How The West Was Digitized

Rockstar Games, maker of the megahitGrand Theft Auto V, readies its next blockbuster, a follow-up to the Westernred dead redemption.

- Harold Goldberg

You can't simply stroll into the Manhattan offices of Rockstar Games. If you make it past the downstairs lobby and up the elevator, a thick metal door blocks your way. After you’re buzzed inside, you’ll need to wear a laminated visitor’s pass to get beyond reception. Signs warn you not to post anything about your visit on social media. Even in the bathroom, a placard jabs, lift the seat before you leak: offenders will be sacrificed. By the door, a worker bee looks at me suspiciously and escorts me back to reception. “You’re not supposed to be out here without someone watching you,” he says.

Inside this highly secure enclave, one of the world’s most successful writers dwells. Along with the team he oversees, Dan Houser, 44, is in no small way responsible for a great portion of tens of billions of dollars in video-game sales, and unless you’re someone who pores over credits, you probably don’t know his name. Dan and his brother, Sam, 47, the Rockstar Games founders, prefer it that way. They hardly ever give interviews, and they’ve never taken a PR photo together. With fame comes annoying obligations and, as Dan has observed by proximity to celebrities he’s worked with, “lots of girls who only want to speak to you or have sex with you because you’re famous. And in exchange for that, you give up your whole soul.” Rockstar hasn’t had a booth at E3, the nation’s biggest game convention—which Sam considers “a big sort of willy-waving exercise”—in over a decade.

The work sells itself. Rockstar’s last release, Grand Theft Auto V, the 2013 action game for which Dan was the lead writer, earned $1 billion in its first three days and has sold nearly 100 million copies. In April of this year,