From one piece Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484 22 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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To watch the universe. The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.
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Basically, a modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we’ve got a long way to go.
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You know, I’ve been in games for 29 years, and all the time, the piece of tech that’s going to make making games much easier and much cheaper is about to turn up, and all that’s happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive.
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I would say do not worry too young about your career. I would say worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life, because you’re going to spend the whole of your life in your own head.
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The never right outcome is, “Oh, you’ve said the wrong thing. You should be removed now.” That should never ever be a thing we should lean towards.
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korrents.com
The most disappointing thing about the twentieth century was the absolute failure of communism.Their words
And I thought that section’s incredible because you realize in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th century, in some ways, was the absolute failure of communism.
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That self-critical brain, I think lots of people suffer from, and I think the internet is designed to induce, if you didn’t have it before, you will have it after being online. It clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency, so it can also become a feature.
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korrents.com
Tetris on the Game Boy is perfect game design, and from a pure puzzle perspective nothing else comes close.Their words
And when you link two together with the cable and if I got four, it would push yours forward. It was like the perfect game design. So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.
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But as a spy, that doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I’m, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.
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Luckily, if you want to do what we’re forced to do and also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single-player games. You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP. It’s just extremely hard.
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You know, I think, I think if you want a long, discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better.
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I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was that there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.
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So you have to be, in your mind, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we… The way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction.
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I would assume it will because it’s so anticipated, and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA4 versus Red Dead Redemption one.
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I also think that they’ve done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.
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They’re not going to, they’re not going to replace good ideas. They can’t really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low-level stuff. So I think it’s going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces.
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I was like, “Well, what is sci-fi?” It’s science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I’ve always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn’t just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis.
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I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”
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And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.
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Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.
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You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.
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I hope it’s got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can’t just have jokes for 40 hours, it won’t work.