GTA’s Lazlow and Dan Houser imagine a future without Rockstar

Jeffrey "Lazlow" Jones was as much a star of Grand Theft Auto as he was an architect in its making. Over two decades, he established himself as a pivotal senior member of a global development team creating some of the most successful entertainment ever made, as a writer, actor, and producer both on and within the games. But in 2020, he left “the demented ad agency” of a video game studio behind. 

It was time for a new project with long-time collaborator, Rockstar’s Dan Houser – one where they could stretch their storytelling style into new areas and genres. Where they could pull apart fresh topics in games, podcasts, animations, or whatever they wanted.

Yet GTA – like his decade-long career in radio broadcasting, from Oklahoma rock music to New York City talk shows – remains a part of his being. It’s in his DNA. 

Take his father, once the spitting image of a GTA character; long, unkempt hair and an overgrown beard, you’d expect to find him on the drab streets of Liberty City. Old photos of him in his undercover narcotics cop days are unrecognizable, even to Lazlow. 

He’d spend his nights in the underworld, hiding a machine gun under the flap of his trench coat, putting together deals with traffickers who were pushing illicit produce through Mexico and Texas, up to Oklahoma. “He would miss church because he was up all night in some seedy bar somewhere putting together a deal for kilos of heroin,” Lazlow tells me. 

After his gun-toting days, his father ran the computers and phones for the Oklahoma City Police Department. Lazlow would spend his weekends cutting through that maze of mainframe computers, all blinking lights, punch cards, and spinning tapes. He’d sneak into Homicide and run his eyes over polaroids from murder scenes and petty crimes. 

It’s not the upbringing you’d expect from someone so heavily involved in a video game series where gunning down cops is as compulsory as Pac-Man gobbling up hallucinogens. Trace his career back, though, and it almost seems inevitable. 

Lazlow was running a radio show called Technofile out of New York City when he decided to go surfing. Out on the waves, he got talking to another surfer about his tech-focused radio show, and it turned out the other guy was working on a video game – not a video game with dragons and elves and other fantasy tropes popular back then, this was a game for grown-ups that satirized American culture down to the finest details, including radio. 

The other surfer, Rockstar co-founder Terry Donovan, invited Lazlow to their offices to do a nationally syndicated radio feature on Grand Theft Auto 3. It’s easy to forget this knowing what a powerhouse that series is now, but no one expected GTA to take over the world before 2001. 

“While doing that interview, I met Dan [Houser]” Lazlow explains. At that point, Lazlow had worked in New York radio for six years, following a stint on rock radio. He demonstrates his tubes with his broadcasting voice –  a full-throated, “Central Missouri's best rock”. 

Houser revealed that they planned to make fun of American radio, of which Lazlow had mastered the peculiarities and nuances. He began reeling off suggestions and Houser offered him a job right there. They spent the entire summer writing, recording, and producing. “It was one of those life-changing experiences.” 

Then, Lazlow’s dad finally became an actual GTA character. So did Lazlow himself, as well as many of his friends, neighbors, and colleagues as he transformed New York City’s residents into fictional radio callers and the non-player characters you bump into on the streets. 

“My father calls into my show, Chatterbox. He talks about how delicious it is to eat squirrels and the culinary differences between squirrels and possums…” he trails off. “To be clear, we did not eat squirrels growing up.”

Houser and Lazlow are a strange mix. They share a love of music, comedy, and fiction, but they both arrived there from different places. Houser went to Oxford University. Lazlow is, in his words, a “hillbilly from Oklahoma”, but their minds meet in the same place. 

“We know if we're making each other laugh, it's working out,” Lazlow says. “One of my favorite things is we email scripts back and forth. He'll come into my office and I'll say, ‘Dude, this line you wrote cracks me up’, and he goes, ‘No, you wrote that one’. We lose track.” 

The pair butt heads occasionally but “it’s never contentious”. They give each other feedback on characters, arcs, jokes, and big-picture ideas, and the trust they have for each other allows them to step back and see it through the other’s eyes. He also appreciates how Houser approaches stories with little thought about what people want and turns fan service on its head. 

Take the way you’re introduced to Trevor in GTA 5, where he curb stomps a GTA 4 protagonist to death and snuffs him out as if it were nothing – that story is dead, stomped, over. It’s a bloody bootprint now, and this is something new. As much as it tells you about Trevor’s character, it’s a violent statement of intent. 

“[Houser] takes the path you're not used to, and that's uncomfortable at first,” Lazlow tells me, before referencing the tragic ending of Red Dead Redemption or how you play as a character who’s slowly dying of TB in its sequel 

“There's no way to ‘win’,” he says. “We were so used to this trope of the video game where you defeat the big boss at the end. There were grown men crying their eyes out when Marston got killed.” 

Absurd Ventures takes Lazlow and Houser, along with other former Rockstar talent, back to those heady, freeform creative days. “We’re a scrappy startup that wants to tell amazing stories and do new things,” he explains. “[We’re] able to pivot and work quickly and change things while creating new worlds and universes for people to explore.”

The first of these new universes is A Better Paradise, which makes its debut as a podcast starring Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead), Shamier Anderson (John Wick: Chapter 4), Paterson Joseph (Wonka), and Rain Spencer (The Summer I Turned Pretty) on June 10. 

Set in the near future, it’s a grounded sci-fi story about a team of game developers who created an AI-powered open-world game invented by a psychologist. After team members disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the project was abandoned, and the super-intelligent AI entity was left alone to surf the internet, including Twitter. Enough to make anyone hate humanity. The story spans multiple decades and interrogates tech bro hubris, what it means to be human, and the social constructs we’ve imprisoned ourselves in thanks to rampant consumerism.

