Dan Houser is "thankful" he’s not releasing Grand Theft Auto 6 in the age of Trump. “It’s really unclear what we would even do with it, let alone how upset people would get with whatever we did,” says the co-founder of Rockstar Games. "Both intense liberal progression and intense conservatism are both very militant, and very angry. It is scary but it’s also strange, and yet both of them seem occasionally to veer towards the absurd. It’s hard to satirise for those reasons. Some of the stuff you see is straightforwardly beyond satire. It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast."

Houser is therefore thankful that his next game, Red Dead Redemption 2, is a period piece. He meets me one evening in London to discuss it in detail, dressed in all black with box-fresh white trainers and relying on his “out-of-control” caffeine habit to get him through the final weeks until launch.

Read more: Red Dead Redemption 2 review: A generation-defining release

The 44-year-old is polite and gracious – keen to talk about his pride in his team and how much he cares about all aspects of development. It’s something that might seem at odds with Rockstar’s demeanour, a studio that is widely seen as exuding more than a little bravado. Take its reticence to rub shoulders with the rest of the industry (it hasn’t turned up to E3, the world’s largest games event, in over a decade). The same goes for Houser’s own avoidance of the spotlight. By his account, though, that's not arrogance – quite the opposite. “It’s not cool to be out there pursuing fame,” he tells me, in what is one of the only interviews he’s given during the company’s history. “I try not to have a massive ego. Video games will keep you fairly humble. It’s not the movie business.”

It's actually far bigger than the movie business. Rockstar is accustomed to putting in gargantuan efforts and is no stranger to the potential results – Grand Theft Auto V has grossed more than $6bn, becoming the most successful entertainment product ever. Five years later – just shy of the studio’s 20th anniversary – we arrive at the eve of Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that’s taken 2,000 staff some eight years to develop. It’s the industry’s most anticipated since, well, Rockstar’s last.

In this western drama-cum-tragedy you play as Arthur Morgan, a senior member in the Van der Linde gang headed by the “pseudo-messianic” Dutch, a group introduced in the first game. Rockstar remained captivated by the Van der Linde outlaws, by Dutch’s leadership, and by the story of how it all eventually fell apart. Houser wanted to tell that tale, but he was also concerned about the risk of repetition. “A lot of video games work on the same premise that you start as a weak person and end as a strong superhero,” he says. “But what if you start as a tough guy? Someone who’s already very strong, someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world. Arthur’s journey is not about becoming a superhero, because he’s almost one at the start, but is going to be taken on a more intellectual roller coaster when his world view gets taken apart.”

What followed pushed Rockstar to create the most lifelike game world ever made.

© Rockstar Games

Looking back, Dan Houser says he was never the real visionary. It was his brother who had the big-picture foresight for what video games could become. A young Houser initially took a different career tack, bug-testing CD ROMs of virtual tours of museums at BMG Interactive, where Sam was a producer. “They either felt sorry for me, because my parents would’ve made me go on the dole, or they just needed someone who was semi-competent,” he says, laughing. “It was literally going around, going ‘That sound bar is playing in the wrong place’. They thought this was incredibly challenging and that no one else could do it.”

After BMG Interactive was sold to Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar Games emerged from its ashes. It was a studio with fervour and big ambitions that, under Sam and Dan’s leadership, aimed to redefine open, explorable worlds. Rockstar is now at the forefront of the biggest entertainment industry on the planet.

Its games are cultural events akin to a new Star Wars film. The studio is constantly pushing new ideas, new tech, more detailed art and more nuanced emotions, with Dan as Creative Director and Sam as Executive Producer. Houser isn’t even sure how his and Sam’s jobs intersect anymore, but he loves working alongside his brother. It's a family thing, a brotherly thing – something that clearly helped define Rockstar’s cultish, insular attitude – but the bond is important to Houser considering the drama that they've attracted over the years.

The peak came in the mid-Noughties, when several high-profile politicians including Hillary Clinton filed against Rockstar for sexual content hidden in the code base of GTA: San Andreas. The incident, which became known as 'Hot Coffee', saw Sam questioned by the Federal Trade Commission and Rockstar emails subpoenaed by the U.S Government. “I’m really lucky,” Houser says. “I don’t think it would’ve been possible if we didn’t have each other. To survive in that situation without someone than you could trust – that would’ve been very difficult.”

Survive they did. Today, Rockstar Games is worth over $3.5bn.

