Dan Houser Talks with NY Times About GTA V and More

Q. What is that vision?

A. It’s the stuff we’re trying to realize with this game. It’s a world brought to life, in which you are able to exist and explore and have the benefits of some kind of narrative pull-through, a world that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. We’ve made something that sort of is Los Angeles and sort of isn’t. And that’s deliberate, that it isn’t an exact replication of it. We wanted this post-crash feeling, because it works thematically in this game about bank robbers. And that seems like it’s going to endure through the next year.

Q. How does the new, three-character structure help you get closer to the ambitions you have for the medium?

A. Just at the conceptual level, the idea was three separate stories that you play in one game. The next bit was, let’s not have the stories intersect once or twice but have them completely interwoven. It felt like it was going to be a real narrative strength: you get to play the protagonist and the antagonist in the same story.

Q. At this stage in the process, what’s left to do with Grand Theft Auto V?

A. We are editing, fixing, removing, replacing, adding, avidly. It’s the equivalent of, if you wrote a book, and you had two million spelling mistakes. And you had to do them by hand, in a language you didn’t understand. But once it’s working, you can sit there and watch the world go by. I still find that magical about them. You don’t get that with anything else. The life might be fake, but it’s still the closest we’ve come to a living artwork. I think that’s the core appeal of them.

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