Dan Houser on GTA V and Rockstar as 'Pariah'

Although Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is grabbing all the headlines now with a record-breaking launch, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV was the king of the castle when it launched last April, grossing over $500 million in its first week. Fans continue to enjoy the game through episodic content, but Rockstar is already in the planning stages for GTA V, according to Times Online.

“We'll think of a city first, then the characters,” said Rockstar's Dan Houser, who will be co-writing a script likely to run around 1,000 pages, which is almost ten times as much as a movie. Take-Two shareholders are eagerly awaiting the next GTA game, but DFC Intelligence argues that Take-Two should be doing a better job monetizing the franchise between major releases. 

Elsewhere in the Times Online interview Houser talks about the constant violence in games controversy that Rockstar has had to deal with. “It feels at last like we’re moving on from that debate. The audience is getting past 30 so it all becomes a bit silly. That’s not to say that all games are for all people; we’ve never said that. GTA has always been rated 18 and we’ve always been very happy with that," he said. "Nevertheless, we do get frustrated when video games are singled out and movies are given a free pass. Manhunt 2 was banned in the same week that Saw was released. The arguments become quite ludicrous quite quickly when people argue that games are somehow more dangerous than full-motion video."

He continued, "Within Rockstar, sometimes we feel that some of our games get singled out and held up as pariahs. All we want to do is tell a story with rounded characters. Like GoodFellas, which is a key film for us, our rounded characters happen to be criminals.”

We'd certainly agree that Rockstar, as much as any studio in this industry, has really pushed the medium of video games forward, making the "games as art" discussion worth having. Although the mainstream has clearly come to accept video games more and more as a part of everyday American culture, it's still a work in progress.