Many players loved the "school GTA" Bully and Red Dead Redemption, but during development, the developers faced difficulties and both games were at risk of cancellation. In a recent interview with IGN, Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser shared his memories.
The developer explained that creating original games is harder to bring to release than making a sequel:
I think there were many times when Red Dead almost got canceled. The same was true with Bully, and there were also many times when various other games could have appeared that ultimately never came out. There are many such cases when everything comes together by chance, a successful build appears, or the game suddenly gains integrity — and this saves projects that are in trouble. In my experience, development is especially difficult when working with new intellectual property [...].
In the case of Red Dead Redemption, Houser explains, the development team was focused on finding and solving a problem — the authors were trying to understand what could be interesting in an open-world cowboy game:
Together we figured out what the problems were and looked for solutions, gradually figuring out what could be interesting in an open-world cowboy game. This may seem obvious in hindsight, but during the work, we only had "holes" that had to be gradually filled.
Rockstar Games is currently preparing for the release of Grand Theft Auto VI. The game is planned to be released on November 19, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles.