"At Rockstar we don’t see writing as particularly separate from game making – my co-writers, Mike Unsworth and Rupert Humphries and I, are just another part of the process, working with the designers and animators to create a game that flows as smoothly as possible and comes to life as well as possible. So while the game structure changes from game to game, our ability to learn from our mistakes and evolve our processes is ongoing. I would not separate out writing as being independent from animation or game design – working together, we do our best to build as cohesive and exciting an experience as possible."
— Dan Houser gets how to write video games.
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Did we think it was too violent? No. We put it out and we were proud of it. Were we conscious that some people might [be offended]? Absolutely. We were very careful to make sure we never marketed it in a way that exploited that. There was no violence or content in it that you wouldn’t see in a TV show and see in a movie.
To us, it was like “well, this debate doesn’t make sense,” but we could sniff that it would probably come. We obviously never could have predicted that it would become as overblown as it did over the next four or five years.
Ten years on, society may be in a bit of a mess right now but it definitely isn’t video games’ fault. The one thing you cannot argue empirically now is: In the last ten years there hasn’t been a massive societal collapse based on these games. You know, you spend tons of time not doing anything violent. There’s far less violence in the game than in an average first-person shooter.
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— Dan Houser on Grand Theft Auto III.
