Dan Houser is a writer, producer and voice actor. He’s also the co-founder and vice president of creativity for Rockstar Games. He was the head writer for several games such as Max Payne 3, Red Dead Redemption and Bully. He has also co-written most of the titles in the Grand Theft Auto series.
Houser was on an “extended break” as described by Take-Two since spring of last year. He will officially depart from Rockstar Games on March 11th. His brother Sam Houser will remain in Rockstar and he will continue doing what he does best.
Take-Two published an official statement regarding Dan Houser’s departure from Rockstar Games. The statement says the following:
“After an extended break beginning in the spring of 2019, Dan Houser, Vice President, Creative at Rockstar Games, will be leaving the company. Dan Houser’s last day will be March 11, 2020. We are extremely grateful for his contributions. Rockstar Games has built some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful game worlds, a global community of passionate fans and an incredibly talented team, which remains focused on current and future projects.”
I’m curious why is this happening, especially now when according to rumors Rockstar is extremely busy working on GTA 6. No matter the reason it’s always sad to see such talented people leaving the mother ship, but sometimes it’s for the best.
Below you can watch Karak talking about the recent news.
Thanks GamesRadar and ACG.
Chris was born in the early 80’s along with the very birth of home gaming. After spending many maaany drachmas on arcades, his father decided to buy him a PC instead of going bankrupt. He lived through the advancing and development of the gaming industry, having played TONS of games on all platforms. He is always honest and will never hesitate to give his true opinion on a game no matter what. Loves stealth games and dislikes microtsansactions, DLC and pre-ordering…who doesn’t after all?!
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Not really bothered with R*, since they aren’t bothered with me anymore.
Well said. I’ve been disappointed with everything they’ve done since GTA 4. GTA 4 itself was a mixed bag, you could still have some fun with the open world despite how messed up character movement was. After that game though all three titles they’ve released are style over substance empty worlds with nothing emergent and interesting happening and their story / career modes have been bogged down by extreme amounts of hand-holding and invisible restrictions to create the course of events they seem obsessed with playing out on your screen like a movie even while you’re nominally in control. They’ve blurred the line between gameplay and cutscene and moved it in the wrong direction. It’s neat when games add an element of interactivity to cutscenes. It’s terrible when they do the opposite and restrict gameplay so pre-planned movie scenes can play out “correctly”. They’ve given up on the soul of video games and replaced it with a poor imitation of movies.
AYe.
All I wanted was for GTA 4-5 to run really nicely on my high end rig, and for 5 to be a more complete game, but even I can’t have that apparently, even more so with the fact that it comes with another layer of DRM via another client launcher install, just to boot the damn game (uninstalled that game so damn fast when I found out).
Money mongols have invaded the Rockstar as well, we knew this since how they have treated gamers since the release of GTA5 as they turned it into a cash grab through shark cards and multiplayer only mods err.. I mean DLCs.
Rockstar once defined the meaning and value of DLCs with GTA4 and RDR but since then they have lost their path and became just like EA and others and focused on easy cash grab DLCs.
Though, can not blame them as such approach seems to be working as gamers prefers to buy such DLCs so Rockstar decision to go towards the same path is justified.
I, personally expected GTA5 single player DLCs as there were multiple findings in the game files suggesting story development and a new location and they are still on GTANET I presume. Anyways, hope to see Rockstar redeem themselves in the future.
I wish people hadn’t bought into Shark cards so much. Maybe we could have gotten some single player DLC. GTA 3 led to Vice City and San Andreas being released in the years after. In GTA 5 all we got were crappy multiplayer updates.
My gamer fuel is overflowing with Chris’ reposts, send help
Chris Kuntouras, writing articles as he gets insanely high on opioids, spending 1 minute looking at the words he wrote before declaring, “yeah whatever, that’ll do”.
Warning! Attention whoah spotted!
Show us on this doll where Chris Kountouras touched you.
will this be a good thing or a bad thing for writing though? I guess it depends who they hire to replace him.
They can hire Anita S. or Zoe Q. so many choices…
I am sure he will be fine with the hundred of millions of $s he has made by making gamers buy the same game two or three times.
Was about to be polite and say “farewell” but that does it too lmao.
Though, just to be clear, he didn’t “MAKE” gamers buy R* games 2-3 times but their strategy was that indeed.
I mean we all had the choice.
the money doesn’t go to his pocket, rockstar is not a private company.
Rockstar has been dead for quite a while
GTA 5 story and dialogues is an abysmal garbage and RDR3 is anti-American SJW junk so it doesn’t matter anymore. Let him out.
honestly…. dude is probably ready to stop working and enjoy his millions of dollars. don’t blame him one bit
Without Dan Houser and Leslie Benzies, the future of Rockstar doesn’t look good.
GTA in the future might be scrapped the single player and focus on multiplayer experience.. because thats what take two want it..
Sad that one of the two Housers is leaving the ship, but it’s not like there were only a bunch of people responsible for the masterpieces they released. So many were and will keep working there.