If you believe the more hysterical newspapers, the quiet-spoken, articulate man I am meeting today in London is the biggest threat to our nation’s youth since the Sex Pistols swore TV presenter Bill Grundy into oblivion.
Even Hillary Clinton has said her say, claiming that his work is “stealing the innocence of our children”.
You might think that a man this notorious would be a household name, but though the work he helps create has smashed sales records and made headlines worldwide, Dan Houser has stayed firmly out of the limelight, his entry on the all-encompassing online encyclopaedia Wikipedia stretching to a mere nine lines.
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In his 35 years, Houser has gone from the genteel surroundings of St Paul’s School and Christchurch College, Oxford, to be one of the main creative forces behind the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise, whose last main instalment, Grand Theft Auto IV, was the most successful entertainment product in history, until Modern Warfare 2 came along.
Shaven-headed, Houser sits back in a comfortable chair at the Chelsea headquarters of Rockstar, the games label he created with his elder brother, Sam. At each question, he pauses to formulate an answer, before delivering it word-perfect, punctuated occasionally by an excited waving of the arms.
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Grand Theft Auto, or GTA as it is known, is a series that has redefined what is possible in video games. Players take on the identity of a character at the dubious fringes of society, who by committing crimes can rise to the top.
It is controversial because it offers you free will. Should you choose to, you can ignore the crime-based missions and explore the city on foot. Equally, you can steal cars, shoot policemen, or start your own drugs trade.
The final instalment of GTA IV, The Ballad of Gay Tony, is currently riding high in the games charts. Set in the same meticulously re-created New York (rechristened Liberty City) as the main GTA IV title, it explores the nightlife of the city, following on from the immigrant experience in GTA IV and living as a member of a biker gang in the first extra GTA IV instalment, The Lost and The Damned.
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“The game evolved out of our love of watching live car chases on TV, or American movies and so on,” Houser explains in an accent that betrays his southern counties upbringing, despite his 11 years in New York. “The game is set in a world that is like the world would be if it were the way the media says it is.”
It’s an irony lost on much of the media itself, which has gleefully pounced on nearly everything produced by Rockstar. Bully, a game about boarding school, was briefly banned in the UK, while Manhunt 2, a bloody serial killer black comedy, ran into serious trouble with the UK censors because it called on players to reassemble severed body parts to make progress.
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“Manhunt 2 was not a good situation,” Houser concedes. “When a game gets banned, it means we’re not doing our first job, of making the investors back their money.”
But for sheer controversy generation, Grand Theft Auto is impossible to beat. The amoral universe in which the characters live presents players with unlimited opportunities to kill, maim and steal. The series has been the target of innumerable complaints and lawsuits in the United States, for everything from its use of sexual imagery to drunken driving, and in Thailand GTA IV was banned after a 19-year-old player killed a taxi driver and stole his cab as a direct result of playing the game.
In a world where anything is possible, and the worst possible retribution is to fail and restart, there is little doubt that GTA does encourage players to behave badly. The question is, does it affect its players’ attitudes and responses in real life? It’s a hot topic in psychology, in the same way that television was in the 1970s, video nasties in the 1980s, and the jury is still very much out.
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“Look,” Houser says, “video games are a popular and easy enemy. It’s all part and parcel of doing something that’s not been done before. One of the things that’s always been exciting is the feeling of being in at the birth of a new medium, but of course the history of technology-driven art from the printing press onwards has been of people fighting against that stuff.
“It feels at last like we’re moving on from that debate. The audience is getting past 30 so it all becomes a bit silly. That’s not to say that all games are for all people; we’ve never said that. GTA has always been rated 18 and we’ve always been very happy with that.
“Nevertheless, we do get frustrated when video games are singled out and movies are given a free pass. Manhunt 2 was banned in the same week that Saw was released. The arguments become quite ludicrous quite quickly when people argue that games are somehow more dangerous than full-motion video.
“Within Rockstar, sometimes we feel that some of our games get singled out and held up as pariahs. All we want to do is tell a story with rounded characters. Like GoodFellas, which is a key film for us, our rounded characters happen to be criminals.”
For a man with millions in the bank, he remains impressively passionate about his work, and equally keen for his private life to remain private. At times it seems like he is deliberately cultivating a mystique.
“I’ve read that about myself, but it’s a myth. I often speak to people like yourself. But me, Sam and Leslie [Benzies, another key force behind GTA] are very aware of the fact that we as a triumvirate do not make the games; 200, 300, 700 people make the games. It’s easy for people to focus on individuals because that’s an easier story to tell, but it’s not relevant to what we do.
