It's not that Rockstar founder Sam Houser is a man of few words. Get him talking about Grand Theft Auto IV and the British-born executive producer of the GTA series will fill two hours of audio tape. He'll go on about how his game's Russian accents trump Hollywood's. He'll disclose the Nintendo-spawned inspiration for the game's interpersonal relationships. He'll discuss the tricky business of developing for two consoles simultaneously. He'll even vent about the previously taboo topic of the Hot Coffee scandal. Landing a sit-down with the notoriously press-shy Houser isn't so easy, but we were granted one in early January for EGM's GTA4 cover story. And here, for the first time, is the full interview....

1UP: Now that you've been living in New York for 10 years, how has that changed this second trip to Liberty City and your perspective on the game's world?

Sam Houser: When we were making the first [few GTAs], we had been in the country a couple of years. It was all still new to us. It was all still -- I was about to say it was all still exciting, but it's still exciting. I still find going to the supermarket exciting. So it's not that it isn't exciting today; it was just when you move your life 3,000 miles away, it's a very different thing to go through. The difference here is that, as you can see from the [new] game, the game is very, very detailed now, and we really want to have the player get that whole new level of immersion, that sense of being somewhere, albeit virtual. Really soak up the atmosphere and the sounds and the smells and the sights, everything. I feel that our being here a long time, the way some of the practices and things that we've cultivated to make these games -- combined with actually learning about the place -- have enabled us to actually make a game about New York -- obviously it's Liberty City, but it evokes New York -- that people really can plug into, feel like they're there, and in a lot of the cases, be visiting areas of our world that they otherwise really wouldn't get to. In a lot of the research trips for this game, we ended up in places that are very, very unusual, to say the least.

1UP: What was the most unusual place you wound up?

SH: Brighton Beach is pretty incredible. I can't speak highly of it enough. I went there once a week for about nine months, the end of the summer through winter and then into spring, seeing slightly hard conditions. You know about Brighton Beach at all, what goes on there?

1UP: No....

H: OK, that's fine then. Because it's the inspiration for Hove Beach in the game. Hove Beach...the reason we called it Hove is in England, Brighton and Hove are next to each other and Brighton & Hove Albion is a football team. So that's pretty obscure, but we got our feet in both the American camp and the British camp, and we can jump back and forth between the two, which is something I think this game does really on a different level. In terms of the humor, in terms of the vibe, it's going to speak to British people; it's going to speak to American people. We can do that in a way that is unusual, in a way that is made possible, like you said, by being there a long time. So Brighton Beach is an area that's just next to Coney Island. Obviously, Coney you know from The Warriors, and also it's just an amazing place. Brighton Beach is this unusual sort of strip of about eight blocks, like a shopping street, underneath an elevated train section, like the thing in The French Connection. It's in the game: the area you see with the elevated section over it. It's all very dark....

But as I understand it from local friends, before the mid- to late '80s, it was predominantly Hasidic Jews, of which there's a lot in the outside and connected areas. But it got taken over in the late '80s and beyond by Eastern Europeans. So it really is, now -- it's completely Russian. There will be Ukrainians and Lithuanians and a whole load of other nationalities there, but the overarching resonance is Eastern European, and predominantly Russian. I've been different places all over the world. I've been to Chinatown in San Francisco, the Chinatown in New York, this quarter of somewhere in Paris or something, and I've never been anywhere like Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. You cross a line, and you are in another world. The people are actually very friendly, but they don't come across as particularly friendly when you first visit -- quite dour faces, heavy atmosphere. So working on this game, when I actually started going there, it blew my mind. Creatively, it was so inspiring and so uplifting, because we were making this game about these Eastern European guys who I think are fascinating anyway, and suddenly I ended up in this place where I was there. Every shop has Russian logos. I've not seen anything like it before. If you go into a shop and you speak English...you'll get what you want, but it's a battle. It's like you're crossing this line and you're suddenly in Moscow.... There's this weird mixture in places of opulence and decay which I love. Like Coney Island is all being transformed into condos. You're not going to know it the way I have. I've been lucky enough to visit it and spend time there. Five years from now it's all going to be converted, yuppified, whatever.

1UP: In a way, GTA4 will be a snapshot of it.

