Meet the brains behind Grand Theft Auto

When I arrive at the luxurious Soho apartment that's been rented for the demo of new game Grand Theft Auto V and my interview with Dan Houser, co-founder and creative director of Rockstar Games, I'm told Houser won't answer any questions about his personal life.

I should especially avoid any mention of his recent purchase of a Brooklyn Heights mansion formerly owned by Truman Capote, which made news in New York as the most expensive non-Manhattan real-estate purchase in the city's history.

Houser's Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of crime-focused titles is now the foundation of Rockstar Games, and as well regarded by gamers as it is hated by religious groups.

GTA IV, released in 2008 for a new generation of consoles (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360), told the story of Niko Bellic, a veteran of an unspecified Eastern European war who comes to the US to eliminate a rival soldier living in a crime-filled version of New York called Liberty City.

In the first week of its release it generated more revenue than any entertainment product, ever - and everyone assumed a sequel would quickly follow. But Rockstar and its two principals, brothers Dan and Sam Houser (38 and 41, respectively), have a reputation for doing things differently.

In 1990 Sam Houser got a job at BMG Music in London, then one of the "big four" music companies, working closely with Pop Idol creator Simon Fuller. He directed in-house music videos for bands such as Take That and the Spice Girls before settling at BMG Interactive Entertainment, an arm of the business that had been established in 1994 to hitch the company wagon to the video-game boom.

When Dan graduated from university with a degree in geography, he joined him there.

"My brother offered me a job testing CD-ROMs," he tells me. "Virtual tours were big at the time and I did a virtual of the Musée d'Orsay. I wanted to be a writer and a job came up on a trivia game and they had joke questions, and they needed someone to write that. Then they wanted to do a soccer game and they needed someone who knew about soccer, so I did that. And then all of sudden I had a full-time job in video games,Find detailed product information for Low price howo tipper truck and other products. which I didn't really mean to have. I always thought I'd do something serious.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele ,"

By 1998, BMG hadn't made much impact in the interactive space and the decision was made to sell BMG Interactive to Take-Two Interactive, a burgeoning American gaming company owned by the then 24-year-old publishing heir Ryan Brant, for a little over $14 million.

During the negotiations, Sam and Dan convinced Brant to let them keep the company alive as a largely independent imprint that would work as an outlier in the games industry.

Neither brother had any coding experience, but they perceived a gap in the gaming market for "cool titles".

They envisioned gaming products informed by music-industry attitude,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. featuring protagonists who resembled movie heroes. While Take-Two was producing cut-priced games in volume, the new imprint planned to produce high-end offerings for young-adult gamers.

The pair moved from London to New York to set up the new imprint, Rockstar Games - a name its new president, Sam Houser, believed to be representative of what the company would be all about: "High-end, glamorous games that we wanted to play," summarises Dan.

Certainly, the location of our meeting today - a $20,000-a-night SoHo apartment filled with Japanese food and stylishly dressed employees - is very "rock star".

Initially, it was a police simulator, with the player controlling a squad car tasked with chasing criminals around two-dimensional American cities filled with traffic and pedestrians. Deadening the game somewhat, though, was the fact that the player had to observe road rules and avoid hitting pedestrians.

In fact, in the new version points were awarded if the player did hit a pedestrian (who'd explode into a smear of red with a satisfying "pop") or committed other crimes, such as carjackings.

In 1995, the company presented the game to Sam Houser, then working in a commissioning role at BMG Interactive. Not only was he enamoured of the fuzzy morality of the game,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. he also loved that play wasn't bound by the normal gaming parameters: if one task was too hard, the player didn't see a "game over" screen. Instead,Directory ofchina glass mosaic Tile Manufacturers, he had the option of going somewhere else within the game.

"Graphically, it wasn't nearly as sharp as Tomb Raider, but it was deeply immersive," Sam Houser recalled in a Rolling Stone interview in 2006. "Once we made it possible to kill policemen, we knew we had something that would turn heads."

The game was bought by BMG Interactive, which released it as Grand Theft Auto (it soon became known just as GTA), a title deemed to be more in keeping with its adult content. It became a minor hit in 1997. Take-Two also bought DMA Design, which was then rebranded as Rockstar North.

After moving to New York, Rockstar started work on GTA II, released in 1999. It was only a minimal improvement on its prequel, though, and sales were disappointing. It wasn't until the development of GTA III began for the then very powerful PlayStation 2 console that the Housers saw the opportunity to make the high-end, technologically advanced adult game they'd always envisioned.

That said, the demo I saw didn't end with a town hall meeting about tax policy but rather with the kidnapping - by Michael, Trevor and Franklin - of a man from a heavily defended skyscraper in downtown Los Santos. The trio kill black-suited federal agents, cause helicopters to explode and plunge the city into chaos.

"The job is to present action," says Houser. "Everything else is on top of that. Your first job is to make the game fun."

Even if that means inviting controversy. In GTA III, the player could make use of the services of a prostitute to bolster his health - and then kill her afterwards to get his money back.

There was an immediate chorus of disapproval from concerned groups, but Rockstar refused to engage them after pointing out that its games are for adults, not children.

The company had a point - last year, a report from Bond University in Queensland found that the average age of gamers in Australia is 32.

"We were always an easy target," says Houser. "Even when our most violent and antisocial game, Manhunt [where the player has to commit a series of increasingly gruesome murders], came out in 2003, the film Saw 3, which is far more violent, was being lauded as a slasher classic.

"Interacting with a system, as one does in a game, is no better or worse than looking at pictures or reading words in a book. I don't think society is in great shape, but I don't think video games have caused the problems."

In Australia, GTA III was refused an MA15+ classification due to its "sexualised violence"; with no R18+ rating for video games available here, copies were pulled from shelves.