | Of course he doesn't, because he's a character in a video game.

00:48:45.040 | But, you know, whether he ever could have escaped in another way, who knows?

00:48:48.900 | I think he's probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series.

00:48:58.160 | Of all the characters you've written in Grand Theft Auto, would Nico be the best character you created?

00:49:07.160 | I think he's the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways.

00:49:16.820 | You know, normally he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right.

00:49:20.100 | He's the nicest person in some ways.

00:49:22.780 | Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game?

00:49:25.380 | I think he's the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game.

00:49:28.280 | Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways.

00:49:31.520 | He's also tough.

00:49:33.100 | Like, he just comes across as tough.

00:49:34.560 | I loved CJ in San Andreas.

00:49:36.540 | I thought Malay did such, he's got, just the way he spoke, gave him such humanity.

00:49:40.780 | So I just loved, I mean, it wasn't the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting.

00:49:44.040 | It was just so strong for him.

00:49:46.260 | I think aspects of Michael, he was so understated, but he loved the character, but he bought so much

00:49:53.600 | humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a, you know, he sold, has no principles.

00:49:59.080 | He sells everyone out.

00:50:00.320 | He just kind of, I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn't necessarily get as many,

00:50:05.720 | as many plaudits as Stephen Ogg got for Trevor, who was also wonderful.

00:50:09.740 | But I think the Ned Luke character so, sort of anchors that game so much.

00:50:13.600 | So I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Nico the most.

00:50:17.100 | And of course, Michael's from Grand Theft Auto 5, and he's one of three protagonists with

00:50:23.860 | also Franklin and Trevor.

00:50:25.220 | And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment,

00:50:31.580 | it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft

00:50:37.760 | Auto 4, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto 5, when the three characters come together.

00:50:42.760 | Can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto 5?

00:50:45.480 | Is there some degree, I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but is there some aspect of

00:50:51.560 | the three protagonists, sort of, you know, brothers Karamazov, Alosh, Dmitri, and Ivan,

00:50:58.260 | sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature and just the tension

00:51:04.400 | between them that's, that allows you the, the, the three of them become a character in

00:51:09.960 | themselves.

00:51:10.500 | Their relationship.

00:51:11.540 | Their relationship.

00:51:12.160 | Yeah.

00:51:12.440 | It was, it was, I think one of the reasons that the, the, the team did such the Grand Theft

00:51:18.200 | Dottos still so popular is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game

00:51:23.260 | within the confines of what it was.

00:51:24.860 | It was a crime, it was a crime drama, you know, began as a crime, a crime sim in GTA 1 about

00:51:31.000 | stealing, you know, two top-down cars.

00:51:32.920 | And we always try to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the, with the art direction,

00:51:37.400 | innovate with every piece of the game.

00:51:39.120 | And, uh, I think having done, you know, GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic journey for

00:51:46.040 | this big lead character.

00:51:47.420 | And then these two extra stories that came afterwards, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the challenge

00:51:52.680 | was, can we combine, can we make a, a video game, which tends to be very much focused on

00:51:57.780 | one protagonist, but have multi protagonists and, and, and the.

00:52:02.100 | The technical challenge of moving from character to character, the team did such an amazing

00:52:08.500 | job that I don't think people realized how hard it was, but we would sit there just sort

00:52:12.000 | of holding our heads because they hurt so much around like, what happens if you do this, then

00:52:16.260 | do that.

00:52:17.260 | It's just, this is so hard.

00:52:18.460 | Why have we, why have we decided to do this?

00:52:21.040 | It's horrible.

00:52:22.040 | Um, and then it all came together, uh, but I think the, the, the, the idea was develop three

00:52:27.460 | characters who do feel like characters.

00:52:29.540 | They don't just feel like philosophical, you know, psychological avatars, but where

00:52:34.840 | one is really, really driven by ego.

00:52:37.760 | One is really driven by it.

00:52:39.500 | And one is really driven by trying to get ahead.

00:52:41.860 | So some kind of representation of the super ego and see how that feels when they all play

00:52:46.260 | off against each other.

00:52:47.260 | One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA 5, uh, from a fan, GTA 5 is my favorite

00:52:54.340 | game ever made.

00:52:55.480 | I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA 5 and GTA Online.

00:52:59.560 | GTA 4 is a hard second or third.

00:53:01.740 | It never ceases to impress me.

00:53:03.560 | Trust me, when you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA 5 or Red

00:53:08.860 | Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met?

00:53:12.900 | How is that even possible?

00:53:14.080 | We know the answer isn't money because there's other studios with a lot of money and they are

00:53:18.580 | two decades behind Rockstar.

00:53:20.320 | So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games?

00:53:24.780 | I think a cult, I mean, certainly when I, when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers.

00:53:33.360 | You know, the culture was, was one of excellence and try to provide creative clarity and, and

00:53:40.580 | people were just, you know, and also an ambition to make.

00:53:44.500 | I think we were like, we thought GTA 3 could be really popular, but really popular to us meant

00:53:50.120 | quite honestly, it's going to sell two or three million copies.

00:53:52.860 | Um, and we thought we were making something pretty innovative.

00:53:55.680 | I mean, we, we knew we were making something innovative, but we didn't know if people would

00:53:59.300 | understand how innovative it was.

00:54:01.260 | And then when we got the chance to make, to make by city and to try and repeat it, I

00:54:06.140 | think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better and to

00:54:10.640 | use this long before we had lots of resources to use time and whatever money we had to always

00:54:16.320 | put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we can do to push the medium

00:54:23.000 | of video games and the sort of medium of building fake worlds further.

00:54:27.540 | And that was always, you know, there was a, it was a, it was, you know, both clarity

00:54:32.420 | of here's what we're trying to do.

00:54:33.920 | Here's what the tone of the game is going to be.

00:54:35.920 | Here's how features will fit into that and said why these features would work and these

00:54:39.920 | features wouldn't work.

00:54:40.920 | Cause fundamentally by 2002, you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted.

00:54:45.420 | Um, it wasn't a, it wasn't a tech, there wasn't a technical limitation.

00:54:48.300 | It was just a making it cohesive.

00:54:49.800 | Um, and then it was also just, uh, everyone committing to a culture of excellence.

00:54:53.800 | Naveek Ansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker who worked with

00:54:58.680 | you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games spoke highly about his time working with you.

00:55:04.180 | Quote, we always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn't coming from the top down.

00:55:08.680 | Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there.

00:55:12.680 | They never left us holding the bag.

00:55:15.180 | We all thought we were making bad-ass shit, so it didn't matter how hard we worked.

00:55:20.720 | So I'm sure there were some tough grinds.

00:55:23.560 | Finishing it is certainly, it's tough, but it also is, you know, intensely rewarding.

00:55:29.060 | And, and you, you get something done and you've made something.

00:55:31.960 | And that feeling is, is, is, as you say, really, really incredible.

00:55:36.560 | I mean, cause sometimes it's a little bit empty as well, cause it's when, when you finish it,

00:55:39.860 | you're like, and my life's got nothing to it.

00:55:41.300 | And then you have to, you know, but that's the same with any big undertaking that you take.

00:55:45.920 | I don't think that, you know, when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work life

00:55:50.140 | balance, but the truth is you're not working that hard all the time.

00:55:52.960 | So it's just, you have to just manage it slightly differently.

00:55:55.300 | And that's such a heavy thing about the human experience.

00:55:58.960 | I've talked to Olympic gold winners and many of them face real depression after they win

00:56:03.540 | the gold medal because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about.

00:56:09.420 | this has been everything and they are still truly happy to do it.

00:56:14.040 | And then it's like, what else is there in life compared to this?

00:56:18.260 | What else is there?

00:56:19.080 | So that's the ups and downs of life.

00:56:22.680 | It's you need the darkness.

00:56:24.420 | You need the lows to really experience the highs.

00:56:28.040 | But let me ask you about the pressure.

00:56:31.380 | There's an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto 6.

00:56:36.460 | Same was true for GTA 5 and GTA 4.

00:56:39.460 | And even before that, and you and the team delivered every time, how difficult was it

00:56:46.660 | to do creative work under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success?

00:56:52.660 | I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and just saying, and I try just to go.

00:56:59.860 | And when with all creative work, I go, well, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven't

00:57:06.360 | been found out yet.

00:57:07.280 | Just do my best.

00:57:08.340 | And hopefully I won't be found out this time.

00:57:10.280 | And just, if I can be, if I can go, I tried hard with the work.

00:57:16.520 | I tried to do it with integrity.

00:57:17.980 | I tried not to copy someone else.

00:57:19.400 | I probably have done all of the above, you know, try to bring something new to it.

00:57:23.520 | And we may, and we as a group made something we are proud of, then that's enough.

00:57:27.900 | You can't, if you don't want to go insane, or if I didn't want to go insane, you couldn't

00:57:33.220 | sit there and worry about financial results.

00:57:34.900 | You know, if we made something great and it didn't sell, that would have to be okay.

00:57:38.620 | Uh, because the goal is to make something that's, you know, video games are expensive.

00:57:44.300 | So it is a sort of commercial form of creativity.

00:57:47.320 | It's a commercial art form, you know?

00:57:49.200 | So you have to be in long mind, you're spending large amounts of someone else's money.

00:57:53.900 | Um, you have to try and make it back for them.

00:57:56.940 | But at the same time, my, my argument with myself as well, if we, the way to make it back

00:58:01.120 | is try and make something great.

00:58:02.040 | So both pressures are pointing in the same direction.

00:58:04.960 | Um, I think GTA 4 was very pressured because there'd been all this pressure on the company.

00:58:11.640 | The company nearly imploded several times, uh, due to hot coffee.

00:58:15.720 | It was extremely tough.

00:58:17.300 | So I think that felt very stressful.

00:58:18.900 | GTA 3, the company was basically broke, but I was young.

00:58:21.640 | I didn't really care.

00:58:22.640 | You know, it didn't, it wasn't, I wasn't living in, in, in, in the grown up world yet.

00:58:26.320 | All of them had their own pressure.

00:58:27.820 | All of the games had their own pressure.

00:58:29.320 | All the more I felt I'd gone into it creatively and try to be more ambitious for me personally.

00:58:36.100 | I felt more pressure, you know, when it, uh, when it came out that, that, that would, that

00:58:40.080 | would have been the right choice.

00:58:41.200 | Cause again, if you're trying to take big swings creatively and you've spent a lot of money,

00:58:46.560 | that can be quite stressful.

00:58:47.560 | You know, I think with, with, with Red Dead 2, when we, you know, we, we were behind schedule,

00:58:52.160 | we were over budget so much.

00:58:54.160 | Shouldn't even want to think about it and you're making a game about a cowboy dying of

00:58:59.400 | TB and the game's not coming together.

00:59:01.800 | Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment, you know, it's not that fun.

00:59:05.460 | So I think that was a lot of pressure, um, but all, you know, anything, and he's doing

00:59:10.660 | something new, you know, the new stuff, there's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic

00:59:14.260 | book or in the same way, cause it's not taken as long, but you know, if you're making things,

00:59:18.880 | there's always pressure that people are going to like it.

00:59:20.200 | Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA 4, GTA 5?

00:59:24.120 | No, GTA 6.

00:59:25.180 | Because they don't come out that regularly.

00:59:28.300 | And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was.

00:59:34.580 | The games always felt different.

00:59:35.940 | You know, people have very strong feelings.

00:59:37.120 | I like this one.

00:59:37.860 | I didn't like that one as much cause they are pretty different.

00:59:39.960 | So you, there would be a simultaneously where you know, what's going to happen.

00:59:43.440 | It's a grand theft auto, you know, it's going to be a game about being a criminal, but the

00:59:47.360 | way it's going to be a game is going to change quite a lot.

00:59:49.340 | So I think the way the, the IP kept evolving meant people being really excited to play it.

00:59:54.080 | And we were good at marketing them as well.

00:59:55.480 | We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing,

01:00:01.560 | where you were really felt like you already in the product just because you'd seen the

01:00:04.940 | trailers and stuff.

01:00:05.560 | You've mentioned that you haven't written for Grand Theft Auto 6.

01:00:09.100 | What's it feel like Grand Theft Auto 6 returning to Vice City?

01:00:12.860 | This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the 80s.

01:00:18.020 | So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit?

01:00:22.200 | Scarface, Miami Vice.

01:00:24.140 | Miami Vice.

01:00:25.340 | And our 80s childhoods.

01:00:27.660 | You know, what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game and it was set, I think, in 86 and it, we made it in 2002.

01:00:37.700 | So 16 years after, and now it's waved past 16 years since Vice City came out.

01:00:43.620 | So it was, uh, the 80s were not that long ago when we made it.

01:00:46.000 | You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.

01:00:49.500 | Oh yeah.

01:00:50.020 | Especially if you're thinking about satirizing American culture.

01:00:52.760 | It has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld.

01:00:56.720 | It has the influencers, it has the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super rich people, and, uh, the desperately poor.

01:01:07.420 | Just the whole of it, would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of, uh, characters that are possible that human nature can generate?

01:01:17.520 | I think it's one of them.

01:01:18.660 | You know, there's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles.

01:01:24.700 | I think they're all very good for exactly what you laid out.

01:01:28.120 | You know, you could, you could say, move it to any of those and it would work, you know?

01:01:32.120 | So yeah, there's a melting pot aspect to New York also, right?

01:01:35.260 | Yeah, melting pot aspect to LA.

01:01:37.020 | You know, there's glitz, glamor, underbelly immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them.

01:01:43.300 | I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just for GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book.

01:01:53.360 | You know, this big slice of life.

01:01:55.600 | He did it with London, you know, this psychotic version of, uh, of these, you know, big, all kinds of characters in a melting pot.

01:02:02.580 | Any of these global cities work well for that.

01:02:06.220 | Do you know if that was ever consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?

01:02:10.900 | We made a little thing in London, 26 years ago, GTA London for the top down for the PS one.

01:02:18.140 | Um, that was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation one.

01:02:23.500 | I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was, uh, there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.

01:02:34.920 | You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger than life characters, it, you know, it just, it just felt like it was, the game was so much about America, you know, possibly from an outsider's perspective, but you know, that, that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere.

01:02:51.600 | So you've, you've created, I don't know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games.

01:02:56.280 | I think so.

01:02:56.760 | I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say, to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and having to watch Grand Theft Auto six released?

01:03:08.880 | Or is it more excitement, is it, what's the feeling?

01:03:11.680 | I think it's a, it's, how would I describe it?

01:03:16.940 | Of course, it's all, all of the above, you know, it's, it's exactly as you, you know, pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now, super excited.

01:03:27.180 | Um, of course, letting go of something, I've worked on it one way or another for like 20 odd years, you know, and, and, and wrote on them for the last year.

01:03:38.860 | Last 10 or 11 that came out, wrote all of them, or, you know, lead writer and all of them, whatever it was.

01:03:42.920 | Um, so of course, letting go of that is, you know, is a big, is a big change and, and a lot, and, and, and sad in a way, um, because it was, each of the games was a kind of standalone story.

