Rockstar Games is preparing for the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6, but one of its most fondly remembered titles nearly never came together. Dan Houser, the former Rockstar vice president who wrote Bully, said the 2006 open-world adventure was in peril throughout its development, according to a new interview tied to IGN's 30th anniversary series.
«The development was hard,» Houser said. «The game was in trouble all of the time. It was difficult. It was an out-there concept. We were struggling with it. I wasn't sure it was going to be any good.»
Bully, originally known in Europe as Canis Canem Edit, tells the story of unruly student Jimmy Hopkins navigating a year at the fictional Bullworth Academy. Released to critical acclaim, it offered a smaller-scale, less explicit take on the Grand Theft Auto formula. But Houser said the game only came together very late, crediting the team for ultimately delivering a strong final product.
Part of the difficulty stemmed from the timing. Bully arrived just over a year after GTA: San Andreas, and Houser described launching a new intellectual property as inherently stressful because it asks developers to do something no one has done before. In Bully's case, that stress was compounded by a public controversy over the game's name and content, with critics worried about how explicit material would translate into a school setting.
«There was huge hysteria around it,» Houser said. «We had to spend most of 2006 diffusing it, so we couldn't positively promote the game in the way we normally would've done.»
That period coincided with the Hot Coffee scandal, in which a sex minigame was discovered in San Andreas's code, and with broader backlash against Rockstar titles such as Manhunt. Houser recalled the atmosphere as one in which employees went to work wondering who might be protesting them that day. He said he was not directly involved in managing the response but remembered it as deeply stressful for those who were.
The external pressure was matched by an internal design problem. Rockstar had to figure out how its open-world action-adventure style could work from the perspective of a teenager. The school setting meant cars and guns, two core GTA mechanics, had to be set aside.
«If you take away the cars and you take away the guns, what is the game?» Houser said, describing the question that dogged the team. He credited a lead designer with building out a schedule and lessons, but said a turning point came when another designer added a feature letting players stick a Post-it note reading «Kick me» on a character's back, prompting an NPC to run up and kick them. Seeing that work, Houser said, made the team realize the concept could be fun at the scale of a school and a kid's life.
Fans have long called for a sequel. Houser said ideas for a follow-up were floated at Rockstar but never got off the ground because of what he called bandwidth issues. For now, attention at the studio is focused on GTA 6, which is weeks away from release.