Rockstar is slowly gearing up for Grand Theft Auto 6‘s release, and as it does so, some new details about co-founder Dan Houser’s new game have been confirmed.
Back in 2020, Houser left Rockstar 22 years after founding the company, revealing his new studio Absurd Ventures in Games the following year. The company was described as providing “ready-made interactive leisure and entertainment software development,” and since its announcement, not much has been confirmed in the way of what it’s actually working on. Well, as spotted by GamesRadar, we do now have some details on the studio’s first game, thanks to some recent job listings. The listing for a lead gameplay designer role noted that the role will see the selected candidate become “the primary vision holder and hands-on contributor for character, controls, and camera design in an open world action-adventure game.”
It also makes mention of the role needing to deliver “best-in-class combat and third person action across multiple game modes” so it sounds like the game might not just be a single-player title. Following this, Absurd Adventures announced its first project, which isn’t actually a game at all, but an audio fiction series called A Better Paradise, a sci-fi story “set in the near future” that “tells the story of the ill-fated development of an ambitious but addictive digital game-world project led by inventor and psychologist, Dr. Mark Tyburn.”
Absurd Adventures also noted in the press release for this audio series that it’s making games set within this universe, writing, “In addition to launching Volume One of the A Better Paradise audio series, Houser, Lazlow [Jones], and the Absurd Ventures team are in various stages of development on multiple projects set in the A Better Paradise universe, including additional audio fiction seasons, as well as television and video game titles.” Whether the lead gameplay designer role is for a game set in the A Better Paradise world or not isn’t clear, but a sci-fi world would be a good fit for an open world action-adventure game.
Earlier this week, Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two narrowed down the release date for GTA 6 to sometime in the fall of 2025, so while Absurd Venture’s first game is likely still a while away, the long wait for Rockstar’s latest doesn’t seem so long anymore.