01:03:59.780 | It's not quite the same as, as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead because it was a cohesive two game art.

01:04:08.840 | That might be more sad to hear someone working on that, but again, that, that, that will probably happen too.

01:04:14.000 | They're not, I don't own the IP.

01:04:15.640 | That was the sort of part of the, the, the deal.

01:04:18.160 | It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it.

01:04:20.880 | When you're done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye?

01:04:24.320 | Like when you sit, when you're done with, uh, Red Dead 2, is like, you're saying goodbye to Arthur?

01:04:29.700 | Like the characters you created, you're walking away.

01:04:32.800 | You kind of are, it's a goodbye to Arthur in the end of the game, even before the end of the game.

01:04:36.640 | Um, yeah, I think you've got, you know, I've been with them for seven, eight years and, and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one.

01:04:44.420 | Yeah.

01:04:44.940 | So it was always this thing of, of, okay, that's done.

01:04:47.000 | And sometimes people would ask me questions and I, about older games.

01:04:51.280 | And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in this, I couldn't really necessarily even remember.

01:04:55.120 | I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go.

01:04:58.200 | So I, it's, it's not, it's, you're so immersed in it and thinking about it.

01:05:03.080 | And certainly in that last period, the last few months, you're really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time.

01:05:09.700 | And then you're just not thinking about it in the same way.

01:05:12.240 | Yeah, it's funny from the player perspective, it feels like an old friend that I miss, whether it's John or Arthur or Nico, it's a real goodbye.

01:05:21.140 | That's there's a real sadness to finishing a video game.

01:05:23.580 | Like legitimately a sad experience, not just because the story is sad or.

01:05:30.080 | Because you've been with them so long.

01:05:31.680 | Yeah.

01:05:32.060 | And it's a real goodbye to close it.

01:05:34.820 | There's that feeling when you're sort of close the video game and it's, I mean, it's like saying goodbye.

01:05:42.060 | That's when you finish a book you love, it's the same feeling.

01:05:46.180 | And I think that was something that we really, in the early days of Rockstar really aspired to have that where people would have that.

01:05:54.520 | It wasn't just the mania of, of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters.

01:05:59.860 | You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible.

01:06:05.480 | So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.

01:06:08.840 | Yeah.

01:06:09.840 | The end of On the Road by Kerouac.

01:06:11.880 | Forlorn rags of growing old.

01:06:13.680 | I just remember closing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world?

01:06:17.560 | It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling.

01:06:20.380 | And you've achieved, it's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead.

01:06:24.640 | And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto 4 with Nico.

01:06:27.200 | I have to ask about, in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do.

01:06:35.880 | And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front, people are getting more divided.

01:06:43.140 | It's getting more absurd and ridiculous, so it's becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous.

01:06:53.180 | You're talking about, you don't even know from Grand Theft Auto 6 if it's possible to satirize.

01:06:59.740 | Because by the time you release the thing, it's already going to be outdated in terms of, the satire will become reality, essentially.

01:07:08.760 | First of all, it'd be nice to get your updated view on that.

01:07:12.400 | Second of all, it seems like you've answered your very own comment with American Caper, which seems to satirize American culture just fine in how much over the top it goes.

01:07:23.880 | Anyway, there's lots of questions in there.

01:07:26.520 | One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are, it still has lead times, but the lead times are not four or five years.

01:07:33.880 | The lead times are, you know, a year when we're putting, we can make little updates much, much newer.

01:07:39.780 | And we're, you know, we're, we're just wrapping issue 10 of a, of a 12 issue arc for that.

01:07:45.440 | So it's not quite, it's not quite as difficult.

01:07:50.280 | You still can get the tone of it.

01:07:51.940 | Um, but yeah, I think it's, uh, I think it's an issue.

01:07:55.260 | Anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015, 2016 is going to have of, how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?

01:08:06.740 | So American Caper is, first of all, epic comic book.

01:08:10.080 | I love it.

01:08:10.560 | The art.

01:08:11.140 | Yeah, the art's beautiful.

01:08:12.580 | David Lapham is the artist.

01:08:13.760 | He did an amazing job.

01:08:14.680 | He is a, he is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

01:08:18.100 | What made you want to set in Wyoming?

01:08:21.060 | Hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about.

01:08:24.220 | I started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West.

01:08:27.860 | And I was like, I, I spent a lot of time in like the countryside in upstate New York and, and thought never really captured it quite right.

01:08:36.300 | And just the idea of these places as they change.

01:08:39.520 | It didn't, it was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA.

01:08:43.380 | You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored.

01:08:48.680 | And there is over the top stuff.

01:08:50.340 | There's, there's, there's definitely slightly over the top.

01:08:53.300 | So let me take notes on this.

01:08:54.240 | There's a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe.

01:08:58.240 | Uh, there's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.

01:09:07.200 | He's not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box.

01:09:12.340 | And his, uh, his, uh, his rather cynical boss is using his, uh, his religion and some mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

01:09:22.680 | And of course there's this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil.

01:09:32.300 | So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.

01:09:36.220 | Yes.

01:09:37.000 | Who loves to manually harvest bull semen.

01:09:40.520 | Accurate.

01:09:42.500 | I mean, I'm, uh, this is the notes I've been taking.

01:09:45.040 | He is a, um, he is a somewhat confused, longevity obsessed.

01:09:51.360 | Right.

01:09:51.720 | Rich dude has run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.

01:09:56.140 | And bull semen is a big component of longevity.

01:09:58.320 | Yes.

01:09:58.860 | He's very into all the life hacking, uh, you know, roid, roiding HGH and, and making money and lost his mind living on a big ranch.

01:10:08.520 | Of course.

01:10:09.500 | And the theme of satire, there is a woman who, uh, sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.

01:10:19.360 | Yes, based on someone I know who got completely red pilled and I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

01:10:28.720 | Yeah.

01:10:29.480 | So, you know, satire of American culture, quick pause, bath and break.

01:10:33.660 | Sure.

01:10:35.360 | I think GTA five had the biggest launch of video game history and, uh, GTA six has the potential to, uh, topping that first of all, do you think it will and more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?

01:10:50.480 | I would assume it will because it's so anticipated and anticipation is the best driver of early sales.

01:10:58.120 | As we saw with GTA four versus red dead redemption one, you know, GTA four far more anticipated, sold much better early on.

01:11:05.100 | So I would assume it will sell really well.

01:11:07.340 | That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money.

01:11:15.360 | You know, you, you're spending someone's money.

01:11:17.420 | So the number one success is, are you making that money back plus a dollar at some level?

01:11:21.800 | That has to be, that has to be the single most important thing.

01:11:24.480 | So you get to do it again, you know, you've got big teams of people, people need to pay the rent.

01:11:29.180 | You have to keep the lights on in the business.

01:11:30.960 | So you have to make a small profit.

01:11:32.820 | If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative.

01:11:35.800 | I think that was like trying to forget about that.

01:11:38.000 | It's not really an option.

01:11:39.160 | Um, but we almost always did that.

01:11:42.040 | We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that.

01:11:43.960 | I think the definition of success for me was had we tried to do new things and done them or achieved some of our goals.

01:11:51.700 | That was the thing that I'm at, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to.

01:11:58.080 | Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars when, if you look at like the eighties and nineties, you know, nobody took video games seriously.

01:12:08.400 | And even in the awesome, and now they're basically, I mean, it's very possible.

01:12:14.340 | If you look at 10, 20 years from now, the video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.

01:12:20.600 | I think they've possibly already done that in some ways.

01:12:24.880 | And certainly as an, as a business proposition, they've already done that.

01:12:28.540 | But I think that's not, you know, as a, as a way of telling stories, I think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better at other kinds of stories.

01:12:38.620 | You know, I think, I think if you want a long discursive adventure, a video game is better.

01:12:43.200 | If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better.

01:12:45.540 | We always felt games were the coming medium.

01:12:48.860 | And so we spent 20 years saying games of the future, games of the future, and, you know, being sneered at, them being laughed at, them being, having people nod their heads and then it kind of happening.

01:13:02.440 | So I would, well, you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don't necessarily believe it's going to be true, but it has become true.

01:13:09.980 | And I think still the games are only going to get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.

01:13:16.900 | You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done.

01:13:22.200 | I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time.

01:13:25.880 | What are the elements that make that game truly great?

01:13:29.440 | I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, um, that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006.

01:13:42.040 | So it was a long experience team.

01:13:44.160 | I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game.

01:13:54.200 | Um, 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 full team on it.

01:14:01.800 | I think that the cowboy setting, uh, is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn't allow.

01:14:13.920 | You know, I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA four, but it just can't, once you're setting things in the modern world, they're too frenetic.

01:14:20.520 | You can't get some of that slightly, you know, operatic feel that I love that, that, that some people think maybe a little over the top, but I, I, you know, I love this kind of, you know, people searching for meaning within amongst the violence.

01:14:33.900 | I think that the, the, the, the west and all of the themes around the west really lend itself to that.

01:14:38.280 | So I think that, and then the, the gunplay was fantastic.

01:14:41.400 | Um, and the horses were incredible.

01:14:43.680 | So I think you had this combination of kind of technical know-how, a very, very strong team and really strong material.

01:14:51.180 | Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the RDR world?

01:14:57.500 | So of course it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's, that, that's a fundamentally, uh, different, I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption one, and then even more so Red Dead Redemption two, that was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.

01:15:20.320 | Well, thank you.

01:15:22.000 | So like what, uh, drugs were involved?

01:15:24.080 | No drugs.

01:15:25.480 | Okay.

01:15:25.920 | No, no, stop the, stop the drugs long before.

01:15:28.160 | Okay.

01:15:28.540 | That's why I did all that work.

01:15:29.540 | Um, I had nothing else to do.

01:15:31.440 | Uh, so yeah, open, open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way.

01:15:37.040 | Kept me busy.

01:15:37.640 | Um, but, uh, Red, so Red Dead, I'll tell you, I'll give you the, my version.

01:15:43.600 | Now games are made by big teams.

01:15:45.360 | Yeah.

01:15:45.780 | So I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only.

01:15:50.800 | Um, we, we made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that being a Capcom game and they didn't want to finish it.

01:15:57.940 | So we finished it and they released in Japan and we released it in the U S in, I think, 2004.

01:16:03.160 | Um, and decided we would start work on open world cowboy game for PS3.

01:16:08.520 | Um, didn't think too much more about it.

01:16:12.280 | And that was a bunch of other stuff to work on.

01:16:14.540 | And slowly 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life, began to, uh, meet with, uh, the lead designer, Christian Cantemessa,

01:16:26.040 | and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for, for the game and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about, well, what works for an open world game?

01:16:35.700 | What works for a cowboy game?

01:16:36.920 | And again, was being lazy or procrastinating.

01:16:40.980 | Uh, can we just, on a small tangent, uh, when you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy, what, what do those notes look like?

01:16:48.440 | They look like either, 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.

01:16:57.940 | Uh, here's a good idea.

01:16:59.300 | Is it a good idea?

01:16:59.600 | And those, or it might be scribbling on a pad.

01:17:01.520 | Um, and then I'll assemble, if I, if they're done digitally, then I'll do, I'll, I'll assemble them into one long word file and then I'll look at them and go, you know, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea and see if it comes to anything.

01:17:14.660 | See if I now aggregate them together and then read through them, there's anything coherent there.

01:17:19.060 | You know, some, like a character like this, a character like that.

01:17:21.580 | This would be a funny line.

01:17:22.900 | This is a line for the main character.

01:17:24.500 | Actually make the main character work like this, you know, or what about this relationship?

01:17:28.680 | Um, as a start to just play around with, what about if we start in that place, go to that place, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces.

01:17:36.920 | And we begun to flesh out some flow for the start of the game.

01:17:42.320 | And this idea you'd start in dusty American West, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees and then go to Mexico and then come back.

01:17:49.100 | Um, and we had a sort of loose flow and I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue.

01:17:56.700 | Um, and I didn't have a clue how to go about it.

01:18:01.680 | And I kept, it'll come, it'll come.

01:18:02.960 | And then, um, and I kept, I could postpone if ages were doing GTA four and I kept worrying about it.

01:18:08.400 | And then GT, my work was wrapped on GTA four, but the game wasn't out yet.

01:18:12.700 | And we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff and I had a little window where I wasn't doing much else.

01:18:16.600 | And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child.

01:18:23.240 | And we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the, well, she, she, she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading.

01:18:31.600 | And I went and sat in the room all day, every day and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about how can I do this?

01:18:39.000 | That it doesn't sound ridiculous.

01:18:40.400 | How can you write in a, in a, in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary, but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have.

01:18:50.040 | And think we can think we can get away with.

01:18:52.120 | And after about three days, it just started to come.

01:18:57.140 | And then suddenly I wrote about nine, 10 scenes in the next couple of days.

01:19:00.740 | And after that knew I had it.

01:19:02.680 | And it was, I don't know if it was, that was why there was so much about a character caring about his family.

01:19:08.660 | Because I was just beginning the process of having a family.

01:19:11.860 | Oh, I don't know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent.

01:19:17.140 | So that was part of the creating the 360 degree characters.

01:19:20.180 | I think so.

01:19:21.220 | Here's this man, uh, that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence.

01:19:27.100 | There's also cares about his family.

01:19:28.960 | He's grown up and he's trying to step away from that and be, and be a man, be a grownup.

01:19:33.620 | And can he get away from it?

01:19:35.020 | And then, and then when he can't get away from it, what's he willing to do to save his family?

01:19:38.780 | And that was, I felt starting to get some idea, feeling just, I mean, she hadn't given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of I'm going to become a parent.

01:19:47.820 | So I hope some of that, and obviously then I didn't probably write anymore for six months.

01:19:52.240 | Later on, I had a, had a child, but, but certainly for that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.

01:19:57.920 | You got the feeling that you can actually do it.

01:19:59.500 | It is true.

01:20:00.220 | It's, uh, it could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable.

01:20:06.720 | The, the dialogue between con boys.

01:20:09.040 | Yes.

01:20:09.560 | I mean, there's probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable.

01:20:15.820 | And, and like that, like, uh, like a Shakespearean type of drama, but not the cheesy kind.

01:20:26.680 | Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke.

01:20:30.700 | I mean, I, I, I love dialogue.

01:20:32.960 | I'm always, you know, I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy.

01:20:39.160 | It didn't sound ridiculous.

01:20:40.360 | You wanted to hear them speak more.

01:20:41.740 | It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke.

01:20:44.160 | That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was.

01:20:46.720 | And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey and you cared about him.

01:20:52.680 | You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them.

01:20:55.880 | When did you know how you're going to end Red Dead Redemption one?

01:21:00.720 | I remember we did a meeting with, uh, Christian, the designer.

01:21:03.900 | I can't remember what year, probably some point late 2008, early 2009.

01:21:09.820 | And we were discussing the last bit and, and, and, uh, said, uh, I think he's got to die.

