{"id":1381570,"date":"2025-11-04T22:29:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T22:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nUeHSjgWwhXmRQd9cueAhV"},"modified":"2025-11-04T22:29:20","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T22:29:20","slug":"rockstar-co-founder-dan-houser-says-theres-a-reason-the-grand-theft-auto-games-are-always-set-in-us-cities-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/rockstar-co-founder-dan-houser-says-theres-a-reason-the-grand-theft-auto-games-are-always-set-in-us-cities-guns\/","title":{"rendered":"Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says there’s a reason the Grand Theft Auto games are always set in US cities: ‘Guns’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Grand Theft Auto games are famed for their sprawling recreations of famous US cities: Liberty City is New York City, Vice City is Miami, Los Santos is Los Angeles. And despite being around for nearly 30 years now, the series has\u2014with one exception, noted further below\u2014never ventured outside of American borders. In a recent interview with Lex Fridman<\/a>, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser said there’s a good reason for that: Other countries may have great cities, but they’re not American cities.<\/p>\n

“There’s a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles,” Houser said, agreeing with Fridman’s assessment that Miami’s blend of “glossy surface and a dark underworld” make it an ideal target for satirizing American culture. “You could move it to any of those and it would work.”<\/p>\n

Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020<\/a> after guiding the stories of the first five GTAs and the Red Dead Redemptions games, then implied that those cities, presumably along with other major US locales, are the only<\/em> place it could work. Houser said GTA London 1969<\/a>, an expansion for the original Grand Theft Auto that came out in 1999 (and, for the record, was released for PC as well as PlayStation), was “pretty cute and fun,” but even back then there was no interest in going international with a standalone Grand Theft Auto release.<\/p>\n

“For a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters\u2014it just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective, but that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.”<\/p>\n

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