SH: Exactly, we're capturing it.... Recently, I watched a film, Eastern Promises. It's a scary movie. I'm a big fan of [director] David Cronenberg. So I watched Eastern Promises with some amount of trepidation. I didn't know what I was going to make of this, because it's in our sort of vibe. As ever, I think Cronenberg did a magnificent job. I think he picks up on an atmosphere, which is something I'm interested in, and he can really evoke that very powerfully.... I loved the Russian vibe in there, loved the tattoos -- he and I have clearly got the same book on Russian mobster tattoos.

The area where I feel as a game we did something different from [Cronenberg] -- I don't want to say "better" because I don't really think like that -- but he used Viggo Mortensen, who I think is American or Danish or Scandinavian or something like that, and then the other guy, Vincent Cassel, he plays the son. He's a French actor. I thought Viggo's accent was OK. I thought Vincent Casell's accent, having studied a lot of accents, was just like a French guy doing a Russian voice. I was just, like, "I can't take this seriously." He's a great actor. He's been in some wicked films, but it just didn't work. So when I went back to our game and I was meeting Vlad and Faustin, and particularly Faustin -- who's this really scary, proper, deep mobster -- running the scene out in Hove Beach, I'm like, "You know what -- we're actually competitive with [the movie's performances]." That's remarkable.

1UP: The past 3D GTAs were obviously inspired by movies and TV shows -- Goodfellas, Boyz in the Hood, Miami Vice. This is the first one that seems to go off on its own. Have you run out of inspirations for the series?

SH: ...We felt that the Italian mob thing had been done to death a little bit. I think we've got some good Italian mobsters in this game, but they're not leading the game. I'm a big, big fan of The Sopranos -- how could I not be? -- but I also feel as if that stuff's had its run. We also read a bunch of books and did a bunch of research on it, and the more we dug into it, the guys who are in this day and age the real-deal thugs -- the real-deal gangsters -- are the Eastern Europeans, these new transplants from different parts of Eastern Europe.... These new guys off the boat, they're coming with something to prove, and they mean business. They are f***ing fearless....

I think [that's why] Niko's a real strong character. I like the setup that someone would have been involved in some of the difficult conflicts that took place in Eastern Europe 10 years ago -- not because he's a good person or a bad person or this or that or the other -- but because that was what was on his doorstep, as many guys like you or I would have had to do. What would you do if your town got attacked and that was what was going on around you? You'd defend yourself. All of these young men like you or I went off and did that, and then the stuff got resolved, and they're all like, "What do I do now?"

Obviously, a lot of guys...got on boats or got on planes, and there's a collection of these guys here. I got excited because I felt that it was something that's very "now." Liberty City was very "now" at the time that [GTA3] came out in 2001. Vice City obviously captured the '80s. San Andreas captured the '90s. I really was obsessed with us making sure that we made something feel very, very contemporary and of the moment. I think that is so key. So this plugged into that. It's not that we necessarily ran out of other things to be inspired by, because I can get inspired by pretty much anything. But the fact is, from wanting to do New York and just dicking about a little bit, these pieces just came together. We're a long way from having just sort of a great big, white, alpha-male dude running around with a bazooka. Our games aren't really set up like that. We want to have a character that makes you ask questions -- that can be a little confusing in terms of how you empathize with them and how you relate to them....

1UP: The theme in GTA4 seems to revolve around relationships -- building them with characters using your cellphone.

SH: Cultivating relationships, like [in] the real world, is bloody hard. People get pissed off with you; they expect you to call them back. That's one of the things that I've personally been obsessed with in games for years.... I think the first time I really felt that in a videogame -- not a PC game -- was in Star Fox on the Nintendo 64.

1UP: Your copilots?

SH: Yes, that's it! The little froggy mate or the rabbit. I'd be flying in and looking across [the game world], and there they'd be. I thought, "That is hot!" I was probably 20-odd [years old], and I remember my friends saying, "You're getting a little bit too into this." You didn't want to see them get hit, even if he is just a rabbit. That stuck in my mind: one of those things where that felt different. With games, to me, it's all about the feeling -- it's about making original, unique sensations and emotions. [like] the mission "Bomb the Base" in GTA3, where you're sniping for 8-Ball; I remembered the feeling between the two of us then. I remember thinking, "That's cool." So we pushed it along a little bit for Vice City, and we pushed it on a little bit for San Andreas. But in this one, because of the amount of resources and power that these new machines give us, we're able to bring it to life so much more....

