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Rockstar vice president Dan Houser believes that his studios have only scratched the surface of sandbox games, but says that the company’s future projects remain equally open.
“I think there’s something really interesting in the open world experience,” said Houser, speaking to IGN. “Obviously we’ve made like ten of them now and they still don’t feel boring to me. It still feels that we’re only scratching the surface of that potential. But who knows what we’ll be doing?
“We’ll hopefully have done a bunch of interesting games in the next ten years. That’s always the goal. I’ve never been that good at the futureology side of game-making. We never really care what the name is on the box, either. The name Grand Theft Auto, the name Max Payne, the name’s Red Dead, the name’s Table Tennis, it doesn’t really matter as long as the game’s cool.”
Houser’s rare appearance in the spotlight coincides with the 10th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III. This week Rockstar announced that the landmark game will be re-released on high end mobile devices this autumn.
“I would never have believed you would have been talking about this in ten years time,” said Houser. “We were still talking about Space Invaders [ten years ago], and that was already 20, 30 years old then. Hopefully we’ll continue to do interesting stuff, that’s you know, that’s kind of all you can hope for.”
Rockstar’s next project will be Max Payne 3. You can check out our first impressions of the game here.
It’s hardly a bold statement to say that Rockstar won’t be abandoning the open world format any time soon. While GTA V has yet to be officially confirmed, it’s a matter of “when” and not “if”. Given the success of Red Dead Redemption, I’d be amazed if the publisher doesn’t revisit the Old West at some point – although something tells me we’ll be waiting a while for a follow-up.
Still, if Max Payne 3 is a roaring success, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rockstar dabbling with linear genres on a more regular basis.
