GTA Co-Founder Dan Houser Skips GTA 6 Trailers to Protect His Own Creative Vision

Dan Houser — who co-founded Rockstar Games and left in 2020 to start Absurd Ventures — told Variety he hasn't watched the GTA 6 Extended Look trailer and has no plans to. His reason is deliberate creative self-preservation, not indifference.

Houser explained that because he spends most of his time making open-world games and figuring out how to market them, watching what competitors are doing would only disrupt his thinking. He's not interested in mentally comparing his choices to someone else's — he wants to find new approaches, not benchmark against existing ones. He also said he's largely stopped playing open-world games for the same reason: he can't switch off the analytical part of his brain. While playing, he finds himself mentally auditing animation teams and imagining the internal meetings behind specific design decisions. He drew a parallel to his time at Rockstar — when developing Red Dead Redemption, he stopped watching Westerns, and during the formative years of GTA he deliberately avoided The Sopranos, fearing it would have reshaped his creative instincts for the series. Absurd Ventures does keep tabs on the industry, though — Houser said he has a dedicated team that tracks what everyone else is shipping.

Houser co-created GTA alongside his brother Sam Houser, who remains at Rockstar and was involved in GTA 6's development. The franchise launched in 1997 and grew into one of the most commercially dominant series in gaming history. Dan Houser told Variety there could be no greater compliment than being permanently associated with GTA, while also saying he hopes Absurd Ventures eventually builds its own identity. The studio has at least two projects in the works: an open-world comedy game Houser says he'll reveal more about in the coming months, and a dystopian sci-fi game about video game development going catastrophically wrong when a rogue AI becomes sentient.

On the Rockstar side, GQ writer Sam White recently posted — and then deleted — tweets saying a planned interview with Sam Houser fell apart at the last minute, which is notable given how rarely Sam Houser speaks publicly or appears in any promotional capacity. GTA 6 launches November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.