From Dickens to Deadeye: How iconic literature helped shape Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA’s stories

Charles Dickens. Thomas Hardy. The Brontë sisters. These icons defined Victorian literature. But is it time to add an unexpected name to that list: Rockstar co-founder and Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption 2 lead writer Dan Houser?

Of course not, but the connection between Rockstar’s biggest games and those titans of literature is less of a stretch than it might seem. Houser himself says the studio’s flagship titles draw heavily from classic Victorian storytelling. Red Dead Redemption 2, in particular, ended up being “slightly more novelistic” than GTA V, thanks largely to the Victorian fiction he was devouring throughout its development.

Red Dead Redemption 2/Rockstar Games

While Houser concedes that GTA is hardly “as good” as Dickens, the works bear surprising similarities.

“I was talking to a journalist from Paris Match, a very cultured French guy – and he said, ‘Well, the Grand Theft Auto games are just like Dickens’. And I was like, God bless you for saying that! But I thought about it afterwards and, well, they’re not as good as Dickens, but they are similar in that he’s world-building,” Houser explained. “If you look at Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy or any of those authors, there’s that feeling of all the world is here – that’s what you’re trying to get in open world games. It’s a twisted prism, looking at a society that’s interesting in one way or another.”

And during the long, demanding creation of RDR2, that literary influence was anything but casual. “I binged on Victorian novels for that,” he told The Guardian. “I listened to the audiobook of Middlemarch walking to and from the office every day. I loved it.”

That immersion helped shape RDR2’s storytelling ambitions. “I thought that was a way of doing something new on the story side,” Houser said. “And the game was going to look so pretty, the art was so strong, I thought the story had better really set it up. We were trying to fill out the three-dimensional lives of the characters, and also to capture that 19th-century feeling of life and death, which was very different from ours.”

Are you surprised that Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and other iconic literature helped shape Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA’s stories? Which Rockstar game do you think has the best storytelling overall? Let us know in the comments.