Dan Houser – one of the co-founders of Rockstar Games and the man behind the writing in several of the studio’s most critically-acclaimed games – has revealed that Red Dead Redemption 2 protagonist Arthur Morgan is “the best lead character,” that he has written. In an interview with Lex Fridman, Houser also noted that Grand Theft Auto 4 protagonist Niko Bellic might also be right up there alongside Arthur as his best.
“I think he’s the best lead character,” said Houser when asked if Arthur was the best one he had created. “You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters, and I think he’s the most rounded and works the best. Him and Niko are the two I like, you know. They were the two most ambitious. So, for me, it’s always sort of a toss-up, you know?”
As for why he rates Arthur so highly, Houser noted that a lot of it had to do with the work of the art team with different gameplay features like the journal, which featured pencil artwork by Arthur depending on his travels throughout Red Dead Redemption 2.
“The art team did such an amazing job,” he explained. “It was their idea with the journal. The way that all the features worked into Arthur’s character. I thought that was really… he was really rounded, he worked in lots of different ways really well. I loved his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend, things like that.”
When it comes to some of the side characters from throughout Rockstar’s history that Houser had a hand in, he also expressed a liking for Dutch from Red Dead Redemption and its sequel. He credited the voice actor for Dutch – Benjamin Byron Davis – whose performance of the character in the first Red Dead Redemption was praised despite the character’s relatively short amount of dialogue at the time.
“I love Dutch,” said Houser. “It was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game, and the actor did such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me all of their backstory, which I had been playing around with by that point anyway, a little bit in my head, but I knew he was a bigger gangster from then. I sort of saw exactly who he was. He felt like a living character to me.”
Houser has spoken about quite a few topics in the same interview, including the fact that he doesn’t believe a Grand Theft Auto game would work well outside of its home setting of the United States. Reflecting on Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 and London 1961 – expansions for the original Grand Theft Auto, Houser said that they were “pretty cute and fun.” He went on to note that the American setting works better for the GTA franchise because “you need guns, you need these larger-than-life characters,” which would be “really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.”
Houser also spoke about the development of Red Dead Redemption 2, including the fact that things got tense because it was “behind schedule,” and “over budget.”
