dan houser interview covers gta 3 box art change and a bunch of other rockstar history

Dan Houser did a long IGN interview and some of the stuff he talked about has me thinking about how different Rockstar was back then. The GTA 3 box art thing especially.

Apparently the original cover got changed at the last minute because of 9/11. I knew the final art looked a certain way but never knew there was a whole other version sitting there until the towers fell. Houser didn't go into every detail in the writeup, but the fact that they pulled it and swapped it out that quickly says a lot about how tense that fall was for everyone.

He also touched on Bully's development being a mess, which I kind of always suspected. That game came out great but you could tell it had been through it. And he said Max Payne 3 was a failure in his eyes, which is wild because I remember that game being pretty solid. The shooting felt incredible. But I guess from his side of the table it didn't do what they needed it to do.

The Red Dead Redemption ending reaction caught him off guard too. People were genuinely angry at how that story closed out, and he didn't see that coming. I remember the forums back then, it was a whole thing.

It's easy to forget Houser left Rockstar in 2020, so he's not in the room for GTA 6. But hearing him talk about the old days makes me wonder what kind of pressure the current team is under with November 19th coming up. Different era, different stakes, but Rockstar still moves the same way when it comes to last minute changes and keeping things under wraps.

I always figured that cover had a story behind it, but hearing it from Houser makes it hit different.

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Source: Eurogamer · Curated content.