Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine: The Boss

OPM Why is the game so damn big?

SAM HOUSER Because we’re insane! Making San Andreas was really about expanding on the things we love. The notion of immersion and having that world be seamlessly connected was incredibly important to us. To be honest, making the game larger was about making it more exciting and intriguing.

OPM Why the jump to three cities? Why not just do a larger version of what you’d done before?

SH We love L.A. and the whole gangbanging vibe and the street culture. That time in L.A. is so important, and we knew a long time ago that the franchise needed to end up there. We’d done the East Coast in GTA3, and then ’80s Miami with Vice City, so going to L.A. in the early ’90s just seemed like an obvious place. We’ve looked at going back in time with it and playing with the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, but it just doesn’t feel like GTA. That’s not to say that we won’t explore that in future, but for now, this is it. L.A. at this time influenced current pop culture in a big way.

OPM So why the other two cities?

SH To be honest, we were drawn to doing a city based on San Francisco because of the hills and all of the beautiful scenery with the bridges and the Victorian architecture. Once we’d decided to do that, it became clear that if you’re doing L.A. and San Francisco, you can’t not do Vegas. Again, there’s a very different look and feel, and you have the whole Mafia vibe, and the gambling and the bright lights. Once we put together the three cities, things started to naturally evolve, and we thought about what would go on between these cities, and we realized that we needed to do the wilderness with the farms and the desert, etc.

OPM Aside from the scale of the game, the other big innovation is the depth of CJ’s character. Why something so ambitious? Why make GTA RPG?

SH How the player connects with a game character is so important. For want of a better word, CJ had to be “cool.” Characters in games are often so robotic, and we didn’t want that. If you think back to when the PS2 was announced and you had Kutaragi standing up there talking about the Emotion Engine, well…I think this is what he was getting at. We want people to feel something when it comes to CJ. If you look back, in GTA3 you had the main guy who never really had a name. I know that some people refer to him as Fido or Claude, but he was never officially given a name because we wanted it to be you. Then in Vice City we had Tommy, and he was much more evolved. He spoke, of course, and as a result, I think he was a more rounded character. This time, our goal was to give the player a real connection and give them a sense of ownership over the hero. All of us, believe it or not, were really inspired by things like Pokmon and Tamagotchi. They’re so simple and so far removed from the kinds of games we make, but the connection you make with those silly plastic eggs is indescribable. We wanted to bring that connection into a more relevant setting.

OPM How much of CJ is Young Maylay putting himself into the role?

SH He added so much to what we were doing. He understood that CJ had to be relatable, and he really gave the character some presence. This is something that’s really important for us and speaks to a much broader point. If you look back, we were among the first to really push this notion of using celebrity voices in games. GTA3 took it to a good place, and then obviously we expanded on it quite dramatically in Vice City. For San Andreas, we knew that we had to do it differently. We don’t want the things with actors in videogames to end up in the same place as movies.

OPM What do you mean?

SH Movies have changed since we were kids, and the problem is the actors. Remember how it always used to be about the heroes themselves? They were heroes that you believed in completely, and you went to see the movies because of them. Now it’s all about the actors, and I think that’s a dangerous path to tread. I want fantasy—I don’t want the actor and all the baggage that they bring along. We know so much about that baggage now because of magazines like Us Weekly that we can’t separate the actor from the character anymore. I’m not saying that we don’t want to use big names at all. I mean, Ray Liotta was perfect for us in Vice City, but this time, when it came to CJ, it absolutely had to be someone that was completely unknown, someone that didn’t bring any of that baggage along with them.

OPM So, what’s next? How can you top this?

SH Well, if we didn’t have to top it, what would be the point? The beauty of working in videogames is that you’re not held back by a fixed medium. If you look at TV, or movies, or music, it’s completely static, but with games we get to see the medium evolve. Every five years the nice people at Sony give us new toys to play with, and we get to reinvent the wheel again. With that in mind, though, we don’t want to abuse the franchise, and we only want to make stuff when there’s a reason for it. This is the trilogy for now (GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas), and we’re not in a rush to do the next one. We’re looking at the next generation of hardware for sure, and if you think about the enormous difference between PS1 and PS2 and then do the calculations on how much more we’ll be able to do if the leap is to the same degree to PS3, well…it’s very exciting.