01:21:15.020 | And he leapt on the idea and went, that's yeah, yes, yes.

01:21:17.740 | And then I went, no, it can't work.

01:21:18.820 | Games can't work like that.

01:21:19.880 | They can't work if he's dead.

01:21:21.280 | And then I began to think through, well, if we just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up.

01:21:26.800 | And then began to think through, actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way.

01:21:30.560 | And so, uh, he then really pushed for that idea and it seemed to, I was like, ah, I was still torn.

01:21:37.080 | I thought it was clever narratively.

01:21:40.040 | Um, but I was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.

01:21:46.320 | Yeah.

01:21:47.220 | And, uh, spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the story of that?

01:21:51.740 | Well, so he goes through a lot.

01:21:54.260 | He does all the, John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang.

01:21:58.160 | And he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch.

01:22:04.580 | And then the government betrays him and sends, uh, uh, troops to, to kill him.

01:22:11.840 | And, and there is dialogue.

01:22:14.280 | I mean, that is just, uh, I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue.

01:22:26.600 | I think John talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember, I think he said, I love you, but he said very, look, he didn't, he made it seem like he's going to see her and his son shortly.

01:22:40.560 | That dialogue was masterfully done, like a definition of like less is more.

01:22:44.700 | It was just so crisp.

01:22:48.980 | That, and of course the other one is, um, again, from memory, Arthur riding his horse and the music is playing.

01:22:57.760 | It's very hard not to shed a tear during that.

01:23:00.740 | Um, anyway, the dialogue of, uh, John talking to his wife at, at the end when he's in a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death.

01:23:12.140 | Uh, do you remember writing that?

01:23:14.160 | Oh yeah.

01:23:15.080 | Yeah.

01:23:16.000 | But it does.

01:23:16.660 | Again, I won't, I, the actor was so good.

01:23:20.180 | I'm already seen a bunch of his work by then.

01:23:21.820 | 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.

01:23:28.420 | Like, I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy.

01:23:31.580 | And so I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

01:23:34.700 | So you were imagining his voice.

01:23:36.840 | Yeah.

01:23:37.180 | And, and I think all of those actors on, on, on Red Dead Redemption one were so strong that they really brought that game to life.

01:23:45.040 | If they, them and Rod, the director hadn't done such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell.

01:23:50.140 | Uh, yeah.

01:23:51.180 | You've said that the ending of that ending, uh, of RDR one is, uh, one of the best things you've been a part of creating.

01:24:01.500 | Uh, why, why, why, why is, why is that ending so powerful to you?

01:24:05.940 | What does it represent?

01:24:06.880 | Um, I think because for the story to work, I mean, just from, from a technical challenge for the story to work, he had to die.

01:24:18.180 | But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die.

01:24:22.300 | It was probably the four fifth or sixth open world game I'd worked on.

01:24:28.880 | And I, you know, 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.

01:24:40.820 | And suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end of the game, you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories to play forever.

01:24:48.980 | 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.

01:24:54.760 | And the narrative is going to be, if we've done a good job, compelling enough where you're not going to care about that.

01:25:01.540 | And, um, or you're going to be upset that he's dead, but you're going to actually have this emotional moment.

01:25:07.440 | Um, so I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that and then it worked.

01:25:13.040 | So I think that was something that was very, we were full of fear and it put, and it worked, it worked out okay.

01:25:18.040 | I mean, I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because I didn't think it was going to happen.

01:25:22.140 | But I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, it was that kind of creative moment where, you know, transcendent moment with, with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we've always aspired to giving people.

01:25:32.660 | I mean, it's incredible because I don't think, I don't remember a single video game that has done that before.

01:25:37.240 | Well, I would like to have at the end of GTA 4, kill Nico, but you couldn't do it.

01:25:40.680 | You know, the game doesn't work.

01:25:43.080 | So it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it and then going, let's do it.

01:25:48.860 | Let's, let's take the risk and do it.

01:25:50.280 | We can't do it.

01:25:50.940 | Let's try it, try it.

01:25:52.040 | And it worked.

01:25:52.620 | Yeah.

01:25:53.640 | What about the decision with the son?

01:25:55.860 | You know, John give so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn't end up in a life of violence.

01:26:02.300 | And then it, uh, I mean, it's very Godfather like it's, he's dragged back into it through revenge.

01:26:10.440 | That was also the game still had to work as a game, whether that was the right ending, a hundred percent, the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective.

01:26:21.340 | I don't know.

01:26:22.040 | Um, but I know that we had to make the game work.

01:26:25.020 | So it was, I think it was, I think it kind of worked in that way where, where Jack can't escape, but I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape.

01:26:34.120 | But that wasn't, you know, uh, it both were interesting to me.

01:26:37.160 | Can you just dig in a little deeper?

01:26:38.760 | Like, what do you mean about for the game to work?

01:26:40.320 | It's such a direct, it's like a Kubrick talking about for this movie to work.

01:26:44.560 | It has to have, cause from my perspective, I just think about the story.

01:26:48.800 | What was the technical aspect for the game to work?

01:26:50.620 | You know, the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you, you, you know, the games don't really end and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff.

01:27:00.740 | So at the end of the game, you had to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of, uh, features, which is you can, you know, run up to someone and punch them or run up to someone and rob them or run up to someone to talk to them.

01:27:15.660 | And that's kind of, you know, jump on a horse or, or, or do all this other stuff in order for the game still to be fun.

01:27:22.200 | And then people to get this full 360 degree experience with it, they had to, you know, a hundred, if they wanted to a hundred percent, the game, as opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an avatar to do that stuff with.

01:27:32.740 | So that was, uh, that was the sort of challenge of, of Jack's character slash wrapping up the story as Jack.

01:27:39.140 | Oh, there's real power, uh, for the avatar to end the finiteness.

01:27:46.500 | Yeah, both the Red Dead Sea, obviously change avatar, which we'd regard, you know, and then did it again.

01:27:51.740 | I think there's something interesting about that moment when you change from one character to another, because they are you and they're not you, you know, and then there's suddenly someone else.

01:27:59.580 | I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it's a, it's a beautiful experience.

01:28:05.860 | It's like an unforgettable experience and that what else can video games possibly reach for, you know, that's to create that experience.

01:28:14.340 | That's what great films do.

01:28:15.160 | That's what great, great, great books do.

01:28:17.280 | It's that, I mean, it's that and the world building in games.

01:28:19.800 | I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taken on these narrative adventures, when that combines, you've got the amazing experience.

01:28:28.060 | So who do you think is the best character you've ever created in RDR?

01:28:31.900 | So to me, I think definitively Arthur from, uh, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games ever.

01:28:43.580 | Uh, I think there's not even, I mean, John will be the same, which is hilarious to say, but like those are, uh, John will be a close second, but Arthur is definitively, and you, you've talked about in that interview, you said that, uh, a lot of video games, uh, work on the same premise that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero.

01:29:05.620 | Uh, but what if you start as a tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world?

01:29:13.680 | Arthur's journey is not about becoming a superhero because he's almost one at the start, but it's about an intellectual rollercoaster when his worldview gets taken apart.

01:29:25.220 | So it's, it's, it's, it's very different than the normal journey of a character.

01:29:31.240 | Yeah.

01:29:32.180 | In a game.

01:29:33.240 | In a game.

01:29:33.920 | Wanted to reverse it.

01:29:34.640 | Yeah.

01:29:35.200 | So there were a couple other themes that matched that.

01:29:37.560 | So there are guys from the wild west, but they're being pushed ever further east.

01:29:41.740 | So it was almost like an anti-western, an eastern, you're traveling east, you're traveling into civilization.

01:29:46.860 | And I, I don't think I would have been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career.

01:29:54.800 | Cause there was, oh, you know, this idea of getting, getting a different kind of strength and different kind of weakness was interesting.

01:30:01.000 | What about the component of mortality of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period?

01:30:06.200 | Sort of just realize the, the, the, the, the prospect of, uh, like real sort of fear of death, realization of death.

01:30:15.520 | Yeah.

01:30:16.040 | I thought that was really part of the story.

01:30:17.480 | Really fun thing to play with.

01:30:19.420 | Um, John dies in Red Dead one, uh, and wanted to top that.

01:30:24.640 | Red Dead two or do, do that in a different way.

01:30:27.440 | And so the idea that it's John's death is fairly sudden.

01:30:30.400 | 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, cause it is this long drawn out, slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker.

01:30:43.180 | 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.

01:30:55.100 | But only three of them out of like 35 survived.

01:30:57.320 | So I was always, uh, captivated by TB as an illness.

01:31:02.620 | It felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea.

01:31:08.060 | This, this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal.

01:31:12.460 | He was the protagonist in a video game.

01:31:14.040 | He could not die.

01:31:14.820 | And suddenly he is becoming mortal.

01:31:17.300 | And, and, you know, but that helps him see stuff.

01:31:19.980 | I thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game.

01:31:23.900 | Yeah.

01:31:25.180 | Do you think it's the greatest character you've ever created?

01:31:27.380 | I think he's the best lead character.

01:31:31.420 | You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters.

01:31:34.460 | And I think he's the, he's the most rounded and works the best.

01:31:41.620 | I kind of him and Nico are the two.

01:31:45.580 | I like, you know, they were the two most ambitious.

01:31:47.940 | So for me, it's always, it's always sort of a toss up, you know, but then I loved all the stuff.

01:31:52.940 | Like the, the, the art team did such an amazing job.

01:31:57.140 | It was there with the journal and that kind of like the way that all the features worked into Arthur's character.

01:32:03.060 | I thought that was really, he really rounded.

01:32:05.140 | He worked in a re in lots of different ways, really well.

01:32:07.140 | I loved like his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend, things like that.

01:32:12.140 | All the side, you know, the bits that kind of turned up around him.

01:32:14.500 | So you also liked the side characters.

01:32:17.140 | You liked the, the flavor of the full cast.

01:32:21.260 | What are, what are some of the favorites you've created?

01:32:23.180 | I'm sure the one you're currently working on, Nigel Dave, that's a, you called them a side character.

01:32:27.780 | Well, he's not a protagonist.

01:32:29.420 | He's like a, he's a God, not a character.

01:32:32.180 | So he's not him.

01:32:33.300 | I'm enjoying.

01:32:33.940 | Um, I love Dutch, you know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the

01:32:43.060 | first game and the actor did such a, uh, such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came

01:32:49.940 | to me all of their backstory, which I'd been playing around with by that point anywhere,

01:32:53.620 | a little bit in my head, but I knew it was his bigger gang stuff.

01:32:56.180 | And then I sort of saw exactly who he was.

01:32:58.340 | And so that was, that, that felt like he, he felt like a living character to me.

01:33:02.500 | And we should say that Dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a God-like figure in

01:33:08.020 | both of the Red Dead Redemption games.

01:33:09.860 | he's the leader of the gang and there's a father-son relationship with Dutch, with the, uh, I mean,

01:33:16.580 | with Arthur, with John.

01:33:17.540 | I mean, there's, there's a family feeling to the gang that you explore all of those dynamics and

01:33:23.620 | And then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis, you're going against the family,

01:33:29.220 | going against the father because he is transforming his, uh, sense of the world of morality of all those kinds of things.

01:33:36.100 | So all the kind of very Shakespearean dramas right there.

01:33:39.460 | And Dutch is a prominent God-like figure through all of that.

01:33:44.900 | Also flawed himself, also a man of good and evil in that, uh, framework that they're operating under.

01:33:52.740 | He's just drowning in his ego at the end.

01:33:54.980 | Yeah.

01:33:55.460 | You know, his ego gets the better of him.

01:33:56.980 | I think he's a, but he, but there was something

01:33:59.300 | flawed, but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger.

01:34:04.900 | And that's mostly off camera, but, and then just, you know, always been as an individual,

01:34:10.180 | I've always been very susceptible to charming people and he's charming.

01:34:14.420 | And so I always kind of, I can see how people get captivated by charming people.

01:34:18.660 | And, and the idea of here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him.

01:34:23.300 | I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am to charm and charisma.

01:34:32.180 | Yeah.

01:34:32.900 | Cause it can cloud your judgment about human nature completely.

01:34:37.060 | And that's what he, that's what's happened with him.

01:34:39.220 | And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself.

01:34:43.060 | He kind of fell for his own rubbish.

01:34:44.660 | Yeah.

01:34:45.860 | But also it clouded Arthur's judgment.

01:34:48.900 | Oh, completely.

01:34:49.780 | Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him.

01:34:53.300 | He was worshiping him.

01:34:54.100 | He'd given up his power to him.

01:34:55.780 | And then I think for Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying.

01:35:02.260 | You know, and that's what the whole, that's what I thought was really interesting.

01:35:04.980 | Yeah.

01:35:05.940 | It's truly tragic for Arthur to be losing his identity, lifelong identity and the sense of belonging

01:35:14.740 | and losing his life at the same time.

01:35:17.940 | in facing the mortality, he is realizing that he's not, all of it has been a lie.

01:35:24.660 | But he gets to do some, well, depends on what the choices you make, but he gets to do some good.

01:35:31.700 | Yes.

01:35:32.100 | And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption.

01:35:34.740 | Just a little bit, but realizing your whole life, you've been living not a good life.

01:35:40.100 | Yes.

01:35:40.660 | You've been not a good man.

01:35:41.940 | Isn't that what we're all afraid of?

01:35:43.700 | I guess it's never too late to change your ways.

01:35:46.180 | I need another time.

01:35:48.260 | Uh, so the biggest, most important question.

01:35:50.500 | Uh, primary central to the reason we're talking today.

01:35:55.380 | Uh, the number one question from the internet.

01:35:58.660 | It is so ridiculous, but I must ask.

01:36:00.500 | Have you seen Gavin?

01:36:02.740 | Who is Gavin?

01:36:06.340 | So for more context, there's a guy named Nigel in Red Dead Redemption 2,

01:36:10.260 | who's frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game.

01:36:14.180 | This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs, the RDR fan base.

01:36:19.860 | So the theories include theory one is it's a split personality disorder.

01:36:24.740 | Nigel himself is Gavin.

01:36:26.980 | Uh, so the evidence is the letter for this theory that has some evidence that maybe due to trauma,

01:36:35.940 | the split personality disorder was created.

01:36:38.500 | This Gavin was created inside Nigel's mind.

01:36:40.820 | Uh, theory two is Gavin is dead and Nigel is simply in denial.

01:36:44.500 | Theory three is that it's just a troll and rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to

01:36:52.020 | drive players crazy.

01:36:53.060 | I also heard, uh, theory four is Gavin is the strange man.

01:36:58.100 | So there's this fascinating character, the strange man, this supernatural character that has a presence

01:37:03.380 | in RDR one and a little bit in RDR two also.

01:37:07.060 | Yeah.

01:37:08.420 | So, uh, which, which theory is closest to the truth?

01:37:12.180 | Not three or four.

01:37:14.580 | Somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two.

01:37:18.900 | Yeah.

