Rockstar Co-Founder Dan Houser’s New Game Will Be an Open World Adventure Set in a Sci-Fi Expanded Universe

Rockstar Games co-founder and Grand Theft Auto writer and producer Dan Houser is hard at work on a new game with his new studio, Absurd Ventures. And we think we know a little more about what that game looks like, including its setting, which is a new sci-fi universe the studio is creating called A Better Paradise.

Houser announced his new endeavor last year, revealing that Absurd Ventures would be “building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a diverse variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation; video games and other interactive content; books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts.”

The studio was seemingly founded way back in 2021, with Houser serving as co-founder and director.

Earlier this week, several outlets noticed that recent job openings for Absurd Ventures were looking for developers on “an open world action-adventure game” it currently had in the cooker. One listing in particular specified “best-in-class combat” and “third-person action across multiple game modes,” and requested developers familiar with a mix of both melee and shooting action mechanics, “non-combat forms of action gameplay (driving, mounts, climbing, traversal, platforming, etc),” Unreal Engine 4 or 5, and working with co-development partners.

Then, yesterday, Absurd Ventures separately announced a release date for its audio fiction series set in its new sci-fi universe, A Better Paradise. The series launches on June 10 and will span 12 episodes, but buried in the release is the news that Absurd Ventures is also making video games in the same expanded universe. “In addition to launching Volume One of the A Better Paradise audio series, Houser, Lazlow [Jones], and the Absurd Ventures team are in various stages of development on multiple projects set in the A Better Paradise universe, including additional audio fiction seasons, as well as television and video game titles.”

Sounds an awful lot like that’s the universe for the new open world action-adventure game, right? An insider source affirmed our suspicions that this was the case, which means we can infer a little more about the new game. According to the official website, the universe is “set in the near future” and follows “the ill-fated development of an ambitious but addictive digital game-world project led by inventor and psychologist, Dr. Mark Tyburn.”

As the advanced software they developed began delivering unexpected and disturbing results, the team fell apart under strange circumstances and the project was abandoned. The game world and the super-intelligence within were discarded, left dormant and undiscovered. Until now.

Admittedly, we can’t say yet how all this fits together with the transmedia franchise Houser and Absurd Ventures seems to be building. And we similarly don’t know how it’s all connected to the audio series — do we need to listen to all 12 episodes to understand this eventual game? Who knows!

For now, it’s all speculation, but Houser has quite the resume to back himself up here. He was a writer and/or producer for almost every single Grand Theft Auto game, as well as both Red Dead Redemptions. And he was an executive producer on L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3, and a writer on Bully. Houser resigned from Rockstar way back in 2021, and seems to have been quietly cooking on this new series ever since. His brother and fellow Rockstar co-founder, Sam Houser, is still at the company as its current president.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].