Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has revealed that he still hasn’t watched the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay reveal, explaining that avoiding the announcement is a deliberate strategy to protect his own creative process. Houser, who helped write and produce every Grand Theft Auto title alongside Red Dead Redemption 2 before departing the company in 2020, told Variety in a new podcast interview that watching Rockstar’s August Netflix premiere would disrupt his ability to work on his current projects.
The former president of creative at Rockstar Games now runs Absurd Ventures, a multimedia studio he founded in 2023. Despite his deep connection to the franchise and the fact that his brother Chris Houser remains involved with Rockstar’s operations, Houser insists he deliberately keeps himself ignorant of what was shown during the much-disclosed reveal.
Avoiding Creative Distraction
“I haven’t seen it yet,” said Houser. “I will try and avoid it because I always try and avoid stuff that’s going to distract or disrupt me creatively. And given that I spend a large amount of time trying to make open-world games, and the rest of my conscious time trying to figure out innovative ways to market them, I don’t need to see what other people are doing. I’m always trying to think about new ways of doing it, not sit there in some kind of comparison of what I would have done differently.”
Houser explained that his profession has essentially ruined open-world games for him as entertainment. He said he can no longer simply enjoy playing such titles because he instinctively breaks them down into their component parts, judging the strengths and weaknesses of the teams behind them in real time.
“I find when I play them, I can almost deconstruct the strengths and weaknesses of the team in real time, and it’s distracting. I’m always thinking, ‘Well, their animation team is weak, but I think this game design is fantastic.’ And, ‘Oh, I can imagine that meeting when they discuss this feature.'”
Dan Houser, co-founder of Absurd Ventures
The creative director noted that he never felt the need to be “the person that understands what everyone else is doing,” which frees him from having to play every major release. Instead, staff at his new company sample fresh open-world games on his behalf so he can focus entirely on original thinking.
A History of Creative Isolation
Houser traced this habit back through his career, recalling how he deliberately avoided genre-defining media while working on his most acclaimed projects. He said that as soon as development began on Red Dead Redemption, he stopped watching Westerns entirely. Similarly, he held off on viewing The Sopranos until after leaving Rockstar.
“I saw one episode, because my girlfriend-now-wife and I did watch the finale in real time,” Houser recalled of the HBO crime drama. “I’d not seen any of it before that moment. And then I watched it all during COVID. And I’m grateful. It’s so good that it would have disrupted everything I did on GTA had I watched at the time.” He added that he “really tries to avoid things” believed to overly influence his work.
The Future of Absurd Ventures
Houser is now building out several different multimedia franchises through Absurd Ventures, which has thus far released audio dramas, comic books, and novels. Two video games based on those properties are currently in development at the studio.
“One is an open-world comedy which is trying to really lean into comedy and character memory,” said Houser. “And that we’ll have more information on in the next few months.” He described the second project as a dystopian sci-fi centered on video game development gone wrong, featuring a rogue AI that discovered sentience but was created by two people who disliked each other.
“Unfortunately,” he joked, “it doesn’t like itself.”
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