Dan Houser told the British TV show Sunday Brunch that when Rockstar was finishing Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001 the studio felt they were onto something special even though the wider world did not share that feeling until the game shipped. Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020 and was a writer on GTA 3, 4, and 5, said that the team thought “this could be amazing. There’s something really magical about this” as the project came together. He added that as the game started to “come together, it had these moments of real innovation and [it] felt like the future, in a way.”
That optimism stood in contrast to the lack of external buzz. “Until it came out, no one outside of our company was very excited by it,” Houser said, noting that GTA 3 arrived just after 9/11 in late 2001 and that public interest grew rapidly after launch. GTA 3 is often treated now as the turning point that made open world action games feel inevitable. Houser’s recollection is a reminder that internal belief and public excitement do not always line up, and sometimes studios are the only people who can see the long shot.
This is not the only time Houser has talked about rocky development and narrow misses. We previously covered his comments about Red Dead Redemption 2 nearly failing after budget and schedule problems, which casts these GTA 3 remarks in a wider pattern of projects that felt fragile while they were being built. GTA 3’s story is a small case study in betting on creative risk when few outside the studio are convinced. The title ended up changing expectations for the series and for open-world design broadly, and Houser’s memory underlines how unpredictable that moment was inside the company.
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