Dan Houser: 9/11 created GTA III's cover, and Trevor came in one night
Rockstar’s co-founder looks back on a long career with IGN: how 9/11 reshaped GTA III and its cover, the idea that saved Bully and how Trevor was born. The highlights.
Dan Houser, Rockstar Games co-founder and lead writer on GTA and Red Dead Redemption until leaving in 2020, rarely gives interviews. That's why the one IGN published on October 13, 2026, an hour-long conversation spanning an entire career, has drawn so much attention. There's nothing about GTA 6, which was made after Houser's time at the studio, but there are plenty of stories about how the classics came together.
GTA III and 9/11
In early 2001, Houser says, Take-Two was on the brink of financial collapse. The team believed in GTA III and took it to E3, where "nobody cared about it." It was due that fall when the September 11 attacks happened.
Rockstar removed a few bits of content that would otherwise have been fine and reworked a couple of lines of dialogue, which pushed the release back about two weeks. The most visible change was the cover: the original showed burning buildings.
"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 they were burning buildings in it. So that look of the shards, the squares that became very iconic, only appeared because of 9/11."
That panel style became the signature of the entire series, GTA 6 included. The game didn't explode out of the gate, either: it launched in October 2001 and simply kept selling, week after week, well into 2002.
Bully and the "kick me" note
Bully was in trouble throughout development. The team couldn't figure out what the game was once you took away the cars and guns. The class schedule helped, but the turning point was a small idea: being able to stick a "kick me" note on someone's back so another kid would run up and kick them. Once that worked, the school came alive and the game started to be fun. Its 2006 launch was surrounded by controversy, and Rockstar spent much of that year persuading stores to stock it.
How Trevor was born
Trevor arrived late in GTA V's development, when the story outline had stalled, and he came to Houser in a single night. Houser also spells out the difference between two of the leads: Trevor, however appalling, has a moral core; Michael has none at all.
Other highlights
- Writing a GTA: the scripts stood "six feet high." Houser wrote the outline, designers broke it into missions, cutscenes were written first and mission dialogue was tuned with designers so lines fired at the right moment.
- Favorite part: the radio station announcements between songs, written with Lazlow.
- A friend turned serial killer: an acquaintance spent years begging to be in GTA, so Houser turned that friend into the killer Eddie Low.
- GTA IV: to capture New York, the team rode along with police officers and crime reporters instead of drawing on movies.
- The controversies: Houser considers the games morally defensible thanks to their satire, and says they were attacked over a few seconds pulled from 50- to 100-hour experiences.
Our take
The interview is a great window into why GTA looks so little like its imitators: according to Houser, the secret was never technology, it was tone. It also leaves a nice irony: the most imitated cover in gaming came out of a two-evening rush job. While Sam Houser stays out of the spotlight, Dan remains the voice that best explains Rockstar's legacy.
