SAM AND DAN HOUSER BUILT ROCKSTAR. THEN ONE LEFT

As of September 2026, Sam Houser is still president of Rockstar Games, the company he cofounded, and Dan Houser has not returned since leaving in 2020. Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled for November 19, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, a date Rockstar set in November 2025 when it moved the game back from May 26, 2026, according to Rockstar's newswire announcement.

Sam Houser still runs Rockstar Games. His brother Dan announced his exit in February 2020 and now runs Absurd Ventures. The two of them turned a top down cops and robbers prototype into Grand Theft Auto, a franchise that has taken in more than $10.5 billion since GTA V shipped in 2013.

West London, 1994. The music industry was about to be eaten by tech. Cinema was in the middle of a ten year reinvention. Nobody was looking at video games.

Sam Houser and his brother Dan were.

The Houser brothers grew up in Hammersmith, raised on American music, American movies, and American mythology from several thousand miles away. That distance was not a disadvantage. It was the angle. Two outsiders looking in at a culture they could analyze without nostalgia gave Grand Theft Auto its perspective before it had a name.

West London, 1994. A Prototype Nobody Wanted to Publish

GTA did not start as GTA. It started as Race'n'Chase, a top down cops and robbers game developed at DMA Design in Dundee, Scotland. Sam was at BMG Interactive, the games label of BMG Music, trying to find titles worth publishing. When a bug in Race'n'Chase made the criminal side more fun than the cop side, Sam saw what the developers had accidentally built. He greenlit it. He renamed it. He moved to New York to run Rockstar Games out of a SoHo loft.

That decision, moving the operation to Manhattan and staffing it with music industry people, separated Rockstar from every other studio. The aesthetic came before the game mechanics. Dan Houser wrote dialogue and story. Sam ran the company and the culture.

The first GTA shipped in 1997. British tabloids called it dangerous. One newspaper ran a headline about murder simulators. Politicians in the United States quoted it in Senate hearings. Rockstar printed the headlines and used them as marketing.

Sam Houser Made the Calls. Dan Houser Built the Worlds.

GTA III, in 2001, was the shift that made everything else possible. Moving from top down to three dimensional open world, the game put players inside Liberty City in a way nobody had done before. Dan wrote the script. Sam approved the tone. The violence was intentional. The satire was intentional. The radio stations, which turned GTA into the most ambitious music licensing project in gaming history, were entirely intentional.

GTA's radio soundtracks introduced entire genres to millions of players who had never heard them. Liberty City FM ran rare hip hop. Flashback FM ran 1980s Miami soul. The music budget for GTA IV reportedly exceeded $5 million. No studio treated music the way Rockstar did, because no studio was run by people who came from the music industry. Sam Houser had worked at BMG. That background shaped everything, including how the GTA VI price point became a cultural flashpoint just as much as the game design did.

GTA V Made $1 Billion Before the Weekend Was Over

GTA V launched September 17, 2013. Three days later it had generated $1 billion in revenue. No entertainment product in history had crossed that threshold faster. Not a film. Not a music release. Not a tour.

The number needs context. A blockbuster film opening weekend is measured in the high tens of millions. A platinum album is 1 million units. GTA V sold 11.21 million copies in three days. As of 2026 it has shipped more than 225 million copies, making it the second most sold video game of all time.

The franchise has generated more than $10 billion in revenue across all titles. Take Two Interactive, the parent company, is valued at roughly $21 billion. A significant portion of that valuation traces back to two brothers who grew up watching American culture from Hammersmith.

Politicians Called It a Crime Simulator. It Sold 200 Million Copies.

The cultural pushback against GTA was consistent from 1997 through the mid 2000s. Jack Thompson, a Florida attorney, spent years attempting to link the games to real world violence. The American Psychological Association issued statements. The Australian government banned GTA III.

Rockstar did not apologize. The games got bigger, more detailed, and more expensive to produce. The GTA IV budget was reported at $100 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever made at that time. The controversy functioned as advertising to a generation of teenagers who were explicitly told not to play it. That generation grew up treating gaming as identity. iShowSpeed built a path from gaming streamer to FIFA cover athlete inside the culture Rockstar made possible.

Dan Left in 2020. Sam Stayed and Is Shipping GTA VI

Dan Houser announced his departure from Rockstar in February 2020 and formally exited that March. Rockstar gave no detailed public reason. He founded Absurd Ventures in 2021 to build new intellectual property across games, books and film.

Sam Houser did not leave. He is still president of Rockstar Games and has spoken publicly about Grand Theft Auto VI, describing it as a new vision for the series and saying it pushes the limits of what an open world game can do. Rockstar lost the writer and kept the operator.

That distinction matters for how the studio reads now. Dan wrote the dialogue that made Liberty City feel authored. Sam built the machine that could ship at that scale and staffed it out of the music industry rather than the games industry, and the machine is still his.

GTA VI releases November 19, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, with a PC version expected later. It is the most anticipated entertainment release of the year. Sam will be there on launch day. Dan will not, and his absence is the one variable nobody can measure until people actually play it.