Sitting down with Rockstar Games president Sam Houser in the freshly decorated demo room of the company’s headquarters in
downtown New York, we ask him how he’s doing. Just over 1,100 uninterrupted words later, he’s finished giving us an answer.
Houser is, in his own words, the “loudmouth” of the Rockstar organisation, not that you’d know it in recent years, since he’s been maintaining a low public profile while the company over which he presides has become the default scapegoat for anything that is perceived to be wrong with videogaming. The most testing point came two years ago, in a Washington courtroom, when he and several of his colleagues faced up to a nine-hour cross-examination at the hands of US federal investigators brandishing stacks of printouts detailing thousands of internal Rockstar emails. Some going for a group of people in the business of making digital entertainment.
All that nonsense may be in the past, but it’s certainly left its mark. “It’s made our resolve that much stronger, and in some ways I feel that some of the negative stuff had to happen to keep everybody’s feet on the ground, and to keep everybody hungry and motivated,” Houser says seriously. “With the sales of some of our previous games we’ve accomplished a lot of what people would have thought we’d set out to achieve, and the fact that, after all this time, we can still be this hungry and ambitious and driven and crazy – that’s got to be a good sign. Because if they can’t shake us now, then what can they do to us?” His eyes are sparkling and he’s laughing heartily now, and we can’t help but join in.
It’s important to note that Houser isn’t the monster his critics would have him painted as. OK, apparently one Raymond Liotta once described him as “a fucking lunatic” (Houser took it as quite the compliment), but this bearded bouncing ball of energy is also a sensitive soul (“I get a panic attack if I get a parking ticket,” he says, laughing again), and is desperately committed to supporting those around him, which in the context of GTA involves ensuring that we understand that it’s the dev staff at Rockstar North in Edinburgh who are the real talents behind the phenomenon. There is an unusual sort of bond in evidence here – the result, perhaps, of standing together in times of difficulty – and not for nothing is the Rockstar Games setup sometimes referred to as a family. Whenever Houser’s colleagues talk about him it is with respect, but also admiration for what the company has achieved under his leadership in the ten short years since its birth.
Anyway, we’re here in New York City not to talk about videogame controversy – an issue that hasn’t so much been flogged to death as beaten with an iron pipe, slashed into variously sized pieces and lobbed into a dumpster. We’re here to discover the real stories behind a series that has transformed perceptions of what the 3D action game can be, and has, with each further iteration, not just progressively refined the genre but reimagined, reshaped and rewired it until it has become something that can no longer be comfortably placed alongside other types of game because its ambition exists in a different sphere.
The signs were there in GTAIII, the 2001 release that showed just how differently Rockstar considered the notion of what a videogame could be all about, its astonishingly engineered mechanics, storyline, technology and soundtrack fusing to create something that wasn’t so much a game as it was an experience. That Vice City, a sequel that built upon its successor in every conceivable manner – and some that were inconceivable at the time – emerged from Rockstar North’s studio only a year later is one of modern-day game development’s wildest accomplishments. By rights, the successor, San Andreas, had no business throwing up any surprises, and yet it punched through expectations with a sense of breadth and scale unmatched in videogaming as a whole.
Today, we’re going to talk about all of these achievements, along with Rockstar’s most fizzlingly ambitious work to date, Grand Theft Auto IV.
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Comments
1Whare are artworks from? I mean in the magazine? Give me the link, please