Dan Houser, the man who wrote GTA, hasn't seen GTA 6 gameplay and plans to keep it that way

In a Variety podcast interview, the former Rockstar head writer said he never watched August's gameplay video and will avoid it so it doesn't interfere with the two open-world games he is building at Absurd Ventures.

Dan Houser wrote and produced every Grand Theft Auto up to the fifth game, plus Red Dead Redemption 2. With 45 days to go until GTA 6 launches, he hasn't watched a single second of the gameplay video Rockstar showed in August, and he doesn't plan to anytime soon.

The comment came on Variety's Strictly Business podcast and began circulating this week through Dexerto, GameRant, Liberty City and VGTimes. The key line: "I haven't seen it yet. I will try and avoid it because I always try and avoid stuff that's going to distract or disrupt me creatively."

The video in question is "Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look," posted on Rockstar's official channel in late August and described by the company as captured entirely from in-game footage on PlayStation 5, with a November 19 release. According to Dexerto, it also aired on Netflix. Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020, sat it out.

An old habit, not a grudge

The most interesting part of the conversation is that it wasn't framed as a dig at his old studio. Houser describes a working method. When he started developing Red Dead Redemption, he stopped watching westerns. And The Sopranos, which many people assume was an obvious influence on the GTA series, he only watched after leaving Rockstar because, in his words, it "would have disrupted everything I did on GTA, had I watched at the time."

The outlets differ slightly on that detail. Dexerto, GameRant and Games.gg say he watched The Sopranos only after leaving the company; Liberty City says he skipped the whole series while working on GTA, except for the finale, which he supposedly watched later during the pandemic. The two versions agree on the essentials: the show stayed out of the creative process behind the games. Which one describes the finale better we couldn't settle from the pages we opened, so we won't pick one.

The trouble with playing like a producer

Houser said the same goes for other open-world games. When he plays one, he says, he ends up evaluating the other team's work instead of enjoying it. Dexerto quotes him: "I can almost deconstruct the strengths and weaknesses of the team in real time and it's distracting." According to Liberty City, he even imagines the production meetings behind each mechanic.

Anyone who works in a creative field will recognize it: once you've seen how the thing is made, it's hard to see only the result. In his case, the practical consequence is staying away, as much as possible, from the game that will be compared directly with everything he has done.

What he's making now

Since 2020 Houser has run Absurd Ventures, and that's why the conversation matters to anyone following the story. According to the sources, the studio is developing two open-world games with different tones:

a comedy action-adventure that leans on humor and character memory (as described by Liberty City and in GamesRadar's headline);
a dystopian sci-fi game about an AI gaining sentience, mentioned by Liberty City, VGTimes and Tech4Gamers.

Neither has a release date or title in the pages we read. A real comparison with GTA is therefore a long way off, and Dexerto notes that Houser himself acknowledged that being measured against his own legacy is, in the end, a compliment.

His brother Sam Houser still runs Rockstar and GTA 6. According to GameRant and Games.gg, a different team handles the new game's narrative. In other words, the story the public reads and hears in November isn't Dan's, and he says he'd rather discover the result like everyone else, later.

What the conversation doesn't say

In the sources we read, Houser doesn't criticize GTA 6, doesn't comment on what was shown, and doesn't say whether he'll play it after launch. He only says that for now he'll avoid it. We also couldn't find the date the podcast was recorded; all we know is the coverage started between October 3 and 4, and we didn't open Variety's original page, only the articles quoting it.

What matters for readers is simple: there is nothing new about the game here, no price, no edition, no availability. For anyone weighing the pre-order, nothing changes. If you want the practical side of the launch, see the official November 19 date or what an ex-Rockstar developer said about GTA 6 on phones and Switch 2.

The site's take

Our reading, which is opinion and not sourced information: the story works because Houser is the person most associated with the series' voice and will still be, in practice, a late spectator. For GTA 6 that's neutral; for Absurd Ventures' games, it's a bet that staying away from what competitors do produces something more original. We can only judge that once there's a game of his to compare.