Dan Houser, former GTA boss and co-founder of Rockstar Games, recently took to the Lex Fridman Podcast to talk about his personal history and the games industry at large (thanks, Games Radar+).

The conversation soon turned to Nintendo when the pair began to speak about early 3D games. Fridman notes that Nintendo has a particular level of polish in which “every pixel has a purpose”, with the company expertly “delivering a pure gaming experience”.

Houser agreed, and when they got onto the more recent open-world Zelda entries – Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom – he states that they “feel like [Alfred] Hitchcock” in their design.

“The new ones, they almost, to me, feel like Hitchcock. They’re just speaking the language of video games. You know, like, you know everything’s going to work this way and that way – it’s quite systemic, but how it all glues together is so amazing.

“It feels like when you watch a Hitchcock film, it’s not reality, he’s speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong accent. It’s very, very cinematic. It’s not realism at all.

“And that’s what those Zelda games kinda feel like to me. They are these amazing things that could only be video games. They couldn’t be anything else.”

Seems a pretty apt comparison to us! Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have certainly earned their fair share of praise over the years, but this might be the first time we’ve heard them compared to Hitchcock – it certainly makes sense, though.

Dan Houser is, of course, no longer at Rockstar Games, which itself is gearing up to launch Grand Theft Auto VI in 2026. Houser went on to form Absurd Ventures with an aim to create new IP across video games, books, movies, comics, and more.