Rare Q&A With Rockstar Games Head Sam Houser

Paul Williams writes "Develop Magazine has posted a fascinating multi-part interview with Sam Houser, president and founder of Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games. Houser is rarely quoted outside of press releases, and almost never does interviews. So, reading his frank views on things like Rockstar's critics, the creative secrets that make games like GTA IV a success, and how the developer rejects things like focus testing — a common practice at the likes of EA but an 'anathema to creativity' according to Houser — is very interesting. Houser has even written a mini biography of his career with some fun references to the Hot Coffee scandal: 'July 2005: Residue code found in San Andreas. Hackers modify it and it turns into scandal known as "Hot Coffee." Get dragged into legal nightmare, ending in trip to Washington in February 2006 to sit in front of federal trade commission staff — for nine hours.'"

Comments

Re:Drop the script

[4D6963]

You're an idiot. Check my first link in my signature, of course I'm a coder. And then you're an idiot for assuming it has to be anything like strong AI. You can just have a basic macroscopic (by that I mean that focuses on large easily observable traits) psychological simulation for each character and let it run based on their situation, what they want to do based on their personality, and the events that subsequently happen. Just because you can't think of a proper algorithm to do that doesn't mean it's impossible, however that fact combined with the fact that you think it's impossible clearly mean that you're not as good at thinking up algorithms as you'd like to think.