Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has recently being doing the rounds to chat about to his company Absurd Ventures, and his latest tidbit from his time at the Grand Theft Auto studio is the surprisingly revelation Red Dead Redemption 2 perhaps owes as much to Victorian literature as it does cowboy films.
“I binged on Victorian novels for that,” he explains in a new interview with the Guardian. “I listened to the audiobook of [George Elliot’s] Middlemarch walking to and from the office every day. I loved it.”
As to why Houser turned to this perhaps unexpected source of inspiration, he explained, “I wanted [Red Dead Redemption 2] to feel from the writing perspective, slightly more novelistic. I thought that was a way of doing something new on the story side – and the game was going to look so pretty, the art was so strong, I thought the story had better really set it up.”
It was his search for the right tone that ultimately led him not just to Middlemarch, but other Victorian fiction, including Sherlock Holmes. And as he noted elsewhere, big 19th-century novels perhaps have more in common with open-world games than is immediately obvious, bringing a “sense of slightly spread out storytelling” that’s paralleled in the likes of GTA.
Houser, who departed Rockstar Games in 2020, formally unveiled his new media company Absurd Ventures in 2023. It’s currently working on A Better Paradise, charting the “ill-fated development of an ambitious but addictive video game project that goes very wrong”, which so far spans a novel and podcast series, with a TV series and game on the way.
It’s also developing a new crime fiction universe, American Caper, and Absurdaverse, a “story-driven action-comedy adventure game”.
