In the few articles/interviews I've read concerning Rockstar Games' Dan Houser, I've always went away liking him. The impression he leaves with me is one of a intelligent guy with a unique perspective on the gaming industry. This morning, I came across an interview with him in the Entertainment section of New York magazine. A few of the things he had to say were fairly interesting.
On casual gaming: "Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We're hopefully going to prove that there's also a very big audience for people that want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies." Amen brother.
On designing New York: "It's not just getting the roads laid out sensibly, which we do, or picking all the landmarks, it's also the more subtle details of dirt, or lighting. We had people out photographing on rooftops on time-lapse cameras so we can get the lighting as close as we can. We had guys looking at Census data..." I love the attention to detail these folks put into their work.
On other facets of production: "We're doing things in this that other people would think is insane. Here's a simple example: pedestrians, the guys that walk around, it's a massive scale production to do that. We ended up with 660 speaking parts. 80,000 lines of dialogue, it's ridiculous." I agree......wow!
He goes on to talk about many other things. The look and feel of New York they were going for, which areas to feature, their research, the radio stations, and of course...violence in video games. I could go on, but the entire article is here for you to read.
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/05/rockstar_games_dan_houser.html
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Amen. Well said, Mr. Houser. Thanks for posting this, ReclusiveSpirit! I saw a much more lengthy interview with him on 1UP, but this had some stuff he didn’t mention in that piece.
As the influence and power of the gaming industry increases, I'm hopeful that these current issues about the medium we love will fall by the wayside.
Thanks for the heads-up on the 1UP interview, I'm gonna have to go check that one out.