From GTA to the Internet of Things: What Lazlow Jones Did Next [IGN]

“My cat took a shit, and I know that because I have a litter robot that sends me a text message whenever he goes to the bathroom,” Lazlow continues, putting the world to rights from the bottom half of my laptop screen.

One of the characters in audio science fiction series A Better Paradise, called NigelDave (yes, all one word, more on him later) is also trying to “solve” the problem that is humanity, but he’s using the internet of things to do it. Probably not the best idea.

But that is what A Better Paradise and, it seems, much of what Absurd Ventures is all about. And it is a lot. There’s this audio series, yes, but also a graphic novel set within an entirely different universe, called American Caper. Then there’s the mystery video game — let’s be real here, the video game is the main event — that has already sparked enthusiastic headlines based on job adverts that suggest what sort of video game Absurd Ventures is trying to make.

It’s hard not to get excited when you read about former Rockstar developers who are working on an “open-world action-adventure game.” Lazlow doesn’t want anyone thinking Absurd Ventures is taking Rockstar on at its own game with some sort of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption competitor. Of course he doesn’t — those games cost hundreds of millions to make and take years and years to put together. But then, these aren’t just any former Rockstar developers.

Let’s start with Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who left the company — and his brother Sam — back in 2020. This is the Dan Houser, the Londoner who wrote GTA and Red Dead for all those years, who made it big in New York to the tune of billions of dollars. And then he left, and now he’s going it alone, making a brand new “open-world action-adventure game.” Yes, it’s hard not to get excited.

Houser is not alone, of course. His partner in crime here is Lazlow Jones, who to the average GTA fan is perhaps an even more recognisable name than Dan Houser. The former journalist and radio host became the voice of GTA for a generation of gamers after he produced, scripted, and hosted the hugely popular Chatterbox FM radio station in 2001’s seminal Grand Theft Auto 3.

From there, Lazlow worked with Dan Houser on pretty much every Rockstar game as a co-writer, coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas to satirize whatever place and time were the focus of the development team’s attention. Dialogue, quest design, even Easter eggs — Lazlow was there. It’s almost overwhelming to interview him. Where to start? Which of the long list of Rockstar games he worked on over a near 20-year stretch to pick his brains on first?

Perhaps it is best, though, to start by asking about the end. With GTA Online bringing in billions for Rockstar and its parent company Take-Two, with Red Dead Redemption 2 an enormous hit in its own right, and with GTA 6 development ramping up, Lazlow left Rockstar. He left Rockstar. You’re at the top of the video game development mountain, and then you jump off. Why?

Just a few weeks after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in October 2018, Lazlow’s sister told him she had terminal cancer. He moved her in with him and became her primary caregiver, while still writing and producing and directing and doing all the other things one must do while working for Rockstar. “I spent a lot of time writing comedy from chemo awards,” he says, matter of factly, “which is a very interesting creative exercise.”

Taking care of his dying sister “snapped me out to analyze things,” Lazlow admits. He left Rockstar, and then the pandemic hit.

“I spent time watching a lot of documentaries like that Black Mirror documentary and just trying to figure out what was the next creative step,” he says. This makes a lot of sense to me, having listened to a few episodes of A Better Paradise (it’s very Black Mirror). His old friend Dan, who had also left Rockstar, asked Lazlow to join him in forming Absurd Ventures in Santa Monica. And so he did.

I ask about burnout. I ask if he got sick of making GTA and Red Dead. Lazlow won’t go as far as to agree to either suggestion, but does point out that he shipped nine GTA games from 2001 to 2020. That’s a lot of GTA. He went from GTA 5 to Red Dead Redemption 2 and then to GTA Online as that was blowing up, and then GTA 6. He was, he says, “excited” to work on a new intellectual property. When Dan Houser told him it was set in the future — Lazlow hadn’t worked on anything set in the future while at Rockstar — it made even more sense to him.

Still, all this new stuff, everything Absurd Ventures is