01:37:19.300 | And I, I just loved the way he shouted Gavin.

01:37:21.940 | It just amused me.

01:37:23.300 | So at some level it probably is trolling and that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery.

01:37:28.580 | You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it.

01:37:32.020 | Um, but it was meant to be without ever fully being explained that Gavin's not there anymore.

01:37:39.620 | Gavin's either gone home.

01:37:41.220 | Gavin's left him.

01:37:42.580 | Gavin's, uh, and we were going to keep exploring that idea.

01:37:46.580 | He was going to reappear in some way or other.

01:37:48.820 | Did you have any idea how much, uh, imagination and excitement and curiosity

01:37:56.100 | that little interaction would inspire in people?

01:37:58.980 | Yes and no.

01:38:01.460 | I mean, no, you could never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games.

01:38:04.980 | And a lot of it comes down to acting as well.

01:38:06.900 | The guy was just funny when he said Gavin, it was just funny, you know, but there was

01:38:11.380 | a ped in red, red dimension one that everyone was obsessed by.

01:38:14.340 | And I really wasn't expecting that.

01:38:16.180 | So we try and put a few characters in.

01:38:18.580 | I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing.

01:38:20.100 | I thought he was amusing.

01:38:21.380 | Um, but you never know what's, what people are going to get obsessed by.

01:38:24.660 | There are other characters I think are funny and the people don't even notice them.

01:38:27.220 | You know, although they see them in a completely different way.

01:38:30.020 | Did you have a part in writing the letter?

01:38:32.180 | Yeah.

01:38:32.420 | I can't remember if I wrote it or I, either I wrote it or Mike wrote it, or we both wrote it.

01:38:37.620 | I really can't remember to be honest with you, but yeah, I certainly would have edited it.

01:38:40.260 | And Mike might've written it or I might've written it.

01:38:42.740 | I really can't remember.

01:38:43.540 | It's so fascinating because that little piece of writing, of course you have thousands of pages.

01:38:48.180 | That little piece of writing gets like analyzed.

01:38:51.220 | Oh, but we certainly talked about it in, in depth.

01:38:53.460 | And, uh, if Mike was here, I'd ask you, he might remember.

01:38:56.660 | I can't be able to do so much of those things.

01:38:59.140 | And I loved the use of letters in red dead to tell all these weird backstories.

01:39:03.620 | And some became very clear and some were still a little kind of opaque, but the general vibe was

01:39:10.260 | there was no Gavin.

01:39:11.300 | Either there was no Gavin or he'd long since left.

01:39:13.620 | So it's kind of a split personality, you know, and then we were going to over subsequent games

01:39:18.900 | that provide more information.

01:39:19.940 | So in some sense, you yourself don't quite know.

01:39:23.060 | You kind of have an idea.

01:39:25.220 | So he could like, like, which way do you lean more theory one or two?

01:39:29.380 | Is he dead in the guy and Nigel's in denial or is there real communication going inside his head?

01:39:35.940 | No, Gavin existed.

01:39:37.140 | So it wasn't that he was a split personality.

01:39:38.980 | And, and the, the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game, were we going to

01:39:44.500 | reveal that Gavin was dead or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac?

01:39:50.020 | You know, that was what we're still playing around with.

01:39:51.940 | I think the idea was that he was never going to meet.

01:39:54.020 | He was never going to meet Gavin in this game.

01:39:58.660 | Uh, it's just, it's just fascinating because you have to think about all of that.

01:40:02.500 | You have to write all of that.

01:40:03.780 | You have to have those discussions.

01:40:05.060 | You have to have those debates.

01:40:06.500 | And it has to feel fresh.

01:40:07.620 | That was like what we've done before.

01:40:09.620 | Constantly looking as you do, you know, I think I did, you know, somewhere between 15 and 20 of these

01:40:14.900 | games got to do stuff that's new.

01:40:16.580 | It can't repeat itself too much.

01:40:17.940 | I mean, we also live in the age of the internet.

01:40:21.700 | Just like you realize there's like millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.

01:40:29.380 | Thank God.

01:40:30.740 | It's like, it's fascinating that they're having is they think about people reading like James

01:40:35.940 | Joyce or something and thinking about the care, like breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about like

01:40:42.020 | arguing about different interpretations of it.

01:40:44.500 | And to me, that in itself is also beautiful.

01:40:47.620 | Yeah.

01:40:47.860 | We want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want, you want these

01:40:52.580 | discussions, you know, and you want, but as long as it feels totally appropriate for this whole big

01:40:58.500 | sort of shaggy dog story experience you're making, which Gavin was just about, and he was so weird.

01:41:04.340 | And he just was intrinsically of just something funny about an English person screaming Gavin.

01:41:09.060 | I don't know why.

01:41:09.700 | Yeah.

01:41:10.740 | Some of that humor.

01:41:11.380 | I mean, there's, there's, there, there's certainly in Red Dead Redemption, that's humor,

01:41:15.540 | but there's a lot of in Grand Theft Auto and what it's hard to put into words.

01:41:19.780 | Why that's funny, why it becomes mean, why it becomes viral.

01:41:24.340 | Cause it's just funny.

01:41:26.020 | It's I know why I think it's funny, but are you, what you can't, what I'm not good at doing at least

01:41:31.060 | is going, this thing will become really popular online.

01:41:34.180 | And this other thing.

01:41:34.900 | Won't you can, you can create this bunch of 50 different side things that people might get

01:41:41.620 | captivated by and you just do not know what they're going to respond to.

01:41:44.260 | How do you know when something's funny?

01:41:46.020 | Is it, you just feel it?

01:41:47.300 | I know what I think is funny.

01:41:48.420 | It's, you know, just because it's ridiculous as well.

01:41:51.460 | That was just, there's nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin a lot.

01:41:55.940 | He just said it, I just thought it might be funny.

01:41:58.340 | And he just said it in such a funny way.

01:42:00.100 | Yeah.

01:42:00.420 | And then it just became funny.

01:42:01.540 | Like you, we often have those side characters and they're not that funny.

01:42:05.860 | And I think they're going to be hysterical.

01:42:07.380 | And then you put them in the game and they're off.

01:42:08.900 | They're fine, but they're not amazing.

01:42:10.260 | That guy just brought that stuff to life.

01:42:12.020 | Yeah.

01:42:12.660 | And there's a backstory too.

01:42:14.020 | I mean, Londoner and not.

01:42:15.300 | I mean, yeah, that was what, you know, just there's something sometimes fun.

01:42:19.540 | You know, an English person saying the name Gavin is.

01:42:22.020 | Uh, yeah.

01:42:22.980 | I don't know why.

01:42:24.020 | So about the strange man, AKA the man of black.

01:42:26.740 | Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in grand theft auto five?

01:42:30.820 | Like who is the strange man?

01:42:32.100 | Well, the strange man was again, was, was someone we came up with quickly.

01:42:38.100 | We made red dead one and we were, we're making red dead one.

01:42:44.660 | And we'd made this, we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world.

01:42:50.660 | But, and we would, we'd already made a bunch of grand theft autos, obviously.

01:42:54.260 | But unfortunately we'd taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game,

01:42:57.780 | apart from the big fixed position ones.

01:42:59.380 | And we'd taken out the cars and we'd taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians.

01:43:03.620 | So we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert.

01:43:06.900 | And it was quite, and it was quite boring.

01:43:10.100 | And so we, we then started filling it with content and we filled it with these and having to improvise.

01:43:15.060 | And we filled it with these things we call random events that would be, they sort of mocap moments

01:43:19.700 | that you could interact with.

01:43:20.980 | And it was, they, they were, they were, the designers did an amazing job of those.

01:43:24.100 | They were really fun.

01:43:24.900 | Um, but there was not enough of them.

01:43:27.220 | And then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short.

01:43:30.340 | So we kind of quite late in development.

01:43:32.900 | Started putting in almost like these RPG type content where you go and meet someone.

01:43:37.860 | And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories.

01:43:40.260 | So you go and meet someone, they'd set you a slow problem.

01:43:43.140 | Like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers.

01:43:45.940 | And when you came, came back, it would resolve your story.

01:43:48.900 | And so the one go, go and get them for my bride.

01:43:51.780 | And you come back and the bride's dead.

01:43:53.140 | You know, we tried to make them like these short stories with a sting in the tail.

01:43:57.220 | And he came out as I was trying to come up with ideas for those as just this weird character.

01:44:05.300 | And then we built him a bit into the story where he would unlock as you worked your way through

01:44:10.260 | and be a commentary on what you were doing.

01:44:13.220 | So he was meant to be a kind of manifestation of your, you know, shadow, your karma, the devil

01:44:23.060 | somewhere, you know, just saw the world.

01:44:25.540 | And then we built out his backstory over time, um, and decide, you know, so in Red Dead 2,

01:44:31.620 | you could interact with him again and, or not really interact with him,

01:44:33.940 | but he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something, I suppose, any creative is

01:44:38.180 | scared of an artist who'd kind of sold his soul to the devil.

01:44:41.620 | And that slowly revealed itself.

01:44:44.180 | There is a connection between the main character and the, is it like a Jungian shadow type of situation?

01:44:50.900 | Well, it's sort of, because he knows what you're up to.

01:44:53.540 | The connection is, and what's never really made clear is, does he know this about everybody?

01:44:58.660 | Like, is he following you or is he able, because of the pact he's made with, with, with, with evil

01:45:04.420 | forces, able to do this for everybody?

01:45:06.180 | And I don't think we necessarily ever clarify that.

01:45:08.340 | He's certainly able to do it for you.

01:45:09.540 | I mean, there's a narrative wise, there's techniques to reveal a kind of self-reflection analysis of

01:45:18.580 | the main character's thoughts.

01:45:19.780 | I mean, that's why I brought up the therapist with Michael.

01:45:22.260 | That was a really powerful, interesting thing to do in the video game.

01:45:27.300 | Like, I don't think I've seen that.

01:45:29.380 | That's such a cool.

01:45:30.340 | I mean, there's a Sopranos element there with a therapist.

01:45:32.740 | A little bit.

01:45:33.220 | Yeah.

01:45:33.620 | I really love an opportunity for a character to just self-reflect through that technique.

01:45:40.660 | But it also changed depending on what you've done.

01:45:42.180 | Yes.

01:45:42.660 | So it was, it was sort of slightly, it wasn't as interactive as it could be,

01:45:46.420 | but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done.

01:45:49.780 | So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point.

01:45:54.420 | And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander was just funny because he was awful.

01:45:58.260 | So it was like LA, you're in therapy.

01:46:00.020 | It's very LA, but it's also very LA.

01:46:02.180 | He wants to write a book and betray you, which felt like a good, a good twist.

01:46:06.260 | And it was, he felt like a grand theft auto therapist, but just like the idea of making

01:46:13.220 | the player in a game and games are intrinsically kind of physical and you know, you, you walk,

01:46:19.460 | you, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever.

01:46:22.740 | There's these kinds of physical fantasies, trying to put them into a slightly more reflective

01:46:27.300 | or metaphysical state for a moment.

01:46:28.900 | I think can be really fun.

01:46:29.860 | I think to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, about video

01:46:34.580 | games that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is insanely specific,

01:46:42.740 | intricate details in the story, but also visually.

01:46:46.580 | It's just added to the, the feeling, uh, that the world is real.

01:46:52.980 | Uh, so I have to ask what, what are some of your, um,

01:46:56.820 | favorite insanely specific, intricate details in, in RDR and give you some options.

01:47:03.620 | Uh, internet's favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.

01:47:06.740 | Those guys did an amazing job on that.

01:47:09.940 | Yeah.

01:47:10.420 | Yeah.

01:47:10.580 | I mean, I just, and there must've been a meeting and there must have been engineers

01:47:14.580 | and, and, uh, graphic designers, just artists.

01:47:18.420 | Artists.

01:47:19.220 | I think, I don't think it was that hard.

01:47:20.580 | Okay.

01:47:22.660 | Uh, thank you.

01:47:26.020 | Thank you for that.

01:47:26.660 | All right.

01:47:26.900 | Arthur's hair and beard grow in real time.

01:47:29.380 | So gun maintenance matters.

01:47:31.940 | Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time.

01:47:34.900 | Uh, animal carcasses decompose realistically.

01:47:37.780 | They feel like they do.

01:47:39.460 | That's still extremely rare in video games.

01:47:41.300 | Yeah.

01:47:41.700 | That the temporal aspect.

01:47:42.900 | Yes.

01:47:43.460 | That permeates through time.

01:47:44.980 | You know, NPCs remembering you.

01:47:46.660 | That's the best.

01:47:48.980 | I mean, that's the thing I love it.

01:47:50.260 | Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that.

01:47:53.860 | Cause I think it's super interesting.

01:47:55.220 | It's really powerful.

01:47:56.580 | To make them.

01:47:56.980 | Yeah.

01:47:57.220 | Really interesting.

01:47:57.940 | I think the, the, it just, it's, it's a really fun way of giving

01:48:01.300 | you kind of narrative content that is also systemic and procedural.

01:48:06.100 | Yeah.

01:48:06.900 | Is it technically really difficult to do for.

01:48:08.900 | For the game, for the game, to feel like it remembers you.

01:48:13.220 | Um, I think with modern tech, it's not that hard, but there's a lot of stuff

01:48:18.420 | you need to track to make it interesting.

01:48:19.940 | Yeah.

01:48:20.900 | To have a memory.

01:48:22.020 | So that's really powerful.

01:48:23.060 | Uh, the mud physics.

01:48:24.900 | Uh, so Arthur's boots get muddy and leave actual tracks.

01:48:27.460 | I mean, that's just incredible.

01:48:28.740 | Really, really incredible.

01:48:30.340 | You know, we made a dusty game.

01:48:31.780 | Red Dead one is a super dusty game making, you know, the problem with.

01:48:34.900 | Cowboys.

01:48:37.300 | Is that if you've tried to make a greatest hits of the cowboy game and then you've

01:48:40.820 | got to make a sequel, you've got to come up with different geographies.

01:48:43.380 | So that's why the game starts in the snow.

01:48:45.060 | So we wanted a game that had snow and mud because those were things you hadn't

01:48:48.100 | really seen in red dead one.

01:48:49.940 | And then the challenge is how do you make mud good in the game?

01:48:52.020 | And the guys did an amazing job.

01:48:53.860 | I mean, this, the small storm that starts the game RDR two.

01:49:00.260 | I don't remember the last time I've experienced anything like it, but you felt it.

01:49:03.620 | I don't know how the hell you do that.

01:49:05.540 | It's not just graphics.

01:49:06.900 | It's everything, everything together.

01:49:08.820 | I suppose some of the, the dialogue is really important.

01:49:11.460 | It's the acting.

01:49:12.020 | They feel, they feel.

01:49:12.900 | Yeah.

01:49:13.380 | That's right.

01:49:14.020 | And they feel desperate.

01:49:15.140 | That was that feeling of sort of exodus.

01:49:17.620 | Like you're running away from something that gives the game sort of energy at the start.

