Dan Houser, the Rockstar Games co-founder and ex-vice president who left the company in 2020, has officially launched a new studio called Absurd Ventures. Although Houser’s new venture was strongly rumoured for some time thanks to registrations filed in mid-2021, we now have confirmation alongside some… interesting promotion.
Geoff Keighley shared the news on social media, quoting a press release that describes Absurd Ventures as “building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a diverse variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation; video games and other interactive content; books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts.”
Houser’s history includes founding Rockstar Games with his brother, Sam Houser, writing nearly every Grand Theft Auto game as well as writing and executive producing Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Red Dead Online.
Dan’s new studio is seemingly going full-arthouse weird with things too, dropping a bizarre promotional video for Absurd Ventures that invites more questions than it answers. With taglines like “Storytelling. Philanthropy. Ultraviolence.” and “Polluting Minds And Damaging Souls In Every Medium Imaginable” it’s clear there’s a degree of edge that the team is hoping to showcase, so it’ll be interesting to see what projects they have in the works and whether they’ll actually capitalise on whatever is going on here:
