Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and co-creator of some of the GTA titles, Bully, and Red Dead Redemption titles, who left the studio in 2020, had a comprehensive talk with IGN, in which he reflected on his career and remembered the creation of the signature GTA cover art, struggles in the development of Bully, and other peculiar facts from the time of developing earlier Rockstar games.

Houser shared that the legendary GTA box grid design was crafted in a surprisingly short period of time of just two evenings after the last-minute decision to change it and then became the standard for the series. "What's funny is the cover art that became the iconic GTA cover art; Stephen Bliss did that in about two evenings because the old cover art was probably being too offensive to release after 9/11 because there were burning buildings in it," Houser shared. "So it would've been fine if there hadn't just been 9/11. So that look of the shards, the squares that became very iconic, only appeared because of 9/11." A similar grid layout was used in GTA 6 as well:

The creator also shared that back in 2001, at the time of Grand Theft Auto 3's release, Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, "was on the point of economic failure." This was especially "dispiriting" because at E3 "nobody cared" about the game.

As for Bully, the 2006 coming-of-age action-adventure, Houser, who was the writer alongside Jacob Krarup, recalls recurring difficulties in the game's creation. "The development was hard," Houser shared. "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." The creator explained that the title sparked controversy and was misunderstood by the audience. Houser acknowledged that Bully never received the attention it deserved. The team also struggled with shaping the game's style without the GTA elements, which they were used to – and to portray an entirely different teenager's world.

Houser also mentioned Max Payne 3, saying he enjoyed creating a linear game rather than an open-world one. "It felt like a 12-hour movie," he said. However, he thinks that he didn't align with the atmosphere of the previous franchise entries. "So I got that completely wrong. I know [Max Payne writer] 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."

Rockstar's anticipated blockbuster GTA 6 will launch on consoles on November 19, and it was predicted that the PC release would arrive several years later, but recent reports suggest Rockstar plans to release GTA 6 on PC in Q1 2027, only a few months after its console release.

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