Dan Houser, former head of GTA, on Zelda: “It’s like when you watch a Hitchcock movie, it’s not reality”
The creative thinks that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom take advantage of the language of video games.
Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and one of the leading figures behind GTA and Red Dead Redemption, left the studio a few years ago. In recent weeks, the creative director has participated in several interviews, in which he has shared his vision of the industry. In a conversation with Lex Fridman, Houser praised The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, the two most recent releases for Nintendo Switch, comparing them to Alfred Hitchcock’s films.
While discussing the first three-dimensional games, the conversation has focused on Nintendo. According to them, the Kyoto-based company never wastes a single pixel.
Zelda and Hitchcock: these are the parallels according to Houser
Regarding The Legend of Zelda, Houser shared the following opinion: “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.” For Houser, this whole combination of mechanics is “amazing.”
He continues: “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.” The former developer of the GTA series believes that these Zelda games are the result of a design idea “that could only be video games. They couldn’t be anything else.”
Dan Houser left Rockstar Games after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. There was still a possibility that some lines of dialogue or characters in GTA 6 were written by him, but the creative director has now confirmed that he has not worked on the eagerly awaited new installment of the Grand Theft Auto series.
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