A couple of weeks after meeting Houser, I find myself on a tour of Rockstar North, based in the heart of Edinburgh, in a beautiful, 75,000 sq ft building that's all steel and glass; a cavernous central atrium flanked by various teams all combining on the game-making process. I'm one of the only journalists to ever see inside the most famous of Rockstar’s nine studios – the one specifically responsible for every Grand Theft Auto game. It’s quiet here, but you can hear the nattering of designers in the corridors. I walk past dozens of screens and see designers, animators, artists and coders beavering away on game material for Red Dead Redemption 2, including teams dedicated to other parts of the project, such as the upcoming and as-yet-unseen Red Dead Online.

I'm here to speak with Rob Nelson, North’s studio director and one of the men chiefly responsible for converting concepts into playable games. Nelson started as a coder on Rockstar's The Warriors in 2003; now he's in an apartment-sized office on the studio’s top floor, overlooking Arthur’s Seat, running a 650-strong team on the most ambitious project in the company’s history.

The toughest thing, Nelson suggests, is making the game's progression – both from the original Red Dead Redemption, and from Grand Theft Auto V – immediately obvious to the player. Sure, Redemption 2 is bigger and more beautiful – I’d argue it’s the best looking game ever made – but that's what you'd expect from a more recent product. But what’s most important, and what’s arguably transformative, is the way this game feels to play. The way the world responds to your reactions; the surprises it throws up along the way. That’s where it moves gaming forwards.

Throughout our interview Nelson repeatedly grabs the PS4 controller that’s sat on his confectionery-covered coffee table. “We’re obsessed with this being the way you interact with the world,” he explains, brandishing the game pad and clicking all the buttons, pulling the triggers, “so it needs to feel right...We talk about it and people are like, ‘Yeah yeah, sounds great, I’ve heard that a lot before: it’s going to be a fully realised interactive living breathing world. Will it be visceral too?'”

The daunting realisation of the true task at hand came once the team had decided that you will live as part of a gang. If you were going to have a family of people roaming across the world, they needed to feel authentic. “If we’d known how much work it was going to be then maybe we’d have backed off,” Houser tells me, “but once we committed we were like, ‘We’ve got to make this work, let’s have some fun with it.’” It was a huge undertaking, to create characters that would respond to you believably and surprisingly throughout the course of a 65-hour experience. Not only that, but Rockstar operates on the principle every part of the game has to feel consistent so no part shines brighter than the rest.

In some ways, this rule is an ego check. Some teams might come up with beautiful-looking ideas, but if they can’t be put into the game world in seamless ways then those ideas will be dumbed down or cut entirely. Phil Hooker, Rockstar’s technology director, remembers how at one point the game had realistic flocks of birds that would shimmer through the skies, yet you couldn’t shoot them when you got close. The fidelity was reduced so it was less pretty to look at, but directly serviced the gameplay and you could interact. “It means pulling back,” Nelson says, “things need to be rolling at the same speed so that one doesn’t outpace the other. Just because we could, doesn’t mean we should.”

Rockstar has dabbled with these illusions of life throughout its history. In Grand Theft Auto V, it was depicted in microcosm in protagonist Michael’s family home, where players could find Michael’s son, Jimmy, playing video games, and his wife doing yoga. These characters had their own routines and felt like they were existing there even when you weren’t present. Houser’s favourite example, however, comes from the original Red Dead Redemption, in the dusty Mexican town of Chuparosa. “If you looked at it for about two seconds when you turned up there, you went, ‘Wow this is amazing’, because everyone was doing stuff. Someone was chopping up fish, someone was doing something with parsley. And then you looked at it for five more seconds and they were doing exactly the same thing. But for those two seconds you went ‘That’s really cool’.”

© Rockstar Games

In Red Dead Redemption 2 these delicate touches permeate the whole experience. Whether you’re carrying a gun or not; whether you’re muddy or clean; if you have a spatter of deer blood across your torso. The world recognizes your place within it, while AI characters respond to you, and each other, contextually.

They remember your actions, too, and even have relationships with one another. If you’re seen shooting some random pedestrian, for example, there’s a chance you may bump into their cousin at the next town, where they’ll then comment on your crimes. In the gang’s camp, this is heightened – if a character is sleeping, Arthur won’t just speak to them as if they were wide awake. Instead, he’ll kick them awake and have a dialogue line specific for that moment. It all places you slap bang in this world, which creates an impressive sense of weight and permanence, right down to the way your horse won’t revive once it dies. This collective want to deliver something more meaningful also pushed Rockstar to expand beyond violence.

“We were chafing against the fact that we’d made this great world and you could only interact with someone by pushing, punching or shooting someone,” Houser explains. “It was getting boring. We wanted to put more talking in the game [but] it had to feel like an action – it should still feel very punchy so you don’t get bogged down in reading.”