1UP: And you get material as well as emotional rewards. Little Jacob brings you weapons; another guy will bring a helicopter....

SH: Yep. It's very integrated into it like that. The idea is that if you do cultivate these relationships, you'll do fun things with them. [The characters] will be amusing people to hang out with, and then other things will come from that: Either they'll introduce you to other people who will introduce you to other things to go and do, or they'll come and bring a present for you of some description, whether it's a weapon or what have you.... But it's a really important area to explore. The idea of having feelings for a bunch of polygons is very profound. It's something that I want to see more games push, and I certainly want our games to keep on pushing it....

1UP: And once a player is invested in the characters, that's when you can do things like kill them off....

SH: Yes, exactly. Once you're invested, then you can turn them on their heads. There's a mission where you have to rescue Roman from some rather hostile characters. You can hear him yelling down at you, and you're yelling up at him, but there's about 15 scary Albanian guys in between: That feels heavy.... There's an emotional charge to [our game], to why you're doing it, that makes you feel very different about it.

1UP: San Andreas put a lot of emphasis on customizing your appearance to interact with other characters, but now that's out.

SH: Yes. You spend more time working at the relationships rather than working on yourself, to some extent. You have to put time in with the friends doing activities or errands for them, or just hanging out, going and having a drink, playing a game of darts, playing a game of pool. The darts is particularly my favorite: I actually win at it, which I can't believe. I've always been terrible at darts my whole life.... But if you put the effort into these relationships, I think -- as in the real world, really -- they blossom and grow and evolve. And if you don't, you start getting these more and more pissed-off text messages and phone calls from them. They're like, "Look...I haven't seen you in a week. What the f***'s this all about?"

1UP: But you can blow people off if you're not into that -- you just won't get the full experience.

SH: You can play the story the whole way through and pretty much ignore all the friends. You will miss out on some really fun, funny, and cool things that'll happen in the course of that, but that's your choice. And I think, more than ever, one of the things that people like about GTA3 and Vice and San Andreas was that freedom to just go around the world, tool about, and do their own little thing. I think this takes that to the absolute next level....

1UP: GTA4 seems like a bit of a harder sell, because players might look at it after playing San Andreas and say, well, you've pruned features. It doesn't have the suburbs, the planes, the working out to build up your character....

SH: When we first started talking about the game, the first map that we were all looking at here...it was f***ing enormous. It was the logical move on from San Andreas. You had the Catskills, the Adirondacks. I'd only been to the Adirondacks once; it took me six hours to get there! It's f***ing miles away. And the more we looked at it, the more we thought, "How are we gonna achieve the level of fidelity?" How are we going to increase the resolution of the experience -- not just the graphics but the experience, the gravity of everything, the weight of every action, the intensity of everything -- if we just go farther and farther out? The more we chatted about that as a group...the more it started to shrink down. The more it became a traditional, what you think of as a "New York City" kind of environment. It was a very conscious thing.

So we wanted to make sure that every single thing that you do, whether it's walking down the street, getting into a pawn shop, using the guns, driving a car or a bike or a boat or a helicopter or whatever -- just general basic interaction -- felt reengineered and reengaged so it feels new for people. Because for me as a consumer, that's what I demand. If I'm going to buy an expensive machine and this beautiful, immersive piece of entertainment, I want to be engaged on levels that I've not had before. And I feel that by going what we flippantly refer to as "back to basics," we were able to really go into each area of the game, each mechanic of the game, each bit that makes up the overall experience, and just crank the absolute life out of it and take everything to that next level that we wanted....

1UP: The first trailers made the game look more serious than the past GTAs, which had us worried because we really like the humor in the games. After playing it, we can tell the humor's still there.