“Furthermore, the games are too full of anti-celebrity diatribe for us to be anything but hypocritical if we were to jump on that bandwagon. It truly holds no appeal for any of us to be a celebrity. I find it very depressing as a consumer when you read about one actor’s experience of making a movie. What about the writer, the producer, the cinematographer or the director?
“We’ve got, you know, 100 plus people, at least 80 per cent of whom are far more intelligent than me, and to start saying it’s me or Sam or the pair of us because we’re such crazy brothers just seems stupid. And it’s not fair or appropriate.”
Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly Sam who has been the biggest influence on his younger brother’s life. Sam it was who dreamt of being a rock star and took a job in the early 1990s with BMG Records, before moving to its interactive department. Dan followed. “I was always at BMG Interactive. It wasn’t particularly an enormous passion of mine, but out of nepotism it was the only job I could get.”
The sale of BMG Interactive to Take Two software in 1998 took the brothers to New York, and one year later the success of GTA II gave them the clout to form their own division within Take Two. They reflected the rock n roll ambitions of their youth in the name they chose – Rockstar. The timing was perfect. Sony released the PlayStation 2 in 2000, and GTA III followed one year later, the first 3D title in the series, and the first that came close to achieving the Rockstar boys’ ambitions.
Thus began what seems to the outsider to be the perfect life: a Manhattan address, money in the bank and complete anonymity on the street. As video games have supplanted rock music as the leading source of the older generations’ opprobrium, it is somehow appropriate that the Rockstar founders are living the lives of the rock stars they set out to imitate.
How does he feel to be part of a medium that can, with some justification claim to be the new rock n roll?
“I am really not the right age to ask, but I think you might find that 25 year olds now discuss games in the same way that we used to discuss music. We recently employed someone from the music industry, and he said that in his years no one ever said, ‘music changed my life’ any more. He gets that all the time with people who want to work for us.
“What strikes me now is that for anyone under the age of 60, it’s impossible to hear music that shocks or appals you. It must be very difficult for a teenager to share music with Dad, who can then pick out where all the riffs came from. It might be a nice bonding experience, but it dulls the sense of discovery, doesn’t give you the same chance to forge your own identity.”
The problem with games, as distinct from rock, is surely that in 20 years’ time, no one will still be playing GTA IV, whereas the Beatles will still be around.
“We do think about that,” Housers concedes. “These games are things that we put a lot of time and effort into but that technology has now made obsolete. Of course, you think is this completely disposable? Maybe the games are close to getting good enough where they will be playable in a few years’ time.
“Games are part of the modern entertainment industry, and maybe they’ll come to be considered an artistic medium – that’s a whole separate discussion – but what they are not is pure software.”
And, for all the trappings of the Manhattan lifestyle, England still has its appeal.
“Whether you live in London, New York or Tokyo,” says Houser, “the sheer venality of the life can get you down. After a while you start to think: ‘I can’t take this any more. I want to go somewhere where people are miserable in a different way.’
“I don’t think in 11 years it had ever been 7 months since I was last here, so by the end of September/October I was incredibly keen to get to Europe.”
Mum and Dad – she a former actress (who once, appropriately, appeared in The Sweeney), he a jazz saxophonist and stalwart of Ronnie Scott’s – still live in Sheen. They are, Houser says, proud of their sons, “though not so much that they’d actually play the games”. Shame. If Dad did plug in his console, he’d see a likeness of himself playing sax in the park in The Ballad of Gay Tony. It’s his boys’ way of saying thank you.
As for the boys themselves, they are already back at work. There’s a Western game in the works for next spring, and the next GTA to think of. “We’ll think of a city first, then the characters,” says Houser. The script he will end up co-writing will run to around 1,000 pages, nearly ten times as much as a feature film.
Surely he can’t keep this up forever, especially as now he’s a father. Has the experience changed him at all?
“Only through exhaustion.” He smiles. “It changes your appreciation of the world, but only in a positive way. You are suddenly not as important as you thought you were. As a man in particular you realise how appallingly selfish or self-absorbed you are, and seeing that change is great.”
But then even family life must take its place alongside Grand Theft Auto. “For anyone in our industry it’s a challenge because the hours are long and the work is hard. But? you know I like my work and I like my family. I don’t socialise that much, so I’m happy.”
The day after we meet, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars adds to Houser’s happiness by winning the players’ vote for best handheld game of the year at the prestigious Golden Joystick awards in London. It is the eighth consecutive year that GTA has won an award.
As usual, at the awards ceremony, Dan Houser was nowhere to be seen.
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is out now on the Xbox 360.