•As Rockstar prepares for the launch of Grand Theft Automatycznie 6, former studio VP and Bully writer Dan Houser has opened up about the troubled development of the 2006 school-set adventure game. Speaking in a new interview as part of IGN’s ICONS30 series, Houser recalled an era when “it felt like things were imploding” amid controversy surrounding Rockstar’s releases.
Bully—originally released in Europe as Canis Canem Edit—follows troublemaking student Jimmy Hopkins through his year at Bullworth Academy. A smaller-scale, less explicit cousin of GTA, it launched to critical acclaim, though Houser admits the road to release was far from smooth.
“The development was hard,” Houser said. “The game was in trouble all of the time. It was difficult. It was an out-there concept. We were struggling with it. I wasn’t sure it was going to be any good. We really wanted it to come together. It was really fun afterwards because it came together really well. The team did a great job. It was a sort of really strong game at the end. It kind of came together very late.”
Houser attributed much of the difficulty to the pressures of launching a new IP just over a year after GTA: San Andreas, which had been engulfed in controversy around its name and the “Hot Coffee” sex minigame uncovered within its code.
“New IP is very stressful because you’re doing something that no one’s ever done before,” he said. In the mid-2000s, controversy seemed to follow every Rockstar release—whether the ultraviolence of Manhunt or the Hot Coffee mod—and Bully faced similar concerns about how its content would translate into a school setting.
“There was huge hysteria around it,” Houser said. “We had to spend most of 2006 diffusing it, so we couldn’t positively promote the game in the way we normally would’ve done. I think that didn’t help it… It felt like things were imploding. It was very stressful. And just go to work each day, wonder who’s protesting you that day.”
Beyond external pressure, Rockstar also wrestled with a core design problem: how to make its open-world action-adventure formula work from the perspective of a teenager. With cars and guns off the table—two pillars of any GTA—the team struggled to define what Bully actually was.
“If you take away the cars and you take away the guns, what is the game? What are you doing?” Houser recalled. The turning point came with a small moment: one designer added the ability to stick a “Kick Me” Post-it note on the back of an NPC, who would then run up and kick them.
“Just seeing that work, you’re like, that’s a great moment,” he said. “So I think that moment was probably when I always remember going, this IP that wouldn’t work in a GTA… But as a kid, and suddenly it was the scale of the school and the scale of a kid’s life, it started to feel really fun.”
Bully proved so beloved that fans have long campaigned for a sequel. While ideas were once floated at Rockstar, Houser revealed to IGN in 2025 that it never got off the ground due to “bandwidth issues.”
The game marks its 20th anniversary this year. With Grand Theft Automatycznie 6 only weeks away from release, readers can explore more on Rockstar’s upcoming title through a full interview with co-studio head Rob Nelson, how the game will handle the current political climate, and why Houser says he won’t be playing it.
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