Vice President of Rockstar Games and co-writer of GTA IV, Dan Houser, has given a revealing interview to the New York Magazine.
The first question was about how much the industry has changed since the last GTA was release a few years ago. "Yeah, fuck 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."
Houser also touched upon the violence issue and whether he think it may finally be dying down a little. "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."
Source:New York Magazine
May 2, 2008
