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Houser and his team worked for years on some of

March 31, 2019 by James Ashley

Houser and his team worked for years on some of the major titles in the Grand Theft Auto series. In December of 2011 and March of 2012, for instance, Houser and his co-founders, Chris Roberts and John Romero, gave the first game in the franchise a final cut (and some major updates) of a game that's still considered one of the greatest in the entire history of video games.

"It was a huge challenge," recalls Houser, who is now a full-time freelance writer. "We spent our whole time on that game and our entire time working on the game. We'd talk to people that worked on other games, and say, 'Hey, this is like a great thing. Let's add some of our stuff to it.'"

As it turns out, the Rockstar studio and its former creative team have a different story than those who are now in charge of the Red Dead Redemption series. Their version of the game, Red Dead Redemption 2, is a sequel to the first and is based on the Rockstar studio's original game, Red Dead Redemption 2: The Fall of Rockstar. The company was founded by longtime Rockstar co-founder and former Rockstar producer Mark Houser. The team's motto is, 'We're Dead. We're Alive.'

According to a report in Rockstar, the team was first hired in late 2011 to take over the development of the game. Houser and his team worked on Red Dead Redemption 2, which included a number of improvements that were originally planned, but were scrapped at the end of 2015 due to "difficulty issues" during development.

"We didn't have the time to make any of the major content updates and improvements that were planned for the game, so it was time for us to do a completely different game," Houser says in the Vulture piece. "[We were] working 100-hour weeks. That was always a goal. It always came out of a desire to do something new. For example, in Red Dead Redemption 2, there's a whole bunch of stuff that we wanted to make and we wanted to polish, which was a big challenge, so we spent a ton of time on that and I think we were doing it right out of the gate."

The two Housers say they've discussed with Rockstar about Red Dead Redemption 2 over the past week. They both admit that Red Dead Redemption 2 is not a completely new experience, but say the two are still