SH: We take our games very seriously, but we don't take ourselves very seriously. Because I think that's a slippery slope for life. So we take the piss out of ourselves, and we take the piss out of anything we can think of. It's sort of unilaterally offensive. No one can get their nose put out of joint, although I'm sure they will. One of the jobs that [brother and Rockstar cofounder] Dan [Houser] and [radio host] Lazlow and those guys really have had to do...is keep being funny but make it get older and more mature and more sensible.... I feel that they have absolutely retained the GTA humor and attitude. But it's grown up, because people who enjoyed it in 2001 are seven years older. Kids that were 10 in 2001 can now play it.... The world is seven years older. When we made the first game, blogs didn't really exist. Now blogs are a way of life. What would this game be without a bunch of bloggers in it? So we have bloggers in there....

1UP: When you think of what Rockstar has been through lately, it's like there are two ways you can go. You can play it supersafe, or you can push it. The American media can take one thing, like the drunk-driving minigame, and make it a bullet point for the news.

SH: Our games are consciously made for adults -- it's why we started the company.... [From 17 years old] and up, I think we have a right to play what we want to play. And that's that. And as long as it's not touching on themes that are socially inappropriate -- and some films do it, and I think games should be allowed to do it, but let's be respectful -- as long as you're not doing that, what's the f***ing problem? Adults should be able to play what they want. America, the country I'm now a citizen of and love, is built on that premise....

I think the problem that games have got is that they're called "games," and that makes people think of 8-year-olds and Mario.... I've been a fan of Mario games as long as I've been playing games. My hat goes off to [Nintendo] -- we learned so much from those people -- but it obviously skews younger.... We're doing our thing. But I think for politicians, for lawyers, and for parasites, you go "game" and you go "killing" and you go "children," and it's too easy. It's a nice way to get half a page in the paper.... When you look at how much work goes into making this stuff, and how much passion and creativity and ambition is behind it, to boil it all down to that is really, really depressing. One of the things that I've struggled with during Hot Coffee is [that] San Andreas is a game that I think is absolutely wicked, top to bottom -- a seminal piece of work -- that's now going to be remembered for Hot Coffee. I think actually we're getting past that now, just about two or three years later, but that stuff really upset me, because it boiled it all down to a bunch of salacious, cheesy muck. We're just not about that. We're not going out to court controversy from anybody. We're looking to make stuff that inspires us, turns us on as young people that are involved in this incredibly powerful, incredibly exciting, incredibly no-rules medium where we sit and go, "What should we make? Let's make this! Let's make that!" All this wonderful energy.

Going back to your point about [the reaction to things like drunk driving], I know there was some reaction to the previews about that, but it never even crossed my mind.... This is something that Strauss Zelnick, who's the chairman of [Rockstar parent company] Take-Two, has spoken to me about, because he has a lot of experience now. He was at BMG, and he had to go and defend rap lyrics in the '90s. He was in Congress doing that, so he was a really good guy.... He was able to give me some great counsel and support.... One of the things that he [brought up] was a notion I didn't even know of before, the notion of "chilling" our thought. [Chilling is any activity that inhibits creativity and the exercise of Constitutional rights -- Ed.] So when I'm making my game with my friends, we're going to make the game we want to make. If, as you said, we'd gone the other way and said, "We're all too scared -- let's go talk to Mattel and get the Barbie license because I feel safer in that territory," then A) I'd probably do something wrong and get in trouble doing that, so it's probably better I don't [laughs], and B) probably if I hit that point, I'd just pack it in and go do something else....

We want to push the boundaries of this medium in terms of the experiences we can give. That's got nothing to do with sex or violence or any of those other things -- it's just in this series of games, gangster games, there's a certain amount of content that goes with that. And it's no different [from] any movie or any book or anything like that. Well, it's interactive, but what happened when we went from a book to TV? When we went from printed words on a page to fully realized [images] on a screen? It's no different. It's called evolution.... I'm obsessed with the fact that they stopped the [supersonic jet] Concorde, because it's one of those things that was so progressive, and they stopped doing it, and they've gone backward. I'm really a fan of progress in the world, new things, evolution, creativity, and maybe that Concorde thing doesn't make a lot of sense....

1UP: Games at least don't depend on ticket prices or fossil fuels. They're limited by imagination.

