Word: houser
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...generation of hardware, for example, characters' faces were too flat to sustain real closeups, and there just wasn't enough horsepower to support a lot of Stoppardian banter. "We simply couldn't stream in much dialogue, 'cause it was so hard to stream the world in on PlayStation 2," Houser explains, "whereas now we can have the characters constantly talking to you. The emotions on PS2 had to be quite black and white. Now we can get a little bit more gray in there...
That world has become so complex that Houser and his team have to use diagramming software to keep its various components straight. "It's an absolute bastard, because you're trying to track 50 characters," he says. "And the thing that makes it more complicated than, say, a TV show or a novel is that you as the player have choice. You can always do any of five or six things at once." Imagine Victor Hugo trying to write Les Misérables with Jean Valjean under the reader's control and you'll get some idea of what Houser...
...game's newest installment, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, which will be released on Feb. 17, Houser and his team have ratcheted up the complexity even further. Instead of extending Niko's story laterally by adding a straight-up sequel, they're drilling down into it vertically: they picked a minor character from Liberty City, a biker named Johnny, and created a story around him that takes place simultaneously with Niko's, weaving across and over and through...
...Lost know it. That knowledge gives the men an air of faded grandeur that's borderline Faulknerian. In their lameness, their expired '70s-era cool, they're emblematic of an America in decline. "The whole thing was meant to feel almost like they're living on past glory," Houser says. "They think they're the last true Americans, the outlaws, the free." But like Niko - who appears periodically in Johnny's story and is an uncanny presence, since he's now outside the player's control - Johnny watches his fantasy deconstructed around him by main force. The further outside...
...fictional inquiry into the myth of the great American badass - the criminal, the gangsta, the made man, the outlaw. It's a loving inquiry, but it has a consistent critical distance, an outsider's point of view. And no wonder: the games aren't created by Americans at all. Houser, a Brit, is based in New York City, but most of the work gets done by Rockstar North, a team of Scots based in Edinburgh...