Dan Houser, one of Rockstar’s co-founders that left the GTA 6 studio in 2020, has given a wide-ranging new interview with IGN, covering topics including the tortured production of Bully, changes made to Grand Theft Auto 3’s artwork post-9/11, the reaction to Red Dead Redemption’s ending, and why he thinks Max Payne 3 was a failure.

The most interesting to me is how the iconic boxart for GTA 3 – a template that has been used for every game since, by the way, most recently being co-opted for GTA 6’s cover – was actually put together very last minute.

“What’s funny is the cover art that became the iconic GTA cover art; Stephen Bliss did that in about two evenings because the old cover art was probably being too offensive to release after 9/11 because there were burning buildings in it,” Houser revealed to IGN. “So it would’ve been fine if there hadn’t just been 9/11. So that look of the shards, the squares that became very iconic, only appeared because of 9/11.”

GTA 3 takes place in Liberty City – a thinly-veiled parody of the real-world New York City, where the 9/11 disaster, of course, took place. So there was sensitivity around showing destruction and death publicly in the months and years after. This is something that Rockstar had to consider carefully as it was launching the game into the aftermath of the event.

“There were a couple of bits of content that would’ve been fine, but in the exact aftermath of 9/11, were maybe a little bit too much,” Houser explained. “So we had to take those out, and the team [rallied] round and remove those and edit a couple of lines of dialogue and did a quick content stand and thought it was fine. And then the game came out in October of 2001. It was gradual all the way through till Christmas 2001 into early 2002, and it just didn’t stop selling. It’s not like any single week was that massive. It was that every week it just rumbled on.”

The art he’s referring to (above) is, of course, as iconic as the staples of GTA 3’s newly-open world gameplay. Houser notes this, and reflects: “GTA has become part of the wider cultural fabric. I mean, you sort of saw that on YouTube clips and whatever else that would have the HUD on it, and people using the logo and things like that. When you go to any big tourist resort, you’ll have a sort of GTA cover art-inspired T-shirt available. So you began to see that creep in 10 years ago.”

This isn’t the first we’ve heard from Dan Houser in the past few months. Back in July, the Rockstar Games co-founder joined longtime GTA writer Lazlow Jones to espouse some opinions on the on-going physical games debate. “I don’t know that I care,” he responded when asked about the fact that Sony plans to scrap physical discs from January 20-28 onwards, “but if people want that, companies should provide it. I think the ability to update games – as critical as people are on digital releases – the ability to update and fix problems in games have been very useful to the quality of games.”

Elsewhere, with his company Absurd Ventures, Houser is working on an “open world action-adventure”. This is the first time we get a look at “just a few characters” coming to a “story-driven action-comedy adventure game set in the Absurdaverse”.