Nelson describes it as the Pandora’s Box moment. As soon as Rockstar played with the idea of a more nuanced, reactive game, they then had to accommodate an inordinate amount of new possibilities. Players can now greet non-playable characters, insult them, help them, tease them. These characters all have to interlink with one another and remember what you do in the game to make sure you feel like you’ve made an impact. Everything Rockstar then put in the world had to feed into that system naturally for it to feel fun. It all came back to being able to press a button on the controller and shout ‘hey!’ at someone in the game, only to have them stop and respond like a human being. “It had the same satisfaction of impacting the world as you aiming a gun or shooting somebody,” Nelson tells me. “Your words are like bullets as well.”

To make all this possible, technically, Rockstar rearranged its studios – from Rockstar North in Edinburgh to Rockstar San Diego in the U.S – into one global development unit. This was a colossal undertaking that entirely shifted the internal workings of an already large team. From animation to camera work, from AI to on- and off-mission design, to lighting, landscape art, character art, audio, music and beyond, Red Dead Redemption 2 has been one worldwide collaboration. “It was a great evolution for us,” Houser tells me, “one that after years of trying, we finally managed to get pretty right.”

This communication allowed them to reinvent their core technologies. Rockstar overhauled its AI system properly for the first time in 17 years, which allowed Houser and his senior writing partners, Mike Unsworth and Rupert Humphries, to write hundreds of unique scenes, which could then be made more lifelike. The final game has some 300,000 spoken lines and half a million individual character animations, all of which were shot in-house at Rockstar’s motion capture hangar in Bethpage, New York. There are animations with no dialogue layered on top, and then dialogue with no animations on top of that, plus there are the ambient sounds. And then the soundtrack – some 200 individual pieces of original music, all reactive and regionalised for the game world.

The game’s final story script was over 2,000 pages long, with thousands more pages if you included side quests and incidental dialogue. Individual pedestrian actors alone had scripts spanning 80 pages, while the main cast had to deliver vast amounts more, working closely with Rockstar for more than five years. Motion-capture shoots would last weeks at a time, totaling 2,200 days of recording for all 700 voice actors; countless hours of audio work to ensure consistency between takes; and dozens of hours of meetings and read-throughs to ensure accuracy and efficiency.

To work with a dedicated team for such a long period, Rockstar continued using lesser-known actors to dodge the egos of the big-shot divas. This, Houser believes, also heightens player immersion. He went so far as to preserve his own illusion of Arthur Morgan by avoiding Roger Clark – the Irish-American actor who plays the gruff cowboy lead – on set, because he didn’t want to hear Clark’s real voice. “I grew up with my mother as an actress and she was always obsessed with accents,” he tells me, “but the dude says 20,000 or 30,000 lines of dialogue in the game and there is not one where he drops it. He got so little wrong. What he gives to it is fantastic. It’s not really like people have seen in our games before.”

A few weeks before meeting Houser, I had the chance to play the first six hours of the game in the darkened suite of a Soho hotel. It was clear from early on that this was a different type of story for Rockstar, as a botched heist causes Arthur & co. to retreat into the mountains for shelter. The game is lavish in its atmosphere and ambience, but also rich with desperation and drama. Houser wanted the game’s group exodus to be the antithesis of Red Dead Redemption’s calm opening.

It was the team’s driving force to keep things fresh that in turn defined the palette of the landscape – a bunch of cowboys in an imposing blizzard. It was an idea that stuck from the early stages, but which took a long time to get right – Rockstar went so far as to redesign it entirely. “[It] was unusual for us to completely rebuild something like that,” Houser says. “We wanted you to feel trapped up there [in the mountains]. And it wasn’t doing that well. It was too long, too open, so we made it tighter. It was a lot of work. Because it has to be right, because it’s the start of the game.”

The resulting introduction brims with confidence. Its pace is slower than anything in Grand Theft Auto – though Rockstar’s director of design, Imran Sarwar, does reassure me that there’s still a hefty number of large scale, fast paced “bangers” in the game – but the first chapter is all about establishing the gang’s main players and Arthur’s relationship with them. After a couple of hours, you come down the mountains to the Heartlands, a vast area contained within Red Dead Redemption 2’s startlingly large map. From there, you have a choice – what kind of Arthur Morgan do you want to be?

© Rockstar Games

The answer, really, is up to you – along with far broader depth within its AI comes even more choice for the player. It all feeds into a world that feels cohesive, avoiding the dissonance of a game that might ask you to play a good guy while also letting you mow down pedestrians without recompense. For Rockstar, it meant creating a character where your actions would fit the person you were playing, no matter what you decided to do.

This in turn helped establish the game’s tone. It’s more serious, with greater emotional weight, but there are still moments of levity. “I don’t think 50 hours of ‘I’m a stern gunslinger’ works. It’s boring,” Houser tells me. “But we wanted to illuminate, in a way that was interesting for a contemporary player, the late nineteenth century as this period of flux. This conflict between society and savagery, between civilisation and industry, and the American wilderness.”

