Dan Houser

@dan-houser · 22 positions · On ppll ↗

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

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What Dan Houser says most about

video games 10

New intellectual property needs single-player games, because launching a multiplayer game on a world nobody knows yet is extremely hard.
Every generation of technology is supposed to make games cheaper and easier to build, and every time the result has been better and far more expensive games.

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design 4

Tetris on the Game Boy is perfect game design, and from a pure puzzle perspective nothing else comes close.
A game is an equation between two personalities, the world's and the protagonist's, and the friction between them is where the experience comes from.

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ambition 2

Commercial pressure and creative ambition point in the same direction, because the way to make an expensive game's money back is to make something great.
The self-critical voice is both a bug and a feature: it can wreck you, but it is also what supplies drive and a lack of complacency.

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LLMs 2

AI has done the first ninety per cent of the work of sounding human, and the last five per cent will turn out to be about ninety-five per cent of the work.
Language models will not replace good ideas, only the low-level work, so what they threaten is the ability to start a creative career rather than to have one.

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