Last night it became known that Dan Hauser, after two decades, still decided to leave Rockstar Games. We analyze what exactly he did in the company and why his departure is considered an important event in the modern industry.
Red Dead Redemption 2
The 46-year-old Briton looks more like a native of the London slums of London, a classic Cockney, than the vice president of one of the most successful gaming companies.
However, his role in Rockstar Games has never been limited to the position of a top manager.
If his older brother Sam, with whom they launched Rockstar Games as a Take-Two division in 1998, was always more focused on management, then Dan was more immersed in what stories the company tells and how exactly it does it. As he himself notes in an interview: “I like to do creative work more than business.”
Junior Hauser is the lead writer of all Rockstar Games, starting with the second part of Grand Theft Auto. We are also talking about the main blockbusters of the studio — GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, which turned out to be one of the central releases of the last decade on the video game market (at least commercially). He was also responsible for the cinematography of the stories (on some studio projects he was listed as the director of cut scenes), for matching the games to the chosen style.
Of course, Hauser did not write the stories alone. However, such large-scale projects had surprisingly few screenwriters. For example, only three authors worked on Red Dead Redemption 2, including Hauser, and two on GTA V. In other words, Hauser for Rockstar Games was both a key manager and one of the key creative employees.
His departure does not call into question the success of the company’s future games, because games are collective creativity. However, for Rockstar Games itself, it marks a new stage, about which we do not know anything yet (at least until the future E3).
Hauser made the decision to leave the company after a year off. Back in the spring of 2019, Dan temporarily decided to retire, take a break from development. Most likely, then it was due to the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. The game, which had been in development for about seven years, drank a lot of blood from the team at the final stages. Dan stated that before the release, Rockstar Games employees worked 100 hours a week.
Perhaps the release of the game western took more strength from Hauser than he expected. The publisher of the game Take-Two, thanks to which it became known about Hauser’s departure, does not share the reasons. Dan will officially leave the company next March.
The news of Hauser’s departure from the company came a couple of days before the publication of Take-Two’s quarterly reports. Most likely, this is due to the fact that the company hopes his good results will affect the stock price, which would certainly have fallen against the background of Dan’s departure (in fact, it happened, in the first hours their value dropped by 5%).