Visiting Rockstar’s HQ for a look at Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, we also felt duty bound to talk with vice president of creative Dan Houser about the wider world of Grand Theft Auto, and specifically the fourth instalment, on which he and the Rockstar North team are obviously still working as they prepare the first of two episodes of downloadable content, due for release over Xbox Live.

Looking back at the launch of GTAIV, what was it like from your perspective?

Nerve-wracking, always nerve-wracking. The bigger the game, the more nerve-wracking. It was a smoother movement from GTAIII to Vice City to San Andreas, and then we hit various political roadbumps in the intervening years, and also we had to deal with a movement on to the new hardware, with technical roadbumps and so on.

The challenge in some ways was outside of the process of making a game, in terms of what we do using experts from Microsoft and Sony to come in and work with the hardware – there was the American government and the crap that went on through 2005 to 2007. So I suppose there was more pressure than there was even with San Andreas. So the sense of relief when it all went off was even greater.

What’s your take on how the game was ultimately received among consumers?

You always get so many opinions. The big thing that we have become aware of, having made any game – since GTAIII, really – is that everything you change, someone will love it and someone will hate it. And there’s no way you can account for that because you have to change it – you can’t just keep making the same thing again and again. But if you keep in mind that we changed things for reasons of integrity, in terms of design, then I think people overall responded amazingly to the game, both in terms of the critics and consumer response.

Of course, you get people complaining that this thing or that thing we’d removed was the thing they’d loved most about the previous game, but the numbers of those were smaller than at any time since GTAIII, I think. In the world of message boards you need to have thick skin because you get insane amounts of hatred for anything you do. But at the same time we get insane amounts of love. Of course you get loads of people going: ‘You’re arseholes!’ but so many people just email in and say: ‘This game is amazing’. The feedback was incredible.

You get concerns with things like the online not working for a few days and people not being able to get a game working, and that’s heartbreaking for us because we want everyone to have a smooth experience. We take that stuff as seriously as we possibly can, and make it as good as we can, so problems like that are really upsetting. But, overall, the fanbase seem to like the direction we’ve taken – they see what we’ve done and why we’ve tried to do it.



Has the direction taken by GTAIV – with more considerations for realism, and the removal of jetpacks and so on – set a direction for GTA as a whole? And is that direction set in stone?

No, not necessarily. We’re still figuring out what we’re going to do next, because of the downloadable content. I don’t think it’s set anything in stone, it’s just what we did with that game. The idea that the tone was identical from GTAIII through to Vice City to San Andreas to Liberty City Stories to Vice City Stories is a little bit of revisionist history. It really wasn’t as close or as unified as all that – sometimes even within a game like San Andreas the tone moved a lot, and we desperately tried to make that make sense.

And we tried to do something different with GTAIV, and I think we’ll always go with horses for courses as a basis for what works in a game at a moment in time. The masterplan, if there is one, is to keep evolving and make the perfect game, and I don’t think we’ve even got close to that. I think GTAIV was as good as we could do at that moment in time. I think it was a really well worked-out game that combined the three elements of what makes GTA on a console. On the one hand that’s a progressive, tight, action game, with a better targeting system and the amazing physics and bunch of other things that really made the seamlessness of the design feel like it was taken up a level.

But then it’s also a strong narrative-driven experience that’s meant to feel like a movie or a TV show, and I think we set a new benchmark for what we’re capable of doing in that regard. And I think the third thing is that it’s a digital fantasy world that you go and explore, and we set another benchmark for ourselves there. The energy we got into that world – whether you’re going for a drink in a bar or seeing a busker when you walk down the street – is, I think, as much as we were capable of at that time. And we did that by really going to a granular level with everything and really figuring stuff out – how we got the animation and AI much tighter, for example. And we’d look to do that fundamental stuff if we did another game. And if that game wasn’t suited to the tone of GTAIV, it wouldn’t have that tone.