Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has spoken out about various cancelled projects, including the infamous GTA 5 story DLC for Trevor Philips.

Despite being one of the most successful video games ever, GTA 5, unlike its predecessors, never received any single-player DLC.

Fans have long known that DLC was originally planned for the title, after Trevor voice actor Steven Ogg confirmed he had acted in scenes for an expansion. While we know little about what the DLC was going to be, it was said to have revolved around Trevor being a secret agent.

Rockstar co-founder and head writer Dan Houser, who left the company in 2020, has now spoken out about the expansion for the first time – where he confirmed it was primarily cancelled to prioritise development on Red Dead Redemption 2.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Houser was asked whether there was any GTA DLC he wish he had created during his time at Rockstar.

‘Of course, there’s always things I wish I’d done,’ Houser replied. ‘The internet knows we made a single-player DLC for GTA 5 which never came out.’

He added: ‘It was one where you played as Trevor as a secret agent. It was cute. It never quite came together and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out we probably wouldn’t have got to make Red Dead 2, so there’s always compromises.’

Houser also mentioned how he ‘liked the idea’ of a ‘GTA zombie game’ – presumably in a similar vein to the Undead Nightmare expansion for the original Red Dead Redemption.

‘I like making the stories,’ he added. ‘For me, I love the model of GTA 4 where we had the extra stories coming afterwards. Or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards, I like just doing these extra things. So I personally would have liked to have done more of that in that company.’

This wasn’t the only cancelled project Houser discussed on the podcast. Elsewhere, he talked about Agent, a stealth action game which was announced for the PlayStation 3 in 2009 but never came out.

Houser said Agent went through about ‘five different iterations’, including one with a 1970s Cold War setting, and ‘it never came together’, primarily because he believes the open world format doesn’t lend itself to being a spy.

‘I don’t think it works,’ Houser said. ‘I concluded… I keep thinking about it sometimes, I lie in bed thinking about it, and I’ve concluded… what makes them really good as film stories, makes them not work as video games. Or we’d need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.’

Houser said it ‘never really found its feet’ because open world design doesn’t match the ‘very frenetic’ pace of a spy film, adding: ‘An open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together, but for large portions it’s lot kind of looser, and you’re just hanging out, and doing what you want.

‘That’s why it works well being a criminal because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do. And we try and create external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times, but as a spy, that doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock. For me, I question whether you can make a good open world spy game.’

There have been open world stealth games, such as Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, but that title is perhaps more systemically flexible than what Houser had in mind. Hitman, arguably the best modern spy game, is open to a degree, but it’s confined to large sandbox levels rather than a persistent open world.

Houser is working on another open world game at his new studio, Absurd Ventures, set in the sci-fi universe of A Better Paradise – which began as an audio show but has since been adapted into a novel.

Throughout his time at Rockstar, Houser served as the lead writer on the majority of the studio’s works, including GTA: Vice City, GTA, San Andreas, Red Dead Redemption, GTA 5, and lastly, Red Dead Redemption 2.

That means that GTA 6 will be the first major Rockstar game without his influence, which puts a big question mark over the nature and quality of its script. Especially as fellow senior writer Lazlow Jones has also left the company.

A fair price to pay (Rockstar)

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