I am RKO
05-04-2008, 08:57 PM
Dan Houser recently conducted an interview with Logan Hill of New York Magazine (http://nymag.com) discussing the likeness of Liberty City with New York City.So the gaming industry has changed a lot since the last GTA ...
Yeah, f*** 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 who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies. They're gonna be about themes that interest us whatever the medium, instead of the weird, special video game–only themes that too many people make — orcs and elves, or monsters, or space. We felt you could make a good game and have it be about something we could actually relate to. Or aspire to.
When it comes to designing New York, where do you even start? With the map?
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 could get the lighting as close as we can. We had guys looking at Census data; this part of Queens should be more Chinese. The [pedestrians] can go up and speak to each other now, so we got them speaking Russian, Spanish, Chinese. It seemed we'd set a high bar in the past and wanted to take it to a new place, where you feel less like a video game and more like this weird digital fantasy world.
How do you do that?
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.
So all the pedestrians fit the neighborhoods?
The people in Soho are expensively dressed and into shopping and vacuous in their own way. People in Noho are slightly different, people in Harlem are different. We give them a little character, maybe a two-sentence description — usually a cynical take on a classic New York persona: an English guy living over here, who thinks he's a real hot shot, but he's a complete phony, which is why he's come to New York. If he gets pushed when he's on his cell phone, he runs away from you.
We're trying to pick up personalities that are worth of spoofing. We're not trying to go after every single black person, or every 25-year-old Hispanic kid. We’re saying, this is the neurotic guy who wants to be hard. This is the hard guy who wants to be a poet. And this is the angry guy who's trying to go to anger management class. We're just trying to get male personas and fix them to any race.
On the fashion side, we're literally doing fashion shoots and taking the photographs and turning them into the models. We have street stylists to help us dress them. It's got to look right.
It seems like the video game–violence issue might finally be dying down. Do you foresee any problems with GTA IV?
If you don’t like any violent content in your entertainment, then I apologize because I do. And I’ve unfortunately been exposed to it my entire life. I agree that the world would be a greater place if all of the guns and all of the bombs disappeared, but that certainly is not in the agenda. If we equally got rid of a lot of books that talk about violence, okay.
But if we don’t like these games because they've got content that we’re happy to see in movies and TV shows, then what you’re saying is you don’t like the medium because we don’t have a George Clooney type sticking his face in front of the camera. There is nothing in the game you would not see in a TV show, or a movie a hundred times over, so I don’t understand what the conversation is about. We set out to make games that felt like they could culturally exist alongside the movies we were watching and the books we were reading, and hopefully we’re getting close to those goals.
I thought you might back away from the sex, but you can still pick up girls, right?
We wanted it to feel like a gangster film. And you can't do that if you can’t use bad language, or have a hooker on the corner, or a strip club, or all the other things that are part of that world.
You can read the interview in it's entirety here (http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/05/rockstar_games_dan_houser.html).
Yeah, f*** 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 who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies. They're gonna be about themes that interest us whatever the medium, instead of the weird, special video game–only themes that too many people make — orcs and elves, or monsters, or space. We felt you could make a good game and have it be about something we could actually relate to. Or aspire to.
When it comes to designing New York, where do you even start? With the map?
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 could get the lighting as close as we can. We had guys looking at Census data; this part of Queens should be more Chinese. The [pedestrians] can go up and speak to each other now, so we got them speaking Russian, Spanish, Chinese. It seemed we'd set a high bar in the past and wanted to take it to a new place, where you feel less like a video game and more like this weird digital fantasy world.
How do you do that?
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.
So all the pedestrians fit the neighborhoods?
The people in Soho are expensively dressed and into shopping and vacuous in their own way. People in Noho are slightly different, people in Harlem are different. We give them a little character, maybe a two-sentence description — usually a cynical take on a classic New York persona: an English guy living over here, who thinks he's a real hot shot, but he's a complete phony, which is why he's come to New York. If he gets pushed when he's on his cell phone, he runs away from you.
We're trying to pick up personalities that are worth of spoofing. We're not trying to go after every single black person, or every 25-year-old Hispanic kid. We’re saying, this is the neurotic guy who wants to be hard. This is the hard guy who wants to be a poet. And this is the angry guy who's trying to go to anger management class. We're just trying to get male personas and fix them to any race.
On the fashion side, we're literally doing fashion shoots and taking the photographs and turning them into the models. We have street stylists to help us dress them. It's got to look right.
It seems like the video game–violence issue might finally be dying down. Do you foresee any problems with GTA IV?
If you don’t like any violent content in your entertainment, then I apologize because I do. And I’ve unfortunately been exposed to it my entire life. I agree that the world would be a greater place if all of the guns and all of the bombs disappeared, but that certainly is not in the agenda. If we equally got rid of a lot of books that talk about violence, okay.
But if we don’t like these games because they've got content that we’re happy to see in movies and TV shows, then what you’re saying is you don’t like the medium because we don’t have a George Clooney type sticking his face in front of the camera. There is nothing in the game you would not see in a TV show, or a movie a hundred times over, so I don’t understand what the conversation is about. We set out to make games that felt like they could culturally exist alongside the movies we were watching and the books we were reading, and hopefully we’re getting close to those goals.
I thought you might back away from the sex, but you can still pick up girls, right?
We wanted it to feel like a gangster film. And you can't do that if you can’t use bad language, or have a hooker on the corner, or a strip club, or all the other things that are part of that world.
You can read the interview in it's entirety here (http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/05/rockstar_games_dan_houser.html).