01:49:21.380 | And it was at night.

01:49:22.500 | Oh man.

01:49:22.980 | It was just.

01:49:23.380 | And there was a big group of them.

01:49:24.660 | The other, you know, first thing you start off as a lone wolf.

01:49:27.060 | Suddenly you're in this big group.

01:49:28.100 | So it felt very different.

01:49:29.460 | In Arthur's body, bullet wounds persist.

01:49:32.580 | So that, that temporal consistency, that's really important.

01:49:35.140 | And then underweight Arthur looks gone.

01:49:37.300 | And, uh, overweight Arthur gets a gut and fuller face.

01:49:42.660 | Again, those like decisions that you make reveal themselves in the game across time and they're

01:49:48.980 | consistent.

01:49:49.540 | I don't know.

01:49:50.980 | I did not see many games do that.

01:49:52.820 | This must be difficult to do, but to, to give that level of care to the details in that way

01:49:58.980 | across time and for specific graphical representations of things is incredible.

01:50:04.180 | Yeah.

01:50:05.060 | Do you have favorites?

01:50:06.420 | Where you were first, like, this is, this is amazing.

01:50:10.820 | I think all of it, I think the way the whole that, to me, the thing that I would care about

01:50:14.260 | most was the way the whole thing sat together.

01:50:16.420 | You know, the fact that each of those, they all feel like they belong together with each other.

01:50:22.580 | You made this cohesive, very, you know, quote unquote realistic for a video game experience

01:50:28.980 | and all the details feel like they mesh.

01:50:30.580 | Well, for me, everything about the horse, for a lot of people.

01:50:34.020 | Now testicle shrinking included.

01:50:36.820 | What's the process of deciding this?

01:50:40.020 | The internet seems to really care about.

01:50:41.940 | I mean, they love the game so much.

01:50:44.260 | So they want to know if anything was cut and I'm sure stuff was cut because you, you have to choose.

01:50:49.140 | What's the process of deciding what to cut?

01:50:52.180 | What the cut seems like is, is there any scenes that you had to let go of, uh, that you really miss

01:50:58.820 | or wish you could have done in, uh, either GTA or RDR?

01:51:04.100 | Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be.

01:51:07.380 | Yeah.

01:51:07.780 | Yeah.

01:51:08.180 | You know, I think there was always, there was a bit at the start of RDR where he'd had a baby who just

01:51:17.940 | died in Red Dead 2 and we ended up cutting it, which, uh, was the right decision.

01:51:22.580 | Yeah, it was too tough in some ways, but I think it gave him real, and he was not very sympathetic to

01:51:29.780 | his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby.

01:51:32.420 | And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting

01:51:36.340 | to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting.

01:51:41.380 | Like he was not a likable character at the start.

01:51:43.300 | And that was one, and we ended up making him slightly more like, he was still sort of tough

01:51:46.820 | and nasty, but he's slightly more likable early on.

01:51:49.620 | That was the right decision commercially.

01:51:52.660 | It's better that way, but I don't, you know, but I still, I liked that little bit.

01:51:56.820 | Um, it spoke to me personally, um, there and just his inability to access his emotions,

01:52:03.940 | I thought was really strong because then later in the game, he's going to get very emotional,

01:52:06.820 | but there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed, you know, and, um, and don't,

01:52:12.740 | well, missions that just are not going to work technically.

01:52:15.300 | Usually it's like, this mission is not going to work technically.

01:52:17.460 | Oh God, we've got to cut it.

01:52:19.780 | Okay.

01:52:20.260 | How do we glue the story back together?

01:52:22.260 | And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks.

01:52:26.180 | You get late in the game and it's just something, you know, some big challenging

01:52:29.620 | moment just is going to look rubbish.

01:52:31.220 | So you just get rid of it.

01:52:32.420 | I think editing, editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down is, is, is

01:52:40.340 | an art form, but it's also just, it feels like torture because you're letting go of things

01:52:46.660 | you put so much love into.

01:52:48.580 | Yeah.

01:52:48.900 | It could be changes.

01:52:49.860 | You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, let's change it.

01:52:52.580 | That could be, of course, that would be upsetting in some ways.

01:52:55.060 | Otherwise you didn't care about it.

01:52:56.100 | But you know, if I was over involved in the big creative thing and he goes, okay,

01:53:00.980 | it's the right decision.

01:53:01.700 | I can probably live with that fine.

01:53:03.380 | I think sometimes for designers, when they're only designing four or five missions in the

01:53:07.220 | whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really, really hard.

01:53:10.180 | Is there DLCs like for RDR GTA that you wish you had the time when you were there to have created?

01:53:18.660 | Of course.

01:53:19.220 | There's always things I wish I'd done.

01:53:21.220 | I always wish I'd done more.

01:53:22.340 | What would you have added?

01:53:24.100 | This is a fun like nerding out.

01:53:26.180 | The internet knows we made a single player DLC for GTA 5 that never came out.

01:53:32.020 | And we've also never really worked on another game.

01:53:35.380 | But I like the idea of it that was a GTA zombie game that would have been funny.

01:53:40.420 | I think that could have been quite fun.

01:53:41.700 | What was the GTA 5 DLC?

01:53:43.620 | It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent.

01:53:46.100 | Oh.

01:53:46.100 | It was cute.

01:53:48.260 | It never quite came together and it was never finished.

01:53:50.900 | It was about half done when it got abandoned.

01:53:53.060 | But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead 2.

01:53:56.580 | So there's always compromises.

01:53:58.660 | But it was, you know, I like making the stories.

01:54:01.220 | For me, I love the model of GTA 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards.

01:54:06.420 | Or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards.

01:54:09.540 | I like just doing these extra things.

01:54:11.700 | So I would personally like to have done more of that in that company.

01:54:17.140 | And with stuff we're doing in the future, we're going to try and come up with worlds

01:54:22.500 | where we can add more stories.

01:54:23.940 | I like single player DLC.

01:54:25.300 | I just think the audience loves it and it's really fun to make.

01:54:27.860 | Does it make it a little bit sad that the gaming industry in general is

01:54:31.860 | moving towards more online, less single player DLC?

01:54:36.020 | Maybe that observation isn't correct, but it feels at this moment to me,

01:54:40.900 | it feels like it's easier to make a lot of money with online.

01:54:46.660 | If you get it right.

01:54:47.540 | If you get it right.

01:54:48.580 | And so the gaming companies are reaching for that.

01:54:50.740 | And it just makes me really sad because there's so much power to the,

01:54:55.540 | what you did with Red Dead Redemption 2.

01:54:57.700 | I don't know how during that time you're able to pull that off,

01:55:00.260 | but that was like a breath of fresh air or in a time where everybody was moving to online

01:55:05.620 | and there was that huge incentive to that.

01:55:07.220 | You go on and drop again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character

01:55:12.980 | in video game history, single player.

01:55:14.900 | We still love single player games.

01:55:17.380 | And I think as we started up absurd, we did a lot of soul searching.

01:55:22.580 | Yeah.

01:55:22.900 | And then also a lot of like cynical looking at, looking at what goes well in the industry.

01:55:28.900 | Luckily, if you want to do what we're forced to do, and also what I want to do, which is make

01:55:32.660 | new IP, you need single player games.

01:55:35.300 | You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP.

01:55:40.660 | It's just extremely hard.

01:55:42.100 | So luckily we are like focusing on what we're good at, which is open world, single player games.

01:55:47.380 | And we might add, um, multiplayer components to one of them.

01:55:52.500 | I think one of them, it's going to be really tough later on, but we're still thinking that through.

01:55:56.260 | But I think we're really leaning into single player experience, um, as being a strength

01:56:01.780 | for us as a company and something we love to do.

01:56:03.780 | And I think something a large part of the audience prefers.

01:56:07.540 | And I'd love to, with all of those, keep single player DLC one way or another going.

01:56:13.220 | Were there some other game ideas you considered while at rockstar and, uh, afterwards they, you

01:56:20.100 | didn't go with so like worlds, I don't know, pirate games.

01:56:24.740 | I mean, what, I would love to see the nose, the possible options.

01:56:27.780 | Never thought a lot about a pirate game.

01:56:30.180 | My son is, is obsessed by that game, sea of thieves at the moment.

01:56:34.340 | So he's constantly saying to a pirate game.

01:56:36.180 | Haven't really thought about it too much.

01:56:38.100 | We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game.

01:56:42.580 | Yeah.

01:56:43.380 | And it never came together.

01:56:44.500 | It's the agent.

01:56:45.380 | Agent in it had about five different iterations.

01:56:48.900 | So good.

01:56:49.940 | I don't think it works.

01:56:51.140 | I concluded.

01:56:51.860 | I'm like, and I keep thinking about it.

01:56:54.660 | Sometimes there's someone's lying bed thinking about it.

01:56:56.660 | And I've concluded as an open, as what makes them really good.

01:57:00.420 | As film stories makes them not work as video games or need to think through how

01:57:06.420 | to do it in a different way as a video game.

01:57:08.260 | So for people who don't know, it would be hypothetically set in 1970s Cold War era.

01:57:13.140 | That was one of the versions.

01:57:14.340 | There was another one that was set in current, we had so many versions of this game.

01:57:18.020 | We worked with so many different teams.

01:57:19.140 | But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage.

01:57:22.180 | That, yeah.

01:57:23.300 | And assassinations.

01:57:24.580 | Like, yeah.

01:57:25.460 | Assassinations.

01:57:26.500 | I don't know what it would have been.

01:57:27.380 | Because it never really, we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it.

01:57:31.540 | We're doing the early work as you get the world up and running.

01:57:34.180 | It never, it never really found its feet in either of them.

01:57:37.300 | And I sort of think I know why.

01:57:39.700 | Because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic.

01:57:44.900 | And they beat to beat to beat.

01:57:46.660 | You know, you've got to go here and save the world.

01:57:48.180 | You've got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world.

01:57:50.820 | And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together.

01:57:56.260 | But for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser.

01:57:58.740 | And you're just hanging out.

01:57:59.940 | And you're just doing what you want.

01:58:00.980 | And I want freedom.

01:58:02.020 | And I want to go over here and do what I want.

01:58:03.460 | And I want to go over and do what you want.

01:58:05.140 | And that's why it works well being a criminal.

01:58:06.900 | Because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do.

01:58:09.940 | And we try and create, you know, external agency through these people kind of forcing you

01:58:14.900 | into the story at times.

01:58:16.500 | But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock.

01:58:20.020 | So I think for me, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.

01:58:24.500 | So interesting.

01:58:25.940 | So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio.

01:58:29.380 | And cruise about.

01:58:30.180 | Or ride a horse and just look at nature.

01:58:34.100 | So lots of things would work as open world games.

01:58:37.060 | But I don't know if a spy does.

01:58:38.500 | That's brilliantly put.

01:58:40.020 | But to me, there's such a espionage and assassinations.

01:58:43.140 | And the geopolitical international context is so interesting.

01:58:46.260 | But you're right.

01:58:46.980 | I just want to listen to, what is it, Laszlo?

01:58:50.260 | And on the radio.

01:58:51.860 | Well, you can't.

01:58:52.420 | You've got to save the world.

01:58:53.540 | And so you need this time pressure.

01:58:55.460 | With a Russian accent or something.

01:58:57.140 | Yeah.

01:58:57.540 | Wow.

01:58:57.940 | Wow.

01:58:59.780 | Yeah.

01:59:00.020 | That's really interesting.

01:59:01.220 | And then we played around with the Knights concept that was looking, you know,

01:59:04.980 | Knights and sort of trying to do a version of a mythological game that could have been fun.

01:59:10.820 | And, you know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.

01:59:15.140 | The Knights would be going really far back in history.

01:59:17.940 | Yeah.

01:59:18.100 | I would have to never got to writing any of it.

01:59:21.460 | Just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas.

01:59:24.500 | But it was, uh, there's always something I thought I would never do.

01:59:27.460 | And then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.

01:59:30.100 | You left rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched absurd ventures.

01:59:35.060 | As we've been talking about, what do you miss about your time at rockstar?

01:59:39.300 | Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?

01:59:42.500 | Of course it was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20 something years, 21 years or something.

01:59:48.740 | Yeah, it was, uh, and I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it.

01:59:54.340 | And I was always living in, in New York.

01:59:56.500 | It was, uh, at times very intense and other times magical experience.

02:00:02.820 | But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

02:00:05.300 | The lows and the highs and the middles.

02:00:08.100 | It was just, it was just my life.

02:00:09.220 | You know, my life was that job and the people I knew in New York and my family.

02:00:13.380 | And it, and we were doing something that was intense and innovative and, and, you know, both

02:00:20.900 | loved and hated by, by wider society in different ways and at different times.

02:00:24.420 | And in this weird company that was constantly in trouble.

02:00:27.380 | So it was, you know, it was really fun.

02:00:29.380 | Just even looking back at that time to today.

02:00:32.020 | Um, how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?

02:00:35.780 | Well, I was a child.

02:00:37.380 | I was a 25 year old child who didn't know anything and I wanted to be a writer, but I

02:00:44.820 | still wasn't writing and I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally scribble in it.

02:00:48.900 | I still got those notebooks somewhere and I was working in video games, which were the least

02:00:53.940 | literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time.

02:00:56.820 | There was no room for that on PS one games, really.

02:00:59.060 | Um, thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to

02:01:06.980 | do it.

02:01:07.300 | And I'd been doing that in London.

02:01:09.860 | Then I came to New York and it was fun, really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a new

02:01:14.900 | company in New York and that was an amazing adventure, but I was still lost as a human being.

02:01:18.660 | And then, um, when I was 27, I still completely lost a child and I, uh, stopped some of my bad

02:01:26.340 | behavior in the next day.

02:01:27.540 | Uh, pretty much the chance to write on that work and open world games and all the skills I'd half

02:01:33.380 | learned over the previous years and my way of thinking, where I thought about space a lot because

02:01:37.620 | I was a geographer rather than a historian, uh, came together and I got the chance to work

02:01:42.580 | on open world games that felt like it was meant to be.

02:01:44.100 | It was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton

02:01:49.780 | and Naveed and Leslie and the guys in Scotland and all the people in, in New York making these

02:01:55.220 | new games in this new way and, and going, oh, we need to find a hundred voices where we've got

02:02:00.500 | no money.

02:02:00.900 | How the hell are we going to do that?

02:02:01.860 | We'll get everyone's friends in and just record four lines of dialogue each, as we kind of would invent

02:02:06.820 | the way that pedestrians are speaking video games.

02:02:08.580 | No one else was doing that kind of stuff.

02:02:09.700 | It was insane.

02:02:10.340 | So I think that that period from kind of 2001, 2005, it was lots of early innovation and, and

02:02:17.940 | felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff.

02:02:20.100 | It didn't feel, it felt creative, but it didn't feel like writing yet.

02:02:26.020 | Just becoming that we felt lots of doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble

02:02:29.460 | the stuff and learning what it could take.

