http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2008/04/dan-housers-ver.html
Interview with Dan Houser or Rockstar. Not so much info on GTAIV, but just general discussion of his opinions and his creative process and history. Pretty long so I've made a short summary of the most interesting bits I found if you are too lazy to read it all (Quotes are in Italics):
Starts off by talking about how competitors and other companies int he market have creative people making the game and PR people running the show like a business.He likes to think of how his ideas and the game will resonate through modern day culture.
I often -- without mentioning any names -- think some of our big competitor titles, their marketing campaign is, "Look at our great marketing campaign!" Ours is, "Look at the game, experience the game hopefully." Then we want to have further conversations with people once they play the game properly. But the two things we want to avoid are talking purely about this as a business -- its not, this is a creative activity. Obviously its young and its not fully mature but we are trying to move it forward as quickly as we can. And obviously the counter to that is everyone wants to go on the controversy story. I'm like, "We can talk about anything in context." Movies moved beyond that years ago.
Mentions he will probably never do a movie.With a movie, a hundred guys write a script, then they go and talk to one or two actors who just act it out.With GTA, the same team are familiar with each other and have worked with each other through the series.
Discusses original ideas on games when founding Rockstar in the beginning: Of course, we were always going to be a company that took gameplay more important than graphics… At the same time, all our production values were going to be the best they could be, always try to use the best music, try to make the best dialogue -- try to lovingly craft these things and make this total experience. That was kind of the idea behind it.
Discusses vision that goes beyond hardware limitations. So we were thinking of the ideas before the tech was there. Like we could put more music in. We could make the writing a lot better. When you only had a CD as opposed to DVD, you could put like 10 songs and eight lines of dialogue and that was your entire game. We were lovingly casting all our actors in "GTA 2" to be DJs on radio stations, but they probably said three things each. The big technological advance was when things moved to DVD, almost more than the power of Playstation 2. It was the storage unit. You could suddenly put on a lot of audio a lot more animation and a lot more content in a world. That then gave us the opportunity of making that content interesting.
Comments on how, when making GTA3, he didn't question whether people will like it, he merely drilled into his head that, if he cares about the game and puts the work in and crafts every single detail he possibly can into each part of the game, people will appreciate it.
On why all the games are in third person:
Me: It seems like all the Rockstar games are third person. You play a character. As opposed to some games where the idea is that you are the character. Is that purposeful?
DH: We definitely think about that stuff. For us it's really a visual thing of it just looks nice controlling a character. Obviously, both views are artificial. None of them are like your eyes. But to us the third-person view feels less artificial than the first person. That whole "blinkers on" just doesn't feel as much fun for some reason.
Our characters are characters, but we do a lot of work so they are people you can probably relate to. Even though you may not always approve of their choices – They're not laid out to be heroes, but they're not people without any moral consequences.
Discussing how he hates being constricted by walls, or dead objects with no real feeling: A really simple one is the physics. The idea that if a guy falls down a wall, we have that running in real time the way he crumbles or compacts. It's stuff you could only do in pre-rendered CGI before. That's amazing and we're the first ones to use that technology.
Discussing size of city:
Me: This game is actually smaller in area than "San Andreas," right?
DH: Yes, but not the city. It's the biggest city we ever built, but not the biggest area. If the difference from "GTA 2" to "3" was 3D, then this time it was from low-def to hi-def. What that meant was detail. Everything has to be insanely detailed. The graphics, animation, behavior, dialogue, artificial intelligence. So we thought that kind of scale was handleable.
On why he doesn't reveal all the details before the game's release:
So we always try to keep a lid on a bunch stuff so you hopefully know enough that you're excited to buy it, but you're still super excited. There has to be a magical quality to actually playing the game. We're not trying to run the best marketing campaign, we're trying to sell the most videogames. We're trying to get enough people excited and our main method of doing that has always been, "If the game is of high quality, it will sell."
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