Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser left the studio because of how long GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 took to make: "I don't know if I had another one of those games in me"

In 2020 Rockstar Games underwent quite a change when co-founder and longtime production manager Dan Houser left the company. Now I'm focused on my work, and not on huge sandboxes like Red Dead Redemption 2 And Grand Craft Auto 5he explained exactly why he decided to leave the studio he helped build.

“The scale of the last pair [GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2] were beyond all imagination,” he says. BBC Radio 4. “I worked with incredibly talented people, so I thought that this group, if I used their huge brains, could do something amazing – that’s why I worked there.”

But it was the enormity of these releases – both massive projects with hundreds of hours of playtime – that tired Houser to the point that he had to quit. “The projects were really long and difficult and took a long time to complete,” he said when asked about leaving Rockstar. “It can be a difficult journey to achieve this scale with so many moving parts in place. You have 450,000 lines of dialogue, and [an] an equal number of parts of other things trying to put themselves together. This is a huge production experience.”

Leading game development at Rockstar's size “eats up all your time for years,” he adds. “I don’t know if I’ve ever had another game like this in me.”

Just look at the timing GTA 6 to understand his point of view. Now, 13 years after its predecessor, these are vital and career-defining things to be a part of. GTA 5 has found new life with GTA Online, the same thing happened with Red Dead Redemption 2, and if you're creative, you'll be able to devote a lot of time and energy to franchises with specific expectations when you could be exploring other possibilities.

Considering he's been featured in almost every Rockstar game, Houser has spent much of his life on disparate teams. His attention now turns to a new novel, A Better Paradise, due out in early 2026 through Absurd Ventures, his franchise studio based on his own universe of characters.

The goal is to take a multimedia approach, including animation, live action, books, comics and, yes, video games. GTA 6 took over a decade to get to us – we'll see how long Houser can keep releasing something otherwise.