GTA 4 is a noticeably darker and more dour game than anything the series had put out before or since, but a lot of that stemmed from Dan Houser’s life at the time.
Courtesy of the Lex Fridman podcast, the Rockstar Games’ co-founder and GTA 4’s lead writer gave a ‘life imitates art’ answer to the question of why the open-world hit felt so sombre. “I had been living in New York for a few years, and wasn’t sure if I was happy,” he recalled of the period where he was writing Niko Bellic’s story.
“I was going through a lot of personal drama, as usual. I was looking at some of GTA 4 again recently, and it’s really dark, and I was like, ‘Ah, that’s why.’ I was single and miserable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America,” he continued. “My life felt in a lot of flux… As a company, we had all that Hot Coffee drama, so we constantly thought we may be shut down in the middle of making [GTA 4].” (Good spot, PC Gamer.)
The Hot Coffee controversy Houser spoke of is, of course, the sex mini-game that people uncovered in GTA: San Andreas, which had players tapping button prompts to get ‘intimate’ with CJ’s girlfriends. It stirred a huge scandal for the studio, even resulting in the game being pulled from store shelves until Rockstar issued a new version that restricted the mini-game, as well as being re-rated for Adults-Only. The scandal would’ve likely sunk any other developer at the time, even if culture nowadays understands that games should be allowed to be as raunchy as any other medium.
“Having had this run of success and relative personal stability from GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, suddenly life felt very unsure,” Houser continued, adding that all the turmoil “kind of bled into” GTA 4.
Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser couldn’t kill GTA 4’s Niko Bellic as fans needed to be able “to play forever,” so he killed Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston instead
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