Dan Houser’s Absurdaverse game may be the closest thing we ever get to Grand Theft Auto escaping into a fantasy convention after three energy drinks. It is an untitled, AAA, story-driven open-world comedy populated by podcasters, corporate weirdos, an MMA maniac, a Viking, a skeleton and what appears to be Death itself. Somehow, that lineup is only the sensible beginning.
The bigger reveal is that Houser and Absurd Ventures are building two open-world games. Absurdaverse is the comic one; A Better Paradise is a separate third-person dystopian sci-fi tragedy. Neither has a release date or confirmed platforms, but hiring material, cast announcements and Houser’s own comments give us enough pieces to see the shape of his post-Rockstar ambition.
The Dan Houser Absurdaverse game is deliberately unhinged
Absurd Ventures describes Absurdaverse as a comedy-satire universe and invites us to meet “new kinds of heroes” before watching them suffer. Its first public character lineup contains 20 figures who look as though several unrelated games crashed into the same lift: office workers, streetwear kids, fantasy warriors, a top-hatted gentleman and assorted supernatural nightmares.
The voice cast makes the tone clearer. Rachel Dratch plays a chain-smoking sovereign-citizen podcaster. Dan Soder voices a Chief People Officer who treats human resources like a DJ residency, while Samantha Alton plays an unhinged MMA fighter. Rachel Dratch, Soder, Ari Matti, Annie Lederman, Yamaneika Saunders and Steph Tolev are among a wider ensemble expected to run into the hundreds across animation and the game.
Animated shorts premiered at the Netflix Is A Joke Festival in May. That matters because Houser is not bolting a cartoon onto a game after the fact. The characters are being rehearsed in animation before players meet them in an open world, continuing the tradition of the deranged television, radio and advertising that made Rockstar’s cities feel culturally alive.
What Houser actually built at Rockstar
Houser’s reputation is not simply “the GTA bloke”. He co-founded Rockstar Games and became its vice president of creative, serving as a lead writer across more than 20 games, including the Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and Bully franchises. His fingerprints are on Vice City’s radio, Niko Bellic’s weary immigrant tragedy, Arthur Morgan’s slow moral reckoning and Bullworth Academy’s petty social warfare.
That work was never a solo act, and Absurd smartly reunites him with major collaborators. Lazlow helped turn Rockstar’s in-world media into a weaponised joke machine. Michael Unsworth, a writer on Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V and both Red Dead Redemption games, is part of the creative team behind A Better Paradise. The studio is also hiring and recruiting developers with experience spanning Bungie, Treyarch, Respawn, Insomniac and Riot.
Houser left Rockstar in March 2020, according to Take-Two’s formal filing. That means Grand Theft Auto VI is moving forward without him, even as players pick apart everything Rockstar still has not explained about its next blockbuster. Absurdaverse is our first real chance to see what Houser chooses when he no longer has to carry GTA’s history on his back.
The job listings reveal the genuinely next-gen idea
The clearest design clues are hiding in Absurd Ventures’ live vacancies. The team wants an open-world designer, mission designers, systems engineers, gameplay animators and cinematic specialists. A mission-design listing identifies an all-new single-player open-world IP built in Unreal Engine 5 and asks for missions that can become “dynamic and unpredictable” by adapting to player choices and actions.
That wording is more exciting than another promise of a huge map. Rockstar’s best worlds felt reactive even when much of that reaction was carefully staged. Absurd appears interested in pushing the trick further: missions assembled around living systems, choices that alter the route rather than merely changing a final cutscene, and NPCs capable of making chaos without waiting for a yellow objective marker.
Here is where the speculation starts. Imagine insulting Dratch’s conspiracy podcaster, then discovering hours later that she has turned a neighbourhood against you. Help the human-resources DJ bury an office scandal and perhaps an entire corporate faction becomes friendly—until an employee remembers what you did. It could feel less like clearing icons and more like throwing a lit match into a box of personalities.
That would be a natural evolution of the life-simulation detail people already hope to see in Grand Theft Auto VI, and of the creator-driven chaos behind Rockstar’s NoPixel experiment. There is no confirmation Absurdaverse will use generative AI, multiplayer or a memory system. The credible clue is simpler: the studio explicitly wants unpredictable missions that respond to player behaviour.
A Better Paradise is the dark mirror
Absurdaverse should not be confused with A Better Paradise. The latter began as a 12-part audio drama and novel about an ambitious digital game world, its damaged creators and a deeply troubled artificial intelligence. Smilegate is funding and globally publishing the AAA open-world sci-fi action-adventure, with Houser writing and creative-directing alongside Lazlow and Unsworth.
The neatest possibility is that Houser is building two answers to the same problem. Absurdaverse can satirise the idiocy produced by interconnected people, media and institutions. A Better Paradise can ask what happens when the system connecting them becomes intelligent, addictive and hostile. One is the pub argument; the other is the nightmare you have after going home.
So when will we actually play it?
There is no announced release window, platform list or gameplay trailer for either project. Both were described as early in development, and the ongoing recruitment for core campaign, open-world and systems roles suggests patience will be required. Unreal Engine 5 makes this a modern production, but it does not prove a PlayStation 6 or next-Xbox release. “Next-gen” is a mood here, not a confirmed box.
What we can reasonably expect is a character-heavy single-player campaign, third-person action, strong comedy and a world designed to surprise its writers as well as its players. Houser has spent decades hiding some of his sharpest jokes inside fictional radio, television and background conversations; Rockstar is still expanding that in-world entertainment idea today. Absurdaverse looks like the moment the side channel becomes the whole show.
We do not need “GTA with a Viking” from Dan Houser. We need the freedom, nastiness, warmth and ridiculous cause-and-effect that made his best work feel alive, pointed at something nobody has already played for 200 hours. If that strange lineup is telling the truth, Absurdaverse may be exactly the creative reset its name promises.
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