It’s a new area for Lazlow and Houser, who are best known for freeze-drying specific moments in time, from the neon glow of ‘80s Miami to the turn of the 20th century. For Red Dead Redemption and GTA, they’d often dip into newspaper archives and immerse themselves in the time to see how people talked, what the issues were, and what people were interested in to create the most authentic rendition of that period. For this, they only have to turn their heads – the future is now and it’s not all flying cars and laser guns. 

Rockstar’s games are plastered with imaginary brands, from the imaginary carbonated lemon and lime beverage, Sprunk, to its spoof on social media, Life Invader. In Red Dead Redemption 2, you can flick through old-timey magazines advertising cocaine chewing gum, and stirrups. 

“We were obsessed with media – radio, television, advertisements,” Lazlow explains. “That is partially our vision of the future in A Better Paradise because advertising is already starting to be made by robots. We imagine that will ratchet up to the point where you're watching TV and it's a dynamically created AI commercial with emotional connections specifically for you. That's our vision of a feasible future.”

It’s a future we can already see. From Taco Bell’s CEO saying they’re going to be an “AI-first company” (whatever that means for middling fast food restaurants), to companies rebranding anything slightly algorithmic as “AI”, businesses are fully on the bandwagon. They all know it’s a creatively bankrupt dead-end, regurgitating man-made art and culture like some kind of digital ouroboros, but it gets the shareholders excited and the line on the graph goes up. It mirrors what we saw with NFTs (mostly badly drawn clip art of monkeys), and the metaverse, a concept that already exists in video games.

Houser and Lazlow want to tell a new story about AI within that modern context. This isn’t HAL 9000, the rogue AI from Space Odyssey, or SHODAN, System Shock’s murderous digital construct. This AI knows your favorite memes, what expensive items you’ve had in your Amazon basket for six months, and every curiosity you’ve absentmindedly searched online.

Originally conceived as a Left 4 Dead-style virtual game director, the AI was made to alter the open-world game for whoever is playing it, strategically changing the gameplay, environment, and NPCs based on your personality. But when the company folded and the game was canceled, it was left to doomscroll. “Imagine a digital entity that is essentially an infant that can read Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, and Google News in a fraction of a second,” Lazlow says. “It would be mental.”

Eventually, the entity breaks out of the game and into the Internet of Things, living in people’s smart homes and kitchen appliances. “You see him evolve,” Lazlow explains. “He gets really excited when he realizes that he's just been confused over something because he's watched humans, and he knows they're extremely confused. He's excited because he's just exhibited a human trait.”

From the clips he plays me, you can hear how Lazlow’s American heritage and Houser’s British humor wrap around each other like a double helix. The AI speaks in a stream of consciousness, adopting various accents and ideologies it’s picked up from different parts of the web, throwing in personal tidbits and the browsing habits of “perverts”, which it equates to people watching cute animal videos. If you’ve played GTA and think the radio stations there are unhinged, strap in. 

It also retains Rockstar’s attention to detail. Lazlow tells me he and Houser have mapped out the entire story’s timeline, from where this podcast takes place to the video game Absurd Ventures will put out years down the line. The audio assets created for the podcast have to be perfect because they’re the same sounds you’ll hear for specific things when you come across A Better Paradise in any other form of media. They’re perfectionists. 

“In games, you've got images on your screen, and that helps inform what the world sounds like,” Lazlow explains. “Making this audio drama was like directing motion capture with your eyes closed. We’ve had tons of meetings about character continuity, what the robots sound like, and what the AI entities sound like. It was great because it informed our other projects in this universe.”

Complicating this, not only are the actors playing themselves decades apart, but some characters also have digital counterparts. Andrew Lincoln’s character had been neglecting his daughter while making the fictional game, so he made an NPC version of her to inhabit the game world, which means Rain Spencer is tasked with playing his actual daughter as well as an innocent virtual construct based on who her dad thinks she is. It’s a fertile ground for some inventive storytelling, and from what I’ve heard so far, Houser and Lazlow will pull it off. 

There’s a real efficiency to the writing. One throwaway line about solar power told me so much about the world while tripling up as a joke and a playful character moment. Another curb stomp. 

Lazlow tells me they almost approach it the same as hiding easter eggs in GTA and Red Dead Redemption. There will be lots of little puzzle pieces to put together. You can see this same approach for Lazlow’s character in GTA, who would appear in each game, each timeline, and become a little deeper with every appearance. 

It’s refreshing to see this forward-thinking approach in video games, where the multimedia efforts and attempts to give depth to characters often come after the fact. Creators don’t have the confidence to bank on their characters and only realize there’s an appetite for more of them after the fact. So the game comes out, years go by, and you might get a tie-in novel or a comic book if you’re lucky. A Better Paradise is giving us a taste in a format where you can enjoy it almost anywhere, ahead of even bigger projects to come. 

A Better Paradise is just the beginning. “We mapped out tons of different media for these characters and these stories,” he says. Absurd Ventures is working on multiple other universes – some announced, some not – that have been “in production for quite a while”. As with their time at Rockstar, the team has big ambitions for its future video games, blending storytelling with interactivity and expanding on what they learned on GTA and Red Dead to create believable worlds full of characters, authentic and grounded. 

The duo wants to continue that evolution. Despite leaving Rockstar firmly behind, they remain “really proud” of their work on games like Red Dead Redemption 2, fulfilling Houser’s vision of immersion through dynamic NPC interactions – the type where you’ve no idea when you’d reach the bottom of the deep world these developers had created. “There are so many moments that Dan has created where something happens and you're like, ‘holy s**t.’” he concludes. Expect more of that.”