02:02:30.900 | And then I think we talked about it earlier, but the journey into doing GTA 4, when it began

02:02:36.340 | to feel more like a proper writing experience.

02:02:38.420 | And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point.

02:02:41.220 | And then I was like, well, this is better than films.

02:02:44.100 | This is something that films can't do.

02:02:45.460 | You know, this 360 degree experience of being this immigrant.

02:02:50.020 | And it still felt that we were still only scratching the surface.

02:02:52.580 | I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways, but it's still, and then that five games,

02:02:57.540 | you know, GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them and Max Payne 3.

02:03:05.300 | I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period.

02:03:08.980 | From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period.

02:03:11.700 | From a business and sort of early creativity period, the period 2001-2005 was probably the most exciting.

02:03:18.260 | The original starting team, we were all doing well.

02:03:21.380 | Personal life was doing okay.

02:03:24.660 | It didn't feel like such a mess.

02:03:25.780 | And then from 2007 onwards, 7-8 was happy personally.

02:03:33.300 | Having children, happily married and the games were just getting much better, but there were

02:03:38.980 | lots of pressure in the business, you know, it was just, and the budgets got really big.

02:03:42.660 | So I had this other stress.

02:03:43.460 | So there's always, always good bits and stresses, but you know, and always just try to sharpen, do my

02:03:51.780 | best and, and think about how I could do it in a new way.

02:03:54.340 | Always trying to go.

02:03:55.060 | It's a new medium.

02:03:56.100 | What can we do that's new?

02:03:57.060 | But as a writer, as a scholar of human nature,

02:04:02.900 | First of all, were you surprised that you were actually able, like you had it in you through

02:04:07.940 | humor and tragedy to create these incredibly compelling characters?

02:04:12.580 | Because I think, I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he's

02:04:18.580 | going to be the greatest writer ever.

02:04:20.660 | And I feel like every 20 year old says this, it's just James Joyce pulls it off.

02:04:26.580 | So were you, were you surprised that you were actually able to do it and how did that person

02:04:33.460 | get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?

02:04:36.260 | James Joyce: The team got better and better.

02:04:38.260 | So we could write in a more ambitious way that the animation got better.

02:04:43.220 | So we could support it in a better way.

02:04:45.540 | We could go deeper.

02:04:46.420 | Like you couldn't go that deep on a PS2 game.

02:04:48.820 | So it was also just the technology evolved.

02:04:53.860 | I don't know.

02:04:54.340 | I felt like, I felt like I was good at doing it and well trained for it.

02:04:59.460 | And I'd been in the right place at the right time.

02:05:01.220 | And I was both lucky and had a, in a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce

02:05:07.060 | them to about 10 sentences was amusing.

02:05:09.380 | You know, I think I was, you know, and it was, and I saw the world in a holistic way and when

02:05:15.380 | saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game.

02:05:19.700 | I was, you know, I thought about it a bunch.

02:05:21.620 | The way I think about things was suitable for that, for whatever reason, just, that was just good

02:05:25.780 | fortune.

02:05:26.180 | James Joyce:

02:05:26.900 | Laszlo mentioned that, uh, it was another legend who you're still working with.

02:05:30.660 | He mentioned that you would, uh, lock yourself in writing dialogue for radio.

02:05:37.620 | I think you would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed

02:05:42.580 | diet cokes.

02:05:43.460 | Is this accurate information?

02:05:44.980 | James Joyce: Very accurate.

02:05:45.540 | James Joyce: For which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process?

02:05:50.260 | Is anchovies and onion pizza?

02:05:52.020 | James Joyce: I would also get pepperoni on my half just to be technically accurate.

02:05:55.300 | James Joyce: Okay.

02:05:55.700 | James Joyce: He wouldn't because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days.

02:05:58.020 | James Joyce: Yeah.

02:05:58.340 | James Joyce: But then he'd admit to me, he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer.

02:06:00.900 | James Joyce: Yeah.

02:06:01.380 | James Joyce: So it was a sort of fake vegetarian.

02:06:03.220 | That was, or I think we still do it now sometimes as sort of.

02:06:06.500 | James Joyce: Nice.

02:06:06.980 | James Joyce: Memorialize.

02:06:08.340 | James Joyce: But that began in 2001.

02:06:09.860 | James Joyce: Yeah.

02:06:10.420 | James Joyce: And we, the, the office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no,

02:06:16.260 | and I, I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard.

02:06:19.700 | It didn't have a window.

02:06:21.380 | I was literally sitting in a cupboard.

02:06:22.900 | Um, so there was no room and I could, it had a desk and a chair just for myself.

02:06:27.380 | So we, but I lived quite near the office.

02:06:29.460 | So we would write one or two afternoons a week.

02:06:31.940 | He'd come in, he was a freelancer working with us.

02:06:34.260 | He'd come in from long Island.

02:06:36.980 | And then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea and sit in this grimy little

02:06:42.340 | apartment I was living in and buy pizza from around the corner.

02:06:44.900 | And that became, you know, we both like diet Coke and pizza, um, very video game developer.

02:06:50.340 | And that became good luck.

02:06:51.940 | And, uh, we'd have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with each other

02:06:55.700 | and that we had a similar sense of humor and we could write the stuff.

02:06:58.660 | And then he would do all of the real work producing it.

02:07:00.580 | So it was perfect for me because I got to outsource most of the real work and he's a brilliant radio

02:07:04.500 | producer.

02:07:05.380 | Um, so he was a great partner in that way.

02:07:07.620 | And then that was how that relationship began.

02:07:10.420 | And then I'd get him, I'd say, well, we've got to record these 80 voices.

02:07:13.700 | Come and help me because I can't direct 80 people at once.

02:07:16.260 | So he would help with that process.

02:07:17.460 | And he was a really good producer, like audio, like getting bodies in produce as well

02:07:21.620 | as a technical producer.

02:07:22.900 | So he was just, that was the beginning of that relationship.

02:07:25.140 | And it was always, my job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone

02:07:30.900 | of the world and we would write it together.

02:07:32.980 | Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny.

02:07:34.660 | Like he would just produce it in a really funny way.

02:07:36.820 | Just to give a little bit more of a shout out to Laszlo.

02:07:40.100 | I, what, what's it been like working with him for over 20 years?

02:07:43.140 | He's working with you still.

02:07:45.620 | He's a kind of this, uh, flamboyant, colorful personality.

02:07:50.340 | Much loved for being a voice also on radio in the, in the Grand Theft Auto games.

02:07:58.340 | Yeah.

02:07:58.580 | And the rule was when he was the character, I would write the first pass of him.

02:08:03.860 | So I would, and I would get nastier and nastier over time.

02:08:07.060 | That's awesome.

02:08:07.380 | So to the point when he's having his head shaved and, you know, being punished by everybody,

02:08:10.900 | but even in game after game, he got worse, he began as his, in GTA 3, he's a quite likable

02:08:15.860 | character.

02:08:16.660 | And then, you know, over the next 12, 13 years, it just got worse and worse.

02:08:21.940 | So I think he's glad not to be doing that anymore, but he did it with great grace.

02:08:26.260 | He's just a great partner because he likes, he like, you know, like me, we just like making stuff.

02:08:31.060 | He likes to make stuff.

02:08:32.020 | He likes to work in new spaces.

02:08:33.860 | He's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that.

02:08:38.420 | He's working on that right now.

02:08:40.020 | Um, and just, he's, he's, he's really fun to work with and he's, you know, always will put creativity

02:08:46.340 | first and he's ridiculous, you know, in the best possible way.

02:08:51.380 | Outside of, uh, the games you've participated in and created,

02:08:56.900 | um, what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?

02:09:01.380 | Tetris, Tetris, Tetris, Game Boy.

02:09:04.820 | No question.

02:09:05.460 | Tetris and a Game Boy.

02:09:06.660 | Yeah.

02:09:07.060 | It was the perfect device for playing that game.

02:09:09.540 | I never liked it as much as anything else.

02:09:11.300 | My wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids, trying to get them for Christmas right now.

02:09:17.140 | Um, it was the most addicted I ever was to anything in my life of far too many addictions that I was

02:09:22.820 | obsessed by it, dreaming about it.

02:09:24.820 | And when you link two together with the cable, and if I got four, it would push yours forward.

02:09:28.820 | It was like the perfect game design.

02:09:30.420 | So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.

02:09:34.740 | Yeah.

02:09:34.980 | It's extremely simple.

02:09:36.100 | Yeah.

02:09:36.900 | Pure gameplay, no narrative.

02:09:39.380 | No, no, nothing.

02:09:40.420 | No, no personality at all.

02:09:42.740 | It's a completely different thing, but perfect in its way.

02:09:45.940 | Open world games can't be that perfect.

02:09:47.540 | Yeah.

02:09:48.100 | But you always dream of making something like that.

02:09:50.180 | It's super Mario.

02:09:51.700 | I think the N64 ones, all of those early 3d games were very amazing when you first saw them on the N64

02:10:02.500 | PS one.

02:10:03.620 | When you went, it suddenly was like, these games, they're alive and they're believable in a different

02:10:08.420 | way.

02:10:08.900 | I think that was very interesting.

02:10:10.180 | It looks like anything else.

02:10:11.460 | Yeah.

02:10:12.020 | Nintendo has that look.

02:10:12.980 | Yeah.

02:10:13.620 | Always.

02:10:14.020 | Yeah.

02:10:14.820 | And I think that's the, they're known for this Nintendo polish that every pixel has a purpose.

02:10:21.860 | Yes.

02:10:22.180 | And what do you, I mean, I, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming

02:10:28.900 | experience with as little as possible.

02:10:32.020 | It's really beautiful.

02:10:32.820 | And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of sort of the feeling of, of a world, but it's not quite open.

02:10:40.500 | No, but it's amazing.

02:10:42.100 | It's almost like the new ones, they almost to me feel like Hitchcock.

02:10:46.500 | They just speaking the language of video games, you know, like, you know, everything's going to

02:10:51.220 | work this way and that way.

02:10:52.420 | It's, it's quite systemic, but it's so how it all glues together is so amazing.

02:10:57.060 | It feels like when you watch a Hitchcock film, it's not reality.

02:11:00.260 | He's speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong, without a very strong accent, almost.

02:11:04.740 | It's very, very cinematic.

02:11:06.340 | It's not realism at all.

02:11:07.860 | And that's what those Zelda games kind of feel to me.

02:11:10.340 | Like there are these amazing things that could only be video games.

02:11:13.780 | They couldn't be anything else.

02:11:14.740 | For me, uh, another really powerful open world is the, the elder squirrels world.

02:11:20.420 | It's role playing.

02:11:21.620 | It's, uh, fantasy dragons, all that kind of stuff.

02:11:25.460 | Todd is great at what he does.

02:11:26.500 | Yeah, there's, there's slightly, they're more, I mean, from a technical perspective, we're always

02:11:33.860 | involved in the same with the new, with the new games, we're constantly trying to find the balance

02:11:39.860 | between, you know, RPG, a role-playing game and an action game.

02:11:45.860 | And then that, you know, and try to go, well, an action adventure game with RPG elements.

02:11:50.180 | And what does that mean?

02:11:50.900 | And I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space.

02:11:54.020 | But for me, it always just comes down to our, is it easy to play?

02:11:56.900 | Are our mechanics super slick?

02:11:58.420 | And then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive?

02:12:02.020 | Like I'm not always a great, just for what we do.

02:12:05.700 | I like when other people do it for what we do.

02:12:07.220 | We always want very punchy dialogue.

02:12:09.700 | So don't give big trees, but still have it interactive.

02:12:12.900 | So we're gonna, we're gonna lose a touch of interactivity, but we'll still have the dialogue

02:12:16.900 | feeling like it's alive, but we'll get better written dialogue and it feel more,

02:12:21.220 | a slightly more cinematic experience.

02:12:22.740 | Yeah.

02:12:23.940 | I think, uh, the Elder Scrolls series have almost always leaned a little more towards the open world.

02:12:29.140 | Yes.

02:12:29.860 | They're real RPGs.

02:12:31.380 | Yeah.

02:12:31.620 | You know, we've not re the games that, you know, I've worked on.

02:12:35.700 | They've not really been RPGs.

02:12:38.020 | They've had RPG elements onto a storage of an action game.

02:12:41.460 | It's a kind of just a slightly different emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing.

02:12:45.540 | He's brilliant at doing it.

02:12:47.140 | And I think Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim are games where

02:12:54.260 | you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around.

02:12:57.780 | And feel the world.

02:12:59.380 | Feel the world.

02:13:00.020 | Just feel the world.

02:13:01.060 | And the Witcher, same thing.

02:13:02.180 | And, uh, Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3, really interesting.

02:13:06.580 | They really tried to make every choice that you make genuinely branched the game

02:13:13.380 | to where it's not the illusion of choice.

02:13:14.980 | It's really, it really, choice really does something.

02:13:18.100 | And that's really hard to pull off.

02:13:20.100 | Technically.

02:13:20.580 | Yes.

02:13:21.060 | And hard to pull off.

02:13:22.180 | You've always sort of debating the, the sweet spot between that and a strong story,

02:13:29.220 | you know, and strong mechanics.

02:13:31.060 | It's hard to get them all.

02:13:32.100 | And you, you know, as a, as a, as a game making team, the whole, you know,

02:13:36.500 | the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

02:13:40.020 | A difficult topic.

02:13:42.500 | Uh, you dedicated the book to your mom and dad.

02:13:46.100 | And in particular, you wrote to my father who died while I was finishing the book.

02:13:52.180 | What have you learned about life from your dad?

02:13:55.860 | To show up, to be present, to go to work every day, to love creative things.

02:14:05.700 | You know, he was a lawyer, but he's also a jazz musician and he did both to the best of his

02:14:13.460 | abilities, you know, and that to value family as more important than either of those things.

02:14:20.740 | You know, he was a present guy.

02:14:23.620 | I think.

02:14:25.940 | And, and, you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved, but loved films,

02:14:29.300 | loved music.

02:14:30.420 | Didn't, wasn't into video games, but liked that we were doing weird things.

02:14:36.100 | Was he proud of you?

02:14:38.180 | Yeah, I think so.

02:14:40.500 | I hope so.

02:14:41.060 | And he was, he was for, for a lawyer.

02:14:43.620 | He really venerated.

02:14:47.220 | At some level, giving the man, the, the, the quote unquote, the man, the finger.

02:14:52.820 | Like, you know, whenever life goes crazy, he just was always on the side of the underdog and the

02:14:59.220 | ridiculous and, and I think that, you know, he always wanted to answer people back, always give

02:15:05.780 | the silly comment.

02:15:06.500 | And I certainly, you know, taken that from him to my detriment, probably, but it makes life more fun.

02:15:11.780 | Like he always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn't give a fuck.

02:15:15.460 | And that was, uh, you know, I think that was probably quite inspiring.

02:15:19.940 | So you have a bit of that in you?

02:15:22.020 | Unfortunately, so yes.

