Rockstar's co-founder and writer, Dan Houser, has led a… uh, colourful life—moving to New York in 1998, he'd go on to help create what is now one of the biggest game development studios and companies in the entire industry. But it turns out that the impetus for Houser to get his butt to the big apple was, pretty fittingly, something out of a Grand Theft Auto sequence.
That's per an interview Houser had with Lex Fridman, which you can also find below. Houser says that, circa '98, "my life was a mess. I was in South America, in Colombia, when there was a war waging there. I was making a series of very poor life choices, and the lack of life skills aged 25—my latest poor choice was to get up too early."
Colombia during the '90s was, to risk an understatement, not exactly the best place to be, which is something Houser discovered first-hand: "The police didn't start work 'till nine but the muggers started at eight. I was out walking along the beach at eight."
He recalls speaking with someone on the beach before "two guys came to talk to him, and I couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him, if he owed the money, or if he'd bought me to them.
"One of them had a machete and one of them had a broken gun. I thought 'this is not good' and I ran off, sprinting down the beach in my silly shoes. I got the chance for once in my life to run over a road, jump into a taxi, and scream: 'Take me anywhere!' Like I'm in an action movie."
Houser made it through the altercation unscathed. Well, mostly: "I got out of the car and cut my foot on a rock, that was the sum total of my injuries."
That incident, as Houser describes it, was one of the galvanising moments that saw him travelling to New York: "I went to an internet cafe, because this was probably late '98, and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York … I was like, well, if I stayed in South America much longer, I was gonna get myself killed because I was getting into silly stuff."
The rest, as we know, is history—as Houser puts it: "I got to write the mission statements and help set the tone for that—and just ended up staying … thought 'ah, I'll stay for a year.'" It wound up being quite a few years, as he wouldn't leave Rockstar until 2020.
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