GTA 4 it's a noticeably darker and grittier game than anything the series has released before or since, but much of it had to do with Dan Houser's life at the time.
Courtesy of Lex Friedman podcast, Rockstar GamesThe GTA 4 co-founder and lead writer gave a “life imitates art” answer when asked why the open-world hit feels so dark. “I lived in New York for several years and wasn’t sure if I was happy,” he recalled about the period when he wrote the story of Niko Bellic.
“As usual, I went through a lot of personal drama. I recently watched GTA 4 again and it's very dark and I thought, “Oh, that's why.” I was lonely and unhappy and wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America,” he continued. “My life was constantly changing… As a company, we had all this drama with Hot Coffee, so we were constantly thinking that we might get shut down mid-production. [GTA 4].” (Nice place, PC gamer.)
The hot coffee debate that Houser was talking about is, of course, a sex mini-game that people discovered in GTA: San Andreas, in which players pressed buttons to get “intimate” with CJ's girlfriends. This caused a huge scandal for the studio, which even resulted in the game being pulled from store shelves until Rockstar released a new version that limited the mini-game and also gave it a new Adults Only rating. The scandal would likely have sunk any other developer at the time, even if modern culture understands that games should be allowed to be as obscene as any other form of media.
“After such success and relative personal stability in GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, life suddenly became very uncertain,” Houser continued, adding that all the turmoil “kind of spilled over into” GTA 4.
Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser couldn't kill GTA 4's Niko Bellic because fans wanted the ability to “play forever,” so he killed Red Dead Redemption's John Marston instead.