02:15:24.340 | Not good at shutting up, not good at towing the line.

02:15:28.260 | I think I speak for most of human civilization that.

02:15:31.700 | Fortunately, you have that as part of, as part of who you are, because it comes through your stories.

02:15:39.460 | I think it made school difficult.

02:15:41.300 | You know, they sent me this very formal school.

02:15:45.140 | Yeah.

02:15:45.460 | That was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s in the 1990s.

02:15:50.260 | And, but then they want, you know, they always get in trouble just for not, not for doing anything

02:15:54.260 | that wrong.

02:15:55.140 | Just answering teachers back all of the time.

02:15:57.700 | Couldn't be quiet.

02:15:58.740 | How often do you think about mortality?

02:16:02.500 | Are you personally yourself afraid of death?

02:16:07.700 | Well, my father passed away in May.

02:16:10.740 | So a lot more since then, obviously.

02:16:17.140 | I mean, I think about it a lot.

02:16:19.380 | Am I afraid of it?

02:16:20.260 | I don't know.

02:16:22.260 | Some days intensely and some days not at all.

02:16:25.700 | I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly go up and settled.

02:16:31.780 | Of course, for them.

02:16:33.140 | I don't know.

02:16:33.700 | Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and not

02:16:39.300 | afraid of death at all.

02:16:40.500 | And other days I feel like a sort of random piece of, of, of good luck.

02:16:45.220 | Who's, uh, going to get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness.

02:16:49.460 | And that terrifies me.

02:16:50.340 | I just, what do you think about the nothingness?

02:16:52.980 | I mean, that, that in itself is terrifying.

02:16:55.060 | Yeah, that is terrifying.

02:16:56.020 | I mean, I, I, I tend to, I, I tend to, you know, I've spent long periods of my life tormented by that

02:17:07.380 | stuff, the, the, the last few years, I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life.

02:17:12.660 | And that we have some kind of spiritual or soul based existence.

02:17:18.180 | No, I'm not quite sure if it matters, if there is a God or not.

02:17:20.580 | We should probably live our lives the same way either way.

02:17:22.420 | Um, but I tend to think that, you know, there is a metaphysical purpose to life.

02:17:27.860 | And part of the, that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose.

02:17:31.460 | But at other points you can get, you know, if you read too much science,

02:17:35.460 | you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.

02:17:37.380 | Also, there's a component to, uh, to your brain, uh, when talking about, uh,

02:17:42.260 | Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, you said that you have been by fortune struck with a bit of a

02:17:48.100 | capacity for the grandiosity of feeling.

02:17:51.220 | So you feel the world deeply, sometimes romantic, sometimes overly romantic.

02:17:55.220 | You've, uh, said, I like this line, feelings may destroy you, but they're the best thing we have.

02:18:01.700 | So, uh, that ability to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you?

02:18:09.140 | What do you think?

02:18:09.700 | That's a really interesting question because it's obviously both, you know, times it's both

02:18:14.260 | or times it's one or the other.

02:18:15.700 | When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel like you're connected to things,

02:18:21.460 | when you're seeing beauty in people and joy in experiences, of course, it's wonderful when you're

02:18:28.900 | feeling like, you know, bereft and set adrift by the world and that you can't connect it to in some way,

02:18:34.660 | and you're lost and abandoned by God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is.

02:18:40.180 | It's awful, you know, when I feel like a dreadful hack, which is most of the time,

02:18:46.580 | you know, it's terrible.

02:18:47.940 | You'd rather not be doing this rubbish.

02:18:49.540 | And then sometimes you're working creatively and it feels good and you feel like you're

02:18:52.500 | doing the right thing and it feels fantastic.

02:18:54.580 | But that's not very often.

02:18:56.100 | Do you think it's possible to have one without the other?

02:18:59.300 | No.

02:18:59.700 | No, of course not.

02:19:01.700 | When I think about growing up to the extent that I am capable of growing up,

02:19:05.940 | it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself, you know,

02:19:13.540 | going, okay, it's not perfect or I'm not perfect.

02:19:16.420 | You said you often feel like a hack.

02:19:20.740 | Is that self-critical part of your brain?

02:19:23.140 | Is that a feature or a bug?

02:19:27.780 | I think it's the new thing that we're going to lean into the bug feature.

02:19:32.260 | It's both, isn't it?

02:19:33.780 | I mean, it's, it's, it cannot lead that self-critical brain.

02:19:37.620 | I think lots of people suffer from, and I think the internet is designed to induce.

02:19:42.580 | If you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online.

02:19:45.060 | It's clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency.

02:19:53.220 | So it can also become a feature.

02:19:55.780 | I had a pretty, uh, intense argument with Paul Conti, who's a legendary psychiatrist,

02:20:01.460 | student of the mind about this.

02:20:02.900 | Um, he worked with many famous creative people and he, he thinks that that negative voice

02:20:10.820 | is not at all needed for creative genius.

02:20:14.580 | And I thought I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.

02:20:19.700 | Paul Conti: I'd rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far.

02:20:25.380 | There's a danger that negativity for me, that negativity and consciousness become the same thing.

02:20:33.860 | You know, and sometimes I have to fight to not just be perpetually negative.

02:20:38.020 | Um, and that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people.

02:20:41.700 | And certainly has been for me.

02:20:42.820 | I think if you're trying to do, you know, good stuff and you're reflective inevitably, and, and, you know,

02:20:50.500 | you live in this world of constant, constant criticisms by the internet, of course, you know,

02:20:55.860 | everyone who ever put something on the internet, be it a picture of themselves or any kind of work

02:21:00.980 | they've made or whatever it is, is gonna get 50 good comments and one bad comment.

02:21:05.060 | And remember the bad comment.

02:21:06.020 | So that, and that big, that becomes fuel for the negative voice.

02:21:09.060 | I don't know anyone that's strong enough not to know, you know, we all, you know, some level,

02:21:12.580 | you should just measure that, that stuff in, in weight, not in, not in quality.

02:21:16.020 | But of course we just focus on the quality.

02:21:17.620 | And I do think in general, as you get older, that's a real challenge for people.

02:21:21.940 | You can see the different trajectories people choose to take, but it's easy to slip into cynicism

02:21:27.620 | and negativity into this, uh, Dostoevsky's notes from underground nihilistic kind of worldview.

02:21:36.260 | I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good.

02:21:41.860 | Uh, I think there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first,

02:21:49.860 | uh, for, for the, the, the first, maybe half of your life or two Thursdays.

02:21:56.020 | And then while maintaining some self-critical aspects, just so you stay humble, start to see the good,

02:22:03.460 | uh, in everything around you and other people in the world.

02:22:06.740 | And even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself.

02:22:10.420 | I hope so.

02:22:12.580 | I mean, that's what I've been.

02:22:13.460 | I could not be more cynical.

02:22:15.940 | I think you put that beautifully.

02:22:17.060 | I could not be more cynical than I was as a child.

02:22:20.020 | You know, I could not see goodness anywhere.

02:22:23.140 | I couldn't see, you know, I don't think, uh, late 1970s to early 1990s.

02:22:29.780 | England was a great, it was a place of great, you know, optimism and naivety.

02:22:34.340 | It was brutal.

02:22:35.380 | And I was brutal.

02:22:36.740 | I was brutal within it.

02:22:38.180 | And I think, um, I've become much more naive and, and, and try to become more innocent in some ways.

02:22:45.060 | And, and always try to see the flawed good in people.

02:22:48.580 | You know, I've tried to re and I've had to force myself to be like that because,

02:22:53.300 | you know, the other way is not fun.

02:22:55.300 | It's not nice to, to, it's not nice to not be nice.

02:22:58.260 | Uh, as a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with, uh, Ryan McCaffrey at, uh,

02:23:04.660 | LA Comic-Con.

02:23:05.700 | I've been a big fan of his for a long time.

02:23:07.620 | He writes amazing stuff at IGN and he has a great podcast.

02:23:11.060 | Everybody should go listen to it.

02:23:12.260 | I really enjoyed it.

02:23:13.220 | Plus I get to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience.

02:23:16.020 | And like we're saying offline, uh, the LA Comic-Con, it's the first Comic-Con I've been to.

02:23:20.660 | It's just all kinds of real genuine nerds, good hearted.

02:23:24.420 | It's just so much kindness and goodness.

02:23:28.180 | And just simple joy and being a fan of a thing was there.

02:23:32.820 | Yeah.

02:23:32.900 | Which is what those things are all about.

02:23:34.180 | Yeah.

02:23:35.060 | Okay.

02:23:35.300 | So let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time.

02:23:38.100 | And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast.

02:23:41.060 | He did with Sonia Walger, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast.

02:23:45.060 | She has guests pick their five favorite, most impactful books and so on.

02:23:48.820 | Uh, you picked five fiction books, one for each decade.

02:23:54.100 | Of your life for the audience.

02:23:55.860 | They should go listen to that conversation.

02:23:57.220 | But, uh, you picked, uh, Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom.

02:24:00.900 | Uh, second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

02:24:03.860 | Then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

02:24:06.820 | Uh, The Thin Red Line by James Jones and Middle March by George Eliot.

02:24:12.100 | But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think if an alien

02:24:17.940 | came, what are, what are some candidates for books that you'll recommend to them?

02:24:22.180 | Middle March.

02:24:23.700 | It's the best novel written in English.

02:24:25.460 | War and Peace.

02:24:27.780 | It's the one of the best novels written in Russian.

02:24:30.980 | I would argue.

02:24:32.740 | I think both of those are because if you've only got one book, you want a long book.

02:24:38.180 | Yeah.

02:24:38.980 | True.

02:24:39.140 | And, and they're both books that kind of it's something I was always trying to put into games.

02:24:45.220 | And you know, that feeling of all of life is here.

02:24:48.260 | You know, you've got love, death, violence, romance, the whole human experience in different ways.

02:24:55.300 | So I think that there's something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair.

02:24:58.020 | I used to, used to love the novel, not the, not the magazine.

02:25:01.060 | Um, because same thing.

02:25:02.580 | All of life is here.

02:25:04.500 | You also spoke highly of, uh, Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

02:25:08.500 | I was obsessed by them in my twenties.

02:25:10.580 | Yeah.

02:25:11.060 | Completely obsessed.

02:25:12.180 | As one must be.

02:25:13.300 | Yeah.

02:25:13.540 | Absolutely.

02:25:14.900 | And I think them as a double act is so amazing.

02:25:19.380 | You know, one helped discover the other and then died first.

02:25:23.540 | And then suddenly it died in, in obscurity and then was rediscovered as a genius while

02:25:29.780 | the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity, but into decline.

02:25:33.860 | I think it's that their relationship is itself very novelistic.

02:25:36.900 | That, that by the way, is a phenomena of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still, uh, that, you know,

02:25:44.260 | people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died in obscurity,

02:25:48.500 | not nobody knows them and they become famous later.

02:25:51.700 | Yeah.

02:25:52.020 | That is just so interesting.

02:25:54.500 | That's such an interesting, you know, that Franz Kafka and Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating

02:26:00.500 | because he wanted all of his work to be burnt, like destroyed.

02:26:04.900 | So that insecurity, speaking of the critical voice is just, uh, and I, I think he's one of the, um,

02:26:11.780 | one of the best writers of the 20th century, of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting.

02:26:16.340 | 1984, uh, brave new world.

02:26:19.380 | Love 1984, had never listened to it or read it.

02:26:23.620 | And then I think I did it on talking book or maybe read it.

02:26:25.700 | I can't remember during COVID and became, I think I did both became obsessed by it.

02:26:29.620 | And it's got the elements of that creeping into a better paradise, but it's so good.

02:26:34.420 | I hadn't realized how good it was.

02:26:36.580 | Yeah.

02:26:36.980 | And it's so of the moment.

02:26:38.660 | It's almost like, because of its fame and it's almost like cliche and you think of the character.

02:26:44.900 | Yeah, it's all English.

02:26:45.460 | And I remember the year 1984 and you're like, oh, this is, I remember the song.

02:26:48.660 | You know, it's too much.

02:26:49.780 | Yeah.

02:26:50.260 | It can't be that good.

02:26:51.460 | And then it was that, I came to it completely cold.

02:26:53.780 | Just, oh, I should get, work my way through this.

02:26:55.620 | Cause it's another classic I haven't read.

02:26:57.780 | And then it's, it's incredible.

02:26:58.980 | And the book I've read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George Orwell.

02:27:02.980 | I don't know why exactly, but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism.

02:27:10.580 | Well, you grew up in a communist country.

02:27:12.180 | Yeah.

02:27:12.420 | Maybe that's it.

02:27:13.220 | The roots of it.

02:27:14.100 | I remember, you know, I was a kid in the cold war in London and we were always terrified of

02:27:19.460 | Eastern Europeans.

02:27:20.740 | You were going to come and kill us all.

02:27:22.340 | And then I ended up marrying a pole.

02:27:25.300 | Yeah.

02:27:26.180 | And, um, and I was, we, we were, and we had Ukrainians, you know, who, who, who worked,

02:27:31.780 | worked for us and worked with us.

02:27:33.540 | And I was sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New York, surrounded with,

02:27:38.820 | with the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian.

02:27:43.060 | And he'd been in the red army.

02:27:44.500 | And I was like, history is so strange that you end up, the red army used to be the ultimate enemy.

02:27:48.100 | Like we're now just hanging out with, everything changes.

02:27:51.300 | You think these, you think these things are permanent and they're really not.

02:27:54.420 | Yeah.

02:27:54.820 | You know, we face some of that now where you think these structures are permanent and they're going to change.

02:27:59.700 | And you also mentioned that the three great World War II books are The Thin Red Line,

02:28:04.420 | Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene.

02:28:09.300 | Uh, what makes for a great war book?

02:28:13.220 | I think World War II is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously.

02:28:20.500 | And so you can get all these different kinds of stories and there's so many good.

02:28:24.340 | I was just trying to come up with a range of one American, one British, uh, one Eastern European,

02:28:30.660 | uh, just to get, just to get different perspectives.

02:28:32.660 | But there's so many amazing World War II books around all kinds of stories.

02:28:36.660 | I think the most complete one because it is this all of life being there probably is life and fate,

02:28:43.300 | which is amazing.

02:28:44.180 | And it was, uh, written by Vasily Grossman.

02:28:46.260 | He experienced Stalingrad firsthand.

02:28:48.260 | And there's also just a deep philosophical component.

02:28:50.740 | And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read.

02:28:55.460 | And it really, almost more than any other piece of art around the Holocaust,

02:29:01.700 | made me feel what you would feel like at that moment.

02:29:05.860 | And it's just incredible piece of humanism.

02:29:07.460 | And also just, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

02:29:11.380 | Oh yeah.

02:29:12.020 | It seems like that context reveals in the most pure way human nature and like what kind of,

02:29:18.660 | you know, in a man's search for meaning is when everything is taken from you, you know,

02:29:24.260 | the little remains of love for, in this case, his wife is the thing that is a little flame that

02:29:32.340 | burns and, uh, let's say Grossman is small acts of kindness is the thing that

02:29:39.860 | allows the human spirit to persist.

