Former Rockstar Co-Founder Spoke Out of Studio’s Titles He Worked - Red Dead Redemption, Bully, and Max Payne 3

Dan Houser is one of the co-founders of Rockstar Games and has been involved in the development of all the studio’s major releases as a producer and writer. As is well known, he left the company in 2020 due to fatigue and burnout, and in a recent interview, he shared new details about the development of several projects at once.

In a new, extensive interview with IGN, Houser—surprisingly—didn’t discuss the upcoming GTA 6 but instead talked about other Rockstar titles, specifically Red Dead Redemption, Bully, and Max Payne 3. He devoted separate attention to each game, sharing interesting insights about the conclusion of John Marston’s story, the challenges of developing Bully, and how the studio didn’t manage to do Max Payne’s legacy justice in the third installment. You can check out more details from Houser on all of the above topics below:

About Red Dead Redemption’s Emotional Ending:

“I remember discussing it with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and he was into it, and I was into it, but just knowing the production realities of… how does an open-world game work if you've killed the protagonist? So I said, ‘I think maybe we have to kill him.’ And he goes, ‘That's a great idea. Got to do it.’ I said, ‘I don't know if... let me just think about this,’ because we're just dealing with audio and dialogue. The nature of an open-world game is you finish a story, then you go back into the world and wrap up all the side content if you want to. We'd have to play as someone else for that. We could play as Jack, but what does that mean? So I had to think through for a while what it would mean production-wise.

I think people really loved that moment when you killed them and found it so powerful internally. “I think there was broad consensus that it was the right decision, but obviously it was an unusual and out-there decision, but I think the company had survived on making those decisions. I think we were surprised when the game came out by how angry some people were about that decision. There were people who were livid with you. And part of you goes, ‘That's fantastic,’ because it means you've really engaged in the story and the characters. Now, I think it was the right decision because you want those big, strong reactions, but I think people were really confused by it. As a writer, it was like he had to die for the story to have any weight, and I had wanted that in several GTAs. We’d never done it really for the technical reasons we just discussed.”

About Bully’s Complicated Development:

“The development was hard. The game was in trouble all of the time. It was difficult. It was an out-there concept. We were struggling with it. I wasn't sure it was going to be any good. We really wanted it to come together. It was really fun afterwards because it came together really well. The team did a great job. It was a sort of really strong game at the end. It kind of came together very late.

New IP is very stressful because you're doing something that no one's ever done before. And particularly that game, there was all of this controversy around it to do with the name, or people misunderstood it when they'd never seen it. So I think one of the challenges with that game was it never got the attention it deserved. We were too focused on trying to at least get people to stock it or to not protest it before it even came out.

Developers were struggling with what the IP was, and we'd made some changes, and some people had moved out there from New York, and it was starting to get a bit better, but it was still really struggling. It was really, well, if you take away the cars and you take away the guns, what is the game? What are you doing? And the lead designer, who was really talented, began to put in the schedule and began to put in the lessons, and it was starting to get there.”

About How Rockstar Failed Max Payne 3:

“It was a linear game, so it was a little different from writing an open-world game, a little more structured.I really enjoyed that as an experience. I loved what we did design-wise, the way the game didn't have loads, the way it felt like a 12-hour movie, some of the visual stuff we did with words on screen. I felt we were creating a really cool digital noir experience, and the consensus at the time was that people hated it.

So I got that completely wrong. know Sam Lake well, and he's a very good guy and really talented. I thought we'd done a good job of doing another Max Payne game. Some people liked it; lots didn't. So we got it wrong, or I got it wrong. I failed. My bit was not a success. The game is beautifully made, and it wasn't as successful as it should have been. So I would say a large amount of that failure was on me as one of the people making the decisions and also as the writer, when people really missed his writing.”

Interestingly, the Max Payne franchise may be getting a new lease on life, as Remedy is developing remakes of the first and second titles in partnership with Rockstar Games, which is serving as the publisher. Recently, it was revealed that this will be the studio’s next project after GTA 6.

Speaking of future projects being developed directly by Rockstar, rumors have previously circulated the studio might release a sequel to L.A. Noire in 2030. What's more, a recent article by Jason Schreier about GTA 6 adds fuel to the fire in this regard. It states that Rockstar’s next release will take much less time than the 8-year development period for GTA 6.