SH: Exactly.... I just like progress. You're exactly right: Why would we want to curb people's imagination, people's thoughts? I couldn't agree more with the need for intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, accurate, aggressively enforced ratings systems. Of course. But when I see politicians coming out and saying parents are too busy to pay attention to what their kids are playing, well, how am I supposed to argue with that? It's such a nonsensical statement. I can't engage it.... We know we can't win in that discussion. We can't win.

I will tell you this: When they dragged me and some of the other guys down to Washington [for the Federal Trade Commission investigation into Hot Coffee], they seized all our e-mails, and they had all that stuff in front of them, and they're going through thousands of them. You sat there in a room like this...and there's you and your lawyers and then all these government investigators sitting opposite. They've got your e-mails, and they say, "Why have you put that word in apostrophes? Why have you done this? Why have you done that?" It's a heavy one, right? It's not many game designers that have been in that position that I know of...which goes back to the point about having the fire for this game. I felt those people were out to crush us, and if they could have crushed us, they absolutely would have. If they could have found that smoking-gun e-mail that says, "Oi, mate, stick the thing in there," [then] off we go. We would have been crucified. But they didn't have it....

The other thing that bothered me about that one is that if you actually know us at all and if you played San Andreas, that section that got unlocked was so not creatively in sync with everything else in the game. It was so not finished.... It was embarrassing. So for that thing to become our whole world was bloody awful.... We just didn't let them [get] in our heads. Because if I'd done that, I'd have to give up.

1UP: You also have that issue in American culture where sex is really inappropriate....

H: But guns are OK. I tell you, Dan and I own a little place in upstate New York, and the first time I went to Gander Mountain.... It's a chain of outdoor shops on the East Coast. As a British person, these shops are amazing. You can buy a quad [bike] or canoe, a pair of Timberland boots, some Carhartt clothing.... But at the back you can buy a bloody M-16, a pump-action this -- un-be-lievable.

1UP: It's a real-life Ammu-Nation.

SH: And then some! It makes Ammu-Nation seem very light on stock. And I remember at the time going, "Wait a minute. Wal-Mart are going to pull our game, but you can go in there and buy a pump-action or a Glock or whatever." I don't get it. One of the things I struggle with, with that whole episode, was that it just felt like we were being used for a political football, at a political time.... It's been very clear to me that it's been an easy way for politicians to talk about something that makes them sound relevant, contemporary. It's a lot easier to talk about than climate change or oil prices or conflicts in the Middle East, things that actually require real thought.... I could really go on and bore you with this stuff, but let's talk about more positive and constructive things. It's very interesting stuff, and I think we are at a real moment in time. I think to some extent it's the publishers' duties and the press' duty as one unit to kind of defend it a little bit. I know I haven't done a particularly good job of it, but I don't think I'm the person to do it. I think they'll look at me and go, "Right, we know why we don't like videogames now. There he is, the cheeky guy over there." But I think we all, as a group, need to be doing a better job. I level that at myself as much as anybody else. And we will, the industry will, they'll get better....

1UP: Let's talk about the hardware issues. Back when GTA4 was delayed, PS3 technical hurdles were cited as a contributing factor. I take it those have been ironed out.

SH: I don't know what anybody's said on that stuff. I didn't say anything, and I stay out of it.... Both machines are absolutely fantastic, but they both come with strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the 360 is a very, very accessible, familiar, effective environment to work in. You're making the game from the get-go, everyone understands its PC environment -- boom, off we go. It's pretty good. One of the problems with the 360, and it affects games like Grand Theft Auto if you think about how much content we put in the actual machine, is the fact that they don't have a significantly larger storage medium than the previous systems. It's a slightly bigger DVD disc.

1UP: Plus, you're not guaranteed a hard drive in every system.

SH: That's a complicated one. I met with a bunch of the senior fellows from [Microsoft]. I said, that's kind of complicated.... The upshot of the technical challenges we've experienced on either the 360 or on the PS3 is [that] both companies stepped up to the plate and have supported us in a way that was beyond even my greedy expectations. They've been amazing. I think that the 360 is going to have to get 'round this issue we're talking about. I can think of various ways they can do it. Hopefully, they're going to adopt one of those in the next year or so, because it's going to become more of an issue. If we're filling up the disc right now, where are we going? It's not like our games are going to get any smaller. I think that issue's on the table with a bunch of games right now. I'm sure they'll come through with an intelligent solution.

