A complete interview by 1UP/EGM with Rockstars Founder of Grand Theft Auto:

It’s not that Rockstar founder Sam Houser is a man of few words. Get him talking about Grand Theft Auto IV and the British-born executive producer of the GTA series will fill two hours of audio tape. He’ll go on about how his game’s Russian accents trump Hollywood’s. He’ll disclose the Nintendo-spawned inspiration for the game’s interpersonal relationships. He’ll discuss the tricky business of developing for two consoles simultaneously. He’ll even vent about the previously taboo topic of the Hot Coffee scandal. Landing a sit-down with the notoriously press-shy Houser isn’t so easy, but we were granted one in early January for EGM‘s GTA4 cover story. And here, for the first time, is the full interview….

1UP: Now that you’ve been living in New York for 10 years, how has that changed this second trip to Liberty City and your perspective on the game’s world?

Sam Houser: When we were making the first [few GTAs], we had been in the country a couple of years. It was all still new to us. It was all still — I was about to say it was all still exciting, but it’s still exciting. I still find going to the supermarket exciting. So it’s not that it isn’t exciting today; it was just when you move your life 3,000 miles away, it’s a very different thing to go through. The difference here is that, as you can see from the [new] game, the game is very, very detailed now, and we really want to have the player get that whole new level of immersion, that sense of being somewhere, albeit virtual. Really soak up the atmosphere and the sounds and the smells and the sights, everything. I feel that our being here a long time, the way some of the practices and things that we’ve cultivated to make these games — combined with actually learning about the place — have enabled us to actually make a game about New York — obviously it’s Liberty City, but it evokes New York — that people really can plug into, feel like they’re there, and in a lot of the cases, be visiting areas of our world that they otherwise really wouldn’t get to. In a lot of the research trips for this game, we ended up in places that are very, very unusual, to say the least.

1UP: What was the most unusual place you wound up?

SH: Brighton Beach is pretty incredible. I can’t speak highly of it enough. I went there once a week for about nine months, the end of the summer through winter and then into spring, seeing slightly hard conditions. You know about Brighton Beach at all, what goes on there?

1UP: No….

SH: OK, that’s fine then. Because it’s the inspiration for Hove Beach in the game. Hove Beach…the reason we called it Hove is in England, Brighton and Hove are next to each other and Brighton & Hove Albion is a football team. So that’s pretty obscure, but we got our feet in both the American camp and the British camp, and we can jump back and forth between the two, which is something I think this game does really on a different level. In terms of the humor, in terms of the vibe, it’s going to speak to British people; it’s going to speak to American people. We can do that in a way that is unusual, in a way that is made possible, like you said, by being there a long time. So Brighton Beach is an area that’s just next to Coney Island. Obviously, Coney you know from The Warriors, and also it’s just an amazing place. Brighton Beach is this unusual sort of strip of about eight blocks, like a shopping street, underneath an elevated train section, like the thing in The French Connection. It’s in the game: the area you see with the elevated section over it. It’s all very dark….

But as I understand it from local friends, before the mid- to late ’80s, it was predominantly Hasidic Jews, of which there’s a lot in the outside and connected areas. But it got taken over in the late ’80s and beyond by Eastern Europeans. So it really is, now — it’s completely Russian. There will be Ukrainians and Lithuanians and a whole load of other nationalities there, but the overarching resonance is Eastern European, and predominantly Russian. I’ve been different places all over the world. I’ve been to Chinatown in San Francisco, the Chinatown in New York, this quarter of somewhere in Paris or something, and I’ve never been anywhere like Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. You cross a line, and you are in another world. The people are actually very friendly, but they don’t come across as particularly friendly when you first visit — quite dour faces, heavy atmosphere. So working on this game, when I actually started going there, it blew my mind. Creatively, it was so inspiring and so uplifting, because we were making this game about these Eastern European guys who I think are fascinating anyway, and suddenly I ended up in this place where I was there. Every shop has Russian logos. I’ve not seen anything like it before. If you go into a shop and you speak English…you’ll get what you want, but it’s a battle. It’s like you’re crossing this line and you’re suddenly in Moscow…. There’s this weird mixture in places of opulence and decay which I love. Like Coney Island is all being transformed into condos. You’re not going to know it the way I have. I’ve been lucky enough to visit it and spend time there. Five years from now it’s all going to be converted, yuppified, whatever.

1UP: In a way, GTA4 will be a snapshot of it.

SH: Exactly, we’re capturing it…. Recently, I watched a film, Eastern Promises. It’s a scary movie. I’m a big fan of [director] David Cronenberg. So I watched Eastern Promises with some amount of trepidation. I didn’t know what I was going to make of this, because it’s in our sort of vibe. As ever, I think Cronenberg did a magnificent job. I think he picks up on an atmosphere, which is something I’m interested in, and he can really evoke that very powerfully…. I loved the Russian vibe in there, loved the tattoos — he and I have clearly got the same book on Russian mobster tattoos.

The area where I feel as a game we did something different from [Cronenberg] — I don’t want to say “better” because I don’t really think like that — but he used Viggo Mortensen, who I think is American or Danish or Scandinavian or something like that, and then the other guy, Vincent Cassel, he plays the son. He’s a French actor. I thought Viggo’s accent was OK. I thought Vincent Casell’s accent, having studied a lot of accents, was just like a French guy doing a Russian voice. I was just, like, “I can’t take this seriously.” He’s a great actor. He’s been in some wicked films, but it just didn’t work. So when I went back to our game and I was meeting Vlad and Faustin, and particularly Faustin — who’s this really scary, proper, deep mobster — running the scene out in Hove Beach, I’m like, “You know what — we’re actually competitive with [the movie's performances].” That’s remarkable.

1UP: The past 3D GTAs were obviously inspired by movies and TV shows — Goodfellas, Boyz in the Hood, Miami Vice. This is the first one that seems to go off on its own. Have you run out of inspirations for the series?

SH: …We felt that the Italian mob thing had been done to death a little bit. I think we’ve got some good Italian mobsters in this game, but they’re not leading the game. I’m a big, big fan of The Sopranos — how could I not be? — but I also feel as if that stuff’s had its run. We also read a bunch of books and did a bunch of research on it, and the more we dug into it, the guys who are in this day and age the real-deal thugs — the real-deal gangsters — are the Eastern Europeans, these new transplants from different parts of Eastern Europe…. These new guys off the boat, they’re coming with something to prove, and they mean business. They are f***ing fearless….

SOURCE