As they embarked on their lengthy research, Rockstar's team learned that they would have to feel their way through a balance of history and fiction, not least to find a way of being sympathetic to problems like racial and gender inequality. “It was oppressive, when you look at what was going on,” Houser says. “It may be a work of historical fiction, but it’s not a work of history. You want to allude to that stuff, but you can’t do it with 100 percent historical accuracy. It would be deeply unpleasant.

“This is a time when the women's movement had begun in its infancy. Women were beginning to challenge their very constrained place in society, and that gave us some interesting characters. We’re not trying to tap into ‘He’s a black man so he should speak this way, and she’s an Indian woman so she should speak that way’. We’re trying to feel what they’re like as people. Maybe that’s my own idiocy, naivety or delusion about what people are fighting about now; I know that there are some people who believe that the only fiction you should do is basically your own autobiography, but I think that’s really limiting and you can’t tell stories. I hope that we’ve found a sensitive way of discussing those issues.”

As launch looms, there’s social-media uproar in response to Houser telling New York Magazine that he and his writing team worked a few 100-hour weeks on the game. People interpreted this as an epidemic in the company.

During our time together, before New York Magazine’s piece came out, Houser had told me how difficult a game of this size is to get made, to get good, and then to make outstanding. His family, he says, would concede that he was a “husk” at some points during development. He explained that some of the longest periods of work, for him, would be playing through the game in its entirety with Nelson, Sarwar his brother and other senior developers – taking notes for weeks on end to improve things.

Entire missions that had been written, designed, animated and acted ended up scrapped. Late into development, Rockstar’s senior team also decided to add letterboxing to the game’s cut scenes, which meant entire reshoots for the cast, not to mention tons more work for everyone else involved in the cinematics. But it’s in these late stages that the game finally takes shape. Until that point, Houser explained, there are points during development where he doubts everything. “The vibe isn’t good yet, the missions aren’t fun yet, the game isn’t fun yet, the code isn’t fun yet, and you’re like, 'Oh god, what a bunch of idiots and I’m the worst of them’,” he told me.

The key, he said, is to sideline ego. “We care about it. We care about details. We are also hopefully humble enough that we can look at it and go, ‘Yeah it’s good but this rough edge, we have to smooth that out’. Sam and Rob are particularly obsessed by that. It might mean that it requires new animation or it needs a new scene because the story isn’t making sense, or it requires a new character. Whatever the rough edge is, we’ll find it and we’ll work on it.”

© Rockstar Games

In the days following, Rockstar released staff-completed timesheets averaging between 42 and 45 hours per week, as well as relaxed its rules on staff posting about their work life online. Already, a wider variety of accounts about the work culture at Rockstar are coming out, both on social media and in an investigate piece by specialist games website, Kotaku.

All of it paints a broader, less extreme picture of the studio as an employer. In many respects, the picture is one of any large company employing thousands of individuals. Many love it, others don’t; some work long hours, many don’t; many thrive off the pressure and demands, while some don’t.

After New York Magazine's piece came out, I asked Nelson about the culture at Rockstar. “It’s easier in the morning than it is at the end of the day,” he concludes. “We help each other through development. Everybody has good days and bad days. We started working together as one completely unified team over the course of this game, and it’s a constant balancing act. Sometimes we do work longer than we want to but we’re always trying to stay on top of that. It’s not something that anybody takes pride in. We’re just constantly trying to find out how we make [conditions] better because we need everybody to be wanting to make it. You sustain enthusiasm by the wins you get every day and every week – they give you the joy and the hope to keep going. I think it’s really amazing when you’re working on it and then to finally get it out there. It’s our biggest game than we’ve ever done by a long shot. I hope it’s our best one.”

Only time will tell whether Rockstar achieved the goals they set eight years ago, but what sticks with me as I leave the big glass doors of Rockstar North is what’s apparent from talking to Houser and his colleagues over the past few weeks. About how the work they have done here has been the most ambitious and fulfilling of their careers. It reminds me of what Houser told me when I asked him why he continues to make video games; the thing that, throughout 20 years running the company, has personally given him the joy and the hope to persevere; the thing that explains Rockstar's shroud of secrecy, its shunning of the spotlight.

“Sam and I talk about this a lot,” he replied, “and it’s that games are still magical. It’s like they’re made by elves. You turn on the screen and it’s just this world that exists on TV. I think you gain something by not knowing how they’re made. As much as we might lose something in terms of people’s respect for what we do, their enjoyment of what we do is enhanced. Which is probably more important.”

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Red Dead Redemption 2 is out on 26th October