Dan Houser Is Skipping GTA 6, and Open-World Games in General

Dan Houser, the Rockstar co-founder who helped define Grand Theft Auto, has no plans to watch what his old company is doing with GTA 6. In a new interview with Variety, Houser said he skipped the "Extended Look" trailer and intends to keep it that way.

His reasoning is about protecting his own creative headspace. Houser left Rockstar in 2020 and now runs Absurd Ventures, where he spends much of his time making open-world games and the rest figuring out how to market them. Watching someone else's version, he said, would only invite comparison. "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," he explained.

The same logic applies to playing other open-world games. Houser said he finds himself dissecting a studio's strengths and weaknesses in real time, noting a weak animation team here or a brilliant design choice there, and imagining the internal meetings behind each feature. He described himself not as a game designer but as a creative director, someone hunting for ideas that haven't been done, or that he can borrow from older media.

It's a habit he has kept for decades. When Rockstar started on Red Dead Redemption, he stopped watching Westerns. While shaping the early GTA games, he steered clear of The Sopranos, since seeing it "would have disrupted everything I did on GTA."

That doesn't mean Absurd Ventures is operating in a bubble. Houser said he employs a team whose job is to study what the rest of the industry is up to, so the company stays informed even if he doesn't.

As for what he is making, Houser confirmed multiple projects. One is an open-world comedy game that he plans to reveal in more detail "in the next few months." Another is a dystopian sci-fi game about game development going badly wrong when a rogue AI becomes sentient.

Houser also addressed his legacy, saying there could be "no greater compliment" than being forever tied to GTA, while hoping his new work can stand on its own.

Meanwhile, his brother Sam Houser remains at Rockstar and worked on GTA 6. Sam rarely gives interviews, which made headlines recently when GQ writer Sam White posted, then deleted, tweets saying a planned interview with him collapsed at the last minute.

GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.