Rockstar Games Co-Founder Announces New Book (And It Connects to a New Game)

Rockstar Games co-founder and Red Dead Redemption 2 writer Dan Houser has announced a brand new book which ties in with a new video game. The video game industry does not have quite as many “auteurs” as movies do given the amount of people that go into making a game. Thousands of people work on a game like Call of Duty and are all giving their input on how to make it better. However, even a massive game like Grand Theft Auto has had key leadership behind it that help create a distinct identity. Dan Houser is one of those key figures as he has helped shepherd a number of incredibly cinematic single player video games.

From Max Payne 3 to Red Dead Redemption 2, Houser’s dry British humor, satirical stories, and dark, brooding leading men have helped make Rockstar one of the best studios in the industry for storytelling. While he isn’t the only writer on Rockstar’s games, he is often cited as one of the driving forces behind their narratives and has probably earned the title of gaming auteur. However, after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018, Dan Houser left Rockstar Games in favor of new creative endeavors. Dan Houser launched a new company called Absurd Ventures and recruited a number of close Rockstar talent such as Lazlow and Michael Unsworth to help him create future projects. Absurd Ventures isn’t just a video game developer, though, it’s a multi-media company that is developing narrative podcasts, television/film projects, and even books.

Rockstar Games Co-Founder Dan Houser Announces New Book Based on Upcoming Video Game Franchise

Absurd Ventures has officially announced that it is releasing its first book penned by Dan Houser himself. Titled A Better Paradise – Volume One: An Aftermath, it will continue/expand the story of Absurd Ventures’ narrative podcast A Better Paradise which stars The Walking Dead‘s Andrew Lincoln in a prominent role. The podcast follows the development of a highly advanced video game and its hyper intelligent AI that yielded disturbing results, prompting it to be abandoned by its creator. Unfortunately, it was re-discovered and unleashed in a dangerous way.

“The novel will go deeper into the origins and secrets of the mysterious video game’s development as told by the tortured souls who are now on the run from the AI entity they played a part in creating and unleashing,” reads a description for the new novel.

Houser’s book will release in fall 2025, which is also the time Rockstar Games plans to launch Grand Theft Auto 6. Whether or not Houser has timed this book’s release to coincide with that window is unclear, but it wouldn’t be a bad marketing move given a book isn’t necessarily going to compete with a massive video game in the traditional sense. However, Houser’s ambitions are on full display as he continues to dip his toes into new mediums.

“Everything I’ve written, whether an interactive or linear story, begins as prose,” said Houser. “Once a story works as prose, it can be told in other mediums. A Better Paradise, which we launched initially as an audio fiction series, was written and produced almost as a hybrid of a traditional ‘radio play’ and an audio book. While we were working on it, it became very clear that there was a book hidden in there that just needed a bit of fleshing out and developing. I am looking forward to sharing this novelization later this year as another version of our first story from the world of A Better Paradise.” 

A Better Paradise is also being developed as a television program and an open-world video game, though details on those projects are scarce. On top of that, Dan Houser’s Absurd Ventures is developing another universe called Absurdaverse which will kick off with an animated project and a “story-driven action-comedy adventure game”. Similarly, not much is known about these projects either, but it’s expected that we will hear more on them later this year.