Rockstar Games gets lots of hate. And that's a shame, because Rockstar makes good games, which make lots of money. So we guess that balances it, so whatever. Here's company co-founder/president Sam Houser on that:

Most of the people who hate us are people it is truly an honour to be hated by — reactionary creeps with strange agendas — and the Daily Mail. Most people who know about modern pop culture know about GTA and like or dislike it on its own merits...

I think we [Sam and his brother and co-founder Dan] are both depressed at how boring we really are and how unexciting even the worse fabrications and exaggerations are when you read about them. None of it seems very rock and roll, so we find it a little sad, when there are probably better stories that could be written about both us and the industry/medium. No sharks, groupies or pounds of coke or anything fun at all. We read like angry dorks, which might be true, but is certainly not very exciting.

So all you haters, just think of Rockstar as angry dorks. That, and take deep breaths.

Grand Theft Auteur - Part 1 [Develop Mag via CVG]

As savvy a piss-take on modern America as the Grand Theft Auto series has become, it's always worth remembering that it's not an American series. It's a British one. Rockstar are a British company (as were DMA), their founders, British. And with the GTA series nestled securely atop the gaming world in terms of both critical acclaim and popularity, Develop are wondering...when can we expect the series to start getting some serious recognition? Sure, they may have their tongue resting gently inside their cheeks when pondering how long til we see "the inevitable coming of Sir Sam Houser, or Dan Houser OBE", but the point itself is still valid! France are down with bestowing major recognition upon noted game developers, you can't help but wonder when places like Britain (and the US) will start doing likewise.

Knights of the Sandbox City [Develop]

In the June issue of Playboy, Rockstar's Dan Houser gave a somewhat rare full-page interview on Grand Theft Auto 4 and violent video games. Why, Houser was asked, don't other entertainment industries offer more support for video games, since their controversial content is often targeted for criticism in the same fashion?

"It's about economics. We take market share and audience from other media - video game makers are challenging the Hollywood hegemony - so they're going to fight us. But I'm not going to fight them. I believe your Constitution protects us."

When interviewer Scott Alexander asked Houser about inequity in the way adult games are treated as compared with film and other media, Houser said:

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Anticlimactic as it is, your humble editor still missed this yesterday; EA's deadline for its offer to acquire Take-Two has passed. Literally nothing happened. No comments from either side, no offers to raise the share purchase price or extend the deadline, no Mark-Gastineau sack-dances by Take-Two's board -- in short, no comment from either side. All we can deduce is that fewer than 50 percent of Take-Two shareholders liked the bid of $US 25.74 per share. And since the stock closed at $US 27.10 Friday, that's hardly a shock.

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Rockstar co-founder and VP Dan Houser, notably reluctant to give long interviews, especially about himself, sat down with Variety's Ben Fritz for a 90 minute interview, and from the looks of it, nearly all is transcribed in Fritz's blog on Variety.

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