Rockstar “only scratching the surface” of open-world games

Rockstar has barely scratched the surface of what’s achievable in open world games, according to co-founder Dan Houser.

When asked by IGN what the future holds for the developer, Houser suggested there was still plenty more mileage left in the free-roaming Grand Theft Auto template.

“I think there’s something really interesting in the open world experience,” he explained.

“Obviously we’ve made like ten of them now and they still don’t feel boring to me. It still feels that we’re only scratching the surface of that potential.”

Houser wouldn’t offer specifics as to what Rockstar has coming up beyond the release of Max Payne 3 early next year.

“We’ll hopefully have done a bunch of interesting games in the next ten years. That’s always the goal. I’ve never been that good at the futureology side of game-making,” he said.

“We never really care what the name is on the box, either. The name Grand Theft Auto, the name Max Payne, the name’s Red Dead, the name’s Table Tennis, it doesn’t really matter as long as the game’s cool.

“I would never have believed you would have been talking about this in ten years time. We were still talking about Space Invaders [10 years ago], and that was already 20, 30 years old then. Hopefully we’ll continue to do interesting stuff, that’s you know, that’s kind of all you can hope for.”

Houser was speaking to mark the 10th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III’s original release. Last week it announced the game will be released on iOS devices later this year.