Dan Houser, the co-founder of Rockstar Games and the lead writer of basically every Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption 2, has explained why the studio never got around to following up its cult classic boarding school sim.
2006’s Bully kind of gained cult status immediately by condensing GTA’s open-world delights into a bad mouthed, naughty boarding school setting where you cause mischief and try to attend mini-game-driven classes on time. Despite it having a lot of fans, Bully never became a full-fledged series like the studio’s other hit games.
Dan Houser has now explained that it was down to “bandwidth issues,” speaking to IGN at LA Comic Con. “I think it was just bandwidth issues,” Houser said (thanks, Eurogamer). “You know, if you’ve got a small lead creative team, and a small senior leadership crew, you just can’t do all the projects you want.”
He’s doing things slightly differently at his new multimedia studio, Absurd Ventures, though. “And you know, we certainly – how we’re structured at Absurd [Ventures], we’re doing two projects with a fairly small team, and it’s really trying to think through that. How can we do that and keep them both moving?”
Absurd Ventures has already announced an early-in-development open-world game, as well as already kicking off a number of new multimedia universes, and teamed up with Immortals of Aveum veterans on another project.
GTA veteran says other games struggle to be funny as comedy doesn’t “make a lot of sense in them,” but it works for Rockstar because each entry tries to “satirize a specific location and time”