Rockstar Vice President Rants on Casual Gaming and GTA IV Violence

After the release of GTA IV, many wanted to interview people from Rockstar to get a reaction from them on issues such as the game's reception, the violence talk in the media related to GTA IV and the general feel of the game.

Dan Houser, Vice President of Rockstar Games and co-writer of GTA IV, recently spoke to New York Mag about a variety of issues. And the beginning sentence of his interview is both gratuitous and hard to re-print. Basically, Dan Houser said "Yeah, f*** all this stuff about casual gaming", which is a sure way to win over a gaming community that sees casual gaming as a great source of revenue and a possible area of great innovation.

Dan's argument is centered around the fact that people want big, blockbuster, movie like games that take them on a journey while also putting them in incredible situations. GTA IV does this with great success. There's a living, breathing, interesting New York clone around you as you get to live your American dream as the game protagonist. As Dan Houser says, "We're hopefully going to prove that there's also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies".

After the initial shocking statement, Dan also said that "The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic", which might come as a bit of a contradiction to what he stated above. He went on to state that Rockstar will continue to release only big games with high production values that will change the way gamers and the general public see games.

The rest of the interview is much tamer than the initial remarks, with Dan Houser talking about the way Rockstar recorded some 80,000 lines of dialog. He also says that the violence in the game is justified by the world it is trying to portray and that anyone offended by it should steer clear of GTA IV.