The man who helped write the GTA franchise into gaming legend has made a deliberate choice: he hasn't played Grand Theft Auto 6, and he doesn't plan to.
Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and the lead creative voice behind most of the GTA series, says he's keeping his distance from the biggest game of the year. The reason is straightforward: he's deep in development on new open-world games at his studio Absurd Ventures, and the last thing he needs is GTA 6 rattling around in his head while he's trying to build something new.
Why the man who built GTA won't touch GTA 6
"I haven't seen it yet," Houser said in a recent interview. "I will try and avoid it because I always try and avoid stuff that's going to distract or disrupt me creatively."
Here's the thing: this isn't a dig at Rockstar or the game itself. Houser clarified he generally steers clear of open-world games these days, not just this one. His reasoning is actually pretty sound from a creative standpoint. Spending his working hours building open-world games and then going home to play the most technically ambitious open-world game ever made would make it nearly impossible to stay in his own creative lane. He's not trying to benchmark against GTA 6. He's trying to do something different with it entirely.
"I'm always trying to think about new ways of doing it, not sit there in some kind of comparison of what I would have done differently," he added. That last part is telling. Houser spent decades shaping what GTA was. Watching what it became without him would be a very specific kind of distraction.
What Absurd Ventures is actually building
Absurd Ventures has at least two games in active development, and both sound genuinely distinct from anything currently on the market.
The first is described as an open-world comedy that leans hard into character and humor. Houser says more details are coming "in the next few months," which puts a concrete announcement window on the table. The second project is a dystopian sci-fi game about video game development going catastrophically wrong, centered on a rogue AI that "discovered sentience" but was built by two people who didn't like each other, so it doesn't like itself. That's either the most interesting game premise of the year or a very elaborate bit.
The studio is clearly swinging for something tonally different from the rest of the open-world genre. Comedy and character-driven design aren't exactly the things most AAA open-world games lead with, which makes the first project particularly worth watching.
The before and after of Houser's career
For most of his career at Rockstar, Houser's creative decisions were filtered through the lens of what GTA needed to be. The franchise set the standard for open-world design across multiple console generations, and Houser was central to that. He left Rockstar in 2020 after more than two decades with the studio.
Now, working without that franchise gravity, his instinct is to build walls around his creative process rather than look back. "All we're trying to do now is do a version of that for this period, and try and do it in a new way and see if there's anything interesting we can say with new IP," he said.
What most players miss in this story is that Houser's avoidance of GTA 6 isn't about rivalry or bitterness. It's a working creative's discipline. Watching the game he helped define, now evolved beyond his involvement, would pull his attention in two directions at once. Keeping that separation clean is how Absurd Ventures gets to build something that doesn't just feel like a shadow of what came before.
The key here is that Houser still has something to prove on his own terms, and he knows it. GTA 6 will dominate the conversation for years. The only way to compete with that gravity is to not look directly at it.
For everything you need ahead of GTA 6's launch, the GTA 6 pre-order guide has dates, platforms, and edition breakdowns to help you lock in your copy before launch.