02:29:42.820 | I love the bit in life and fate when you get, obviously it's in this Stalinist

02:29:47.860 | period.

02:29:48.340 | And so the, they're all losing.

02:29:50.740 | They all know that the, that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution

02:29:55.300 | isn't going to happen.

02:29:56.340 | So there's a whole, and everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin

02:29:58.900 | because it's post the purges.

02:30:00.340 | But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building fighting in Stalingrad.

02:30:05.300 | And, uh, so they know at this moment they're dead anyway, and they get to live like pure,

02:30:10.820 | perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin all his nonsense.

02:30:15.300 | And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some ways in all of its horrors,

02:30:21.700 | the most disappointing thing about the 20th century, in some ways was the absolute failure of communism.

02:30:28.980 | You know, it was because it was such a, you know, quote unquote, beautiful idea.

02:30:32.900 | And it just did not work time and time again.

02:30:35.060 | And these people who fought for it and then saw it not working, I think they're sort of fascinating

02:30:40.420 | characters, you know, all of the, all of the revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed

02:30:46.660 | by Stalin, which was all of them apart from him and him and him and Lenin.

02:30:49.940 | And that was, uh, you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism,

02:30:54.420 | like it's trivially, it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don't think it's that trivial.

02:30:59.620 | It's, uh, it's this idealism of human, of humans.

02:31:03.380 | It's like, why, you know, why can't, basically, why can't we all get along?

02:31:08.980 | There's a real compassion behind it.

02:31:10.580 | There's real love.

02:31:11.140 | And what you realize is there is, it's a real study, the 20th century of human nature that

02:31:16.980 | unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion, uh, is abused by centralized power.

02:31:25.220 | So there's a dictator always in that context, in, in those, given that set of technologies,

02:31:31.220 | a dictator arises and does the opposite of what the, the, the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.

02:31:37.620 | Well, I think I thought a lot about that then, because I was taught by all these disappointed

02:31:43.860 | communists, you know, after 89, all of these English communists, you know, all like having to

02:31:49.140 | discovering all these atrocities that happened in, you know, so it was, it always fascinated me.

02:31:54.180 | And then you think about complexities or where one's own values are in the modern moment.

02:32:02.260 | And I, I say, you know, without from, from, from, and whether either of them, any,

02:32:06.500 | what we would call left now or call right now, does it have any bearing on,

02:32:10.420 | on the sort of communist era of those words?

02:32:12.100 | And I would say, probably not.

02:32:13.380 | I think things have changed, but fundamentally the one value that I would go,

02:32:17.380 | I think is worth fighting for is go whenever either side starts to move towards thought

02:32:23.140 | control, move away. That's never the right outcome. The never right outcome is, oh,

02:32:29.060 | you've said the wrong thing. You should be removed now. That should never ever be a thing we should

02:32:34.260 | lean towards. Yeah. It does seem like freedom, individual freedom is a prerequisite for happiness, for

02:32:42.340 | in a flourishing of a larger society. So there's, like you said, 1984 is pretty, I mean, it's a caricature,

02:32:47.860 | but it is brilliant. It's quite, it's actually also just a good story. That's my criticism of Brave New

02:32:53.300 | World. It's just poorly written, but I like Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century,

02:32:59.860 | uh, than does 1984. I don't know. I think 1984 with the, with the fake wars and the way that it revealed

02:33:08.020 | that everything in it was a setup for him. Yeah. There's something, if he could have seen the internet,

02:33:12.020 | there's something that it's like, it's like an analog internet that world they build around, uh, the main character.

02:33:17.940 | What advice would you give to a young person today about, let's say career, how, how to have a career they can be proud of,

02:33:27.380 | how they can have a life to be proud of. You've had a non-standard life.

02:33:32.020 | I've had a lucky life, um, in which I have fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.

02:33:41.300 | You've, uh, traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.

02:33:45.540 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that happened.

02:33:49.300 | That was a series of poor life decisions. Yeah. Um, and I, I ran, I ran away, you know, I was, I mean,

02:33:54.500 | I ran away to South America. That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with the knife. That was a

02:34:00.340 | good decision. Yeah. Uh, I came to America. That was a good decision. Um, I ran, came to LA.

02:34:07.460 | That's I think been a good decision. Uh, it's been fun to see a different side of America and, um,

02:34:12.500 | be in a different creative environment. LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment,

02:34:18.660 | the wider entertainment industry stuff. I think that's been fun. Um, what would I say? I would say

02:34:27.940 | when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well. When I got chances, I was

02:34:34.900 | good at taking them. Um, I would say, do not worry too young about your career. I would say,

02:34:41.700 | worry about having a rounded intellectual in a life because you're going to spend the whole of

02:34:46.420 | your life in your own head. So the more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find

02:34:51.700 | the world, the less you're going to annoy yourself. So I would say, I would, I would say, do not do

02:34:58.660 | a vocational degree as an undergraduate. That's my, I would say, do something else, do something,

02:35:04.740 | you know, random and then focus afterwards. That would be, I think, uh, I was advocating against

02:35:09.860 | the obsession that people had about four years ago with STEM subjects. And now AI is going to make them all

02:35:14.820 | irrelevant anyway. Uh, so, you know, I, it's interesting to see everything changes. Um,

02:35:22.020 | jobs are not that hard, you know, turn up, be enthusiastic, uh, be, turn up in, in person,

02:35:31.700 | be enthusiastic, uh, help people say you'll be fine in any job. People, you know,

02:35:37.060 | did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like this is okay. This is interesting.

02:35:40.980 | This is new. This is different. Not always. No, but I did the, the big times were the chance to move

02:35:46.500 | to America for me. That was a big moment. My life was a mess. That was weird timing. So I, I read that,

02:35:51.780 | uh, Sam wrote you an email in South America. I literally, I was in South America in Columbia

02:36:00.420 | when there was a war raging there. Um, I was making a series of very poor life choices and a

02:36:07.460 | lack of life skills, age 25. Um, my latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police

02:36:15.220 | didn't start work till nine, but the muggers started at eight. And so I was out, uh, walking along the

02:36:20.580 | beach at eight. Uh, and these, uh, guys, this raster, uh, turned up who I'd been talking to the day

02:36:27.460 | before was like trying to talk to me. And then two guys came up to talk to him and I couldn't tell

02:36:32.820 | if they were trying to mug him cause he owed the money or he'd bought me to them. But I did notice

02:36:38.180 | one of them had a machete and now they had a kind of broken gun. So I thought this is not good. And I

02:36:43.220 | ran off, sprinted down the beach in my, in my, uh, silly shoes and, uh, got to the chance once in my

02:36:50.180 | life to run over to a road, run, jump into a taxi and scream, you know, take me anywhere. I feel like

02:36:55.620 | I'm an action movie and they have guys chasing after the machete and the taxi driver looks back,

02:37:00.100 | sees the dude with the machete and goes, see con amigos. They're not my friends. Get me out of here.

02:37:05.860 | And then I, um, he drove me up the street into a bit where the town was. Um, it's kind of between the

02:37:10.820 | old town and the new town in Cartagena. And, um, I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock.

02:37:18.580 | That was the sum total of my injuries. And, um, then went to an internet cafe. Cause this was probably late

02:37:23.780 | 98 and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York. And I was like, well,

02:37:30.180 | if I stay in South America much longer, I'm going to get myself killed. Cause this was,

02:37:33.780 | I was getting into silly stuff. Um, and so I went to New York and they're just starting rockstar.

02:37:40.900 | And so I got to sort of write the mission statements and whatnot there and help set the tone for that.

02:37:46.340 | And just ended up staying, you know, had to come and go a bit. Well, the visas got sorted out and

02:37:52.340 | then just ended up staying for it till I stayed for a year. Cause New York's pretty fun. It actually was

02:37:57.140 | not that this was the height of Giuliani for he was a maniac. Um, so he, uh, you couldn't, when you went to

02:38:05.540 | bars, you were told you couldn't dance. Cause they were trying to clamp down on New York being fun. So it was

02:38:09.780 | actually less fun than London, but there's still a great energy in New York and got exposed to

02:38:14.740 | the kind of madness of New York capitalism. By the way, as we hear sirens in the background,

02:38:20.180 | that always makes me think of New York. Whenever I'm in New York, there's always sirens.

02:38:23.380 | Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you

02:38:27.780 | in LA at least. Yeah. But it's more distributed. It's more spread out. You can get a bit more quiet here.

02:38:32.500 | Yeah. Um, and I love the energy, you know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner

02:38:37.780 | late and New York was really, really a fun experience for me. You work with your brother,

02:38:43.700 | Sam for many years. Uh, what do you admire about him as a creative mind as a human being?

02:38:51.300 | His drive and his

02:38:54.740 | vision, uh, early on to see what video games could become. He was the one who understood that video

02:39:04.100 | games were the next big thing. And I think that was, uh, you know, people would laugh in our face about

02:39:10.580 | that in those days. And so to have someone that was strong and saying, no, no, we stick to the

02:39:14.580 | state of the course and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.

02:39:18.980 | Are you excited for the future of video games?

02:39:22.020 | Yeah. I think I, I completely, I still, I still look at, I'm glad you spoken. So, I mean, you've spoken so

02:39:30.260 | kindly about our work, about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did is wonderful, but I

02:39:37.620 | just look at it and see problems and see things that we can make do better. You know, I think, uh, it was

02:39:42.820 | always each, try each time to do it better. And I've got, you know, some of the stuff we're working on now

02:39:47.940 | is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before. Uh, and I think it's just, I think the

02:39:53.700 | games can get so much better. They can feel so much more alive or they can be better at storytelling

02:39:59.300 | and feel more alive and feel like, you know, their systems, all the stuff, the, the component parts we

02:40:05.060 | talked about. You can, we can both make each of those parts better and tie them together better. I

02:40:09.300 | think it's the technology is all it to me. It's still feels like it's only just beginning, you know,

02:40:13.220 | it's been, it's been cinema evolved from like 1900, 1895, whenever it was until they invented talking in

02:40:22.580 | 1930 or whenever that was. It's not that. And then it's kind of found its modern form. And then by 39,

02:40:28.420 | they're shooting in color. And that's basically a modern film is no different from a 1939 film.

02:40:33.540 | But with games, I still think we've got a long way to go. The tech, there's so many different parts

02:40:38.580 | of the tech that it's still got a long way to go and you can go in all different fun directions.

02:40:42.420 | I just wish, and I know you said video games take a lot less than they possibly, they, they could,

02:40:48.900 | but I just wish it was faster. Like you've already made me fall in love with Absurdiverse and you've

02:40:54.260 | made me fall in love with a better paradise. And now I am going to sit depressed to realize I'm gonna have to

02:40:59.460 | wait. I could of course read. We should have some little short cartoons coming out

02:41:04.820 | in a while for Absurdiverse and more stuff coming in the next period. But yeah, it just takes,

02:41:10.980 | it takes a little bit of time. And I think, I mean, movies, you, big movies are four years plus from

02:41:16.660 | start to end. You know, with all the legal stuff at the start, you know, we'll be about the same.

02:41:21.300 | Yeah. And certain movies from idea to completion, I mean, take 10 plus years and some of the greats.

02:41:26.820 | A lot of that's just that development process that is really sometimes feels like it's designed to not

02:41:32.020 | make stuff.

02:41:32.820 | A bit more of a specific advice, but on the topic of video games, what advice would you give to,

02:41:37.460 | uh, to maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games? They're inspired

02:41:46.500 | by Red Dead. They're inspiring of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you've created. Like,

02:41:52.500 | how's it possible to have a chance of doing something like that?

02:41:55.220 | I mean, it's part of the two, two ways, try and do it cheaply for, with yourself in a small group

02:42:01.300 | or join a company that you think is doing it the right way. You know, and I think there's upsides

02:42:06.180 | to either of those. I think if you want to make something that's cinematic, AI is going to change some

02:42:12.020 | of this, but if you want to make something cinematic, you need resources. You can still make something

02:42:15.460 | that's really interesting that isn't super cinematic, but it's an interesting experience

02:42:19.220 | in some ways. But the second you're involving actors and motion capture and one of those big

02:42:23.860 | experiences, it's going to cost some money. So therefore, if you want to do that, you've got to

02:42:27.700 | figure out what companies you want to work out and figure out how you get to work there.

02:42:31.460 | Do you have, do you have hope for AI helping with some of the video,

02:42:35.380 | some of the video generation, some of the world generation,

02:42:38.820 | some of the open world assistance in, in generating the world?

02:42:44.020 | Yes. Limited. Absolutely. If used correctly, it will be a great tool. If used incorrectly,

02:42:51.780 | it will lead to loads of generic stuff. You know, I've been in games for 29 years and all the time,

02:42:58.260 | the piece of tech that's going to make making games much easier, much cheaper is about to turn up. And

02:43:02.660 | all that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive. So I'm always nervous

02:43:07.460 | about saying, finally, we have that bit of tech that makes our lives easier, but it looks as if it might be

02:43:12.580 | able to do that when you use it in the right way. If you use it, you know, if you use it to try and as a substitute

02:43:16.340 | for creativity, it's going to be really generic.

02:43:18.340 | A big, ridiculous question.

02:43:20.340 | What's the meaning of life, of existence? Why are we here?

02:43:28.100 | What's the meaning of life, of life, of life, of life, of life, of life, of life, of life?

02:43:33.860 | Is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.

02:43:38.660 | Consistently more and more interesting ways, yeah. What role does love play as part of that?

02:43:45.460 | It's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material is

02:43:52.980 | irrelevant. So the only things of value are these immaterial things. You know, I do think

02:43:59.300 | metaphysics always trumps physics for me. Wow. Dan, from the bottom of my heart,

02:44:05.780 | speaking of love, thank you. What a pleasure. Thank you, man.

02:44:08.980 | Thank you for everything you've created in this world. Me and millions of diehard fans of your games

02:44:13.940 | are forever grateful. I know there's a lot of people that would like to say thank you to you.

02:44:18.740 | Just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear.

02:44:21.140 | Yeah. It was never me. It was always me

02:44:23.780 | sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.

02:44:27.700 | Well, I hope you keep being self-critical and creating awesome stuff in the world.

02:44:33.220 | And we can't wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. And thank you so much for talking today,

02:44:40.980 | brother. Thank you for having me. What a privilege.

02:44:43.620 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Hauser. To support this podcast,

02:44:47.220 | please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me,

02:44:52.100 | ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you some words from Ernest Hemingway,

02:44:59.300 | one of Dan's and my favorite writers. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the

02:45:09.140 | broken places. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:45:17.540 | Thank you.

02:45:18.180 | Thank you for listening.

02:45:18.820 | Thank you.

02:45:18.880 | Thank you.

02:45:19.520 | Thank you.

02:45:20.020 | Thank you.

02:45:20.660 | Thank you.

02:45:21.220 | Thank you.

Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484

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