Getting things running on the PS3 initially was challenging. I think it was challenging for a lot of companies, but it's also a machine where, now that we've got comfortable with it -- I don't want to say we've cracked it, but we've got comfortable with it -- we know we can make our games. We're at a point now where the games pretty much look identical side by side. There's a slight difference in the way they look. I think that's to do with really low-level technical stuff that I'm not the guy to explain. The 360 games have a certain look to them; PS3 games have a certain look to them. I like the way [the PS3] renders. There's a certain kind of softness without being blurry -- some warmth to it -- and then there's a certain more clinical element to how the 360 looks. Both have plusses and minuses. As far as I'm concerned, they're neck and neck now. That's very much our goal; we do not want to get in the middle of that rather heated, fervent debate.... These guys who wanna defend their systems, you know what? Good on 'em, and let them do it. We just didn't want to give them something that would in any way fuel it....

1UP: GTA4 has some online modes, but what about a massively multiplayer GTA? Is that something this world can support, or do you think you need a world where you're mining ore and grinding like in World of WarCraft?

SH: I think a subscription-based Grand Theft Auto-type game...is very, very doable and is a very, very compelling proposition. Your question about mining ore, I think you've hit on the core of what the challenge would be. I think the basic things that you can get away with in a fantasy thing -- that fantasy players don't mind doing -- just wouldn't fly for the kind of mass-market users that we really talk to. But I think that there's other ways that we can get at them, and it's definitely something that we're very keen to explore.... I do think that the combination of the multiplayer games that we've got for GTA4 is pretty good. It's a range of different modes. It's pretty deep, pretty sophisticated. It's still Grand Theft Auto, so it's got a rawness to it.... Our multiplayer experiences definitely have a different vibe. [They're] a lot of fun, have a lot of character. It's got a lot of standard modes, but it's also got some modes we've not really done before....

For me, though, the combination of what we're doing with multiplayer and what we're doing with the [downloadable XB360] episodes is the start of us putting our toes in this water and seeing how our audience...adapts to online. Is episodic content the way forward for them? These are things we're going to find out. I'm very excited about the episodes. I think they're going to work beautifully well, particularly if you played the single-player experience -- how they connect. Again, without giving too much away, we're absolutely going to head down that path. We're already kind of on it....

1UP: Nobody's been very successful with the massively multiplayer thing on the consoles....

SH: No one's done it, and it's like the Holy Grail. I think if you can combine the vibe and the attitude and also the gameplay and the tangibility of the games we make with some kind of -- for want of a better term -- MMO subscription model, I think that's like the golden-goal kind of thing. It's such a creatively fascinating place to be.... Keeping the world like the one you experienced for a couple of hours today alive -- I could think of a hundred ways of doing that every day. So I think this is a world that really can support it. But it's not just a done deal. It's a complex, challenging process. Imagine that world, populated by a lot of people -- it wouldn't be unpleasant, would it?

1UP: It might be chaos.

SH: Well, that's the thing: How you manage the chaos is the trick, where it's not just everybody running around and firing f***ing rocket launchers. That wouldn't be fun. It's how you can bring mass-market people over and make them be comfortable with some amount of roleplaying, in a way that World of WarCraft players -- these are people who maybe 15 years ago were playing D&D or Magic: The Gathering -- did. Those people get roleplaying. We have to get mass-market people.... We have to find ways of getting around some of those challenges. Having 2,000 people run around a map shooting each other, that's just not interesting to me.

1UP: The world's a lot different now than when GTA3 came out -- 9/11 had just happened. How has the war on terror affected GTA4? I know that there's a terror scare in the city, and that's why one-third of it is closed at the beginning.

SH: It's not a massive theme in the game, because it's not actually that relevant to our game. But to not reference it in the world would be inaccurate and in some ways inappropriate. This goes back to one of the things that we were really obsessed with in the game, which was making it be as "now" as possible. As much as this reality TV thing is part of now, or this type of music is now, what's going on with some terrorism issues and things like that, that's now. So for a game that prides itself on being relevant and being socially aware, even if it's inappropriately socially aware, it knows what's going on. We make reference to it, but we don't go into any huge amount of detail with it. Because again, if we were to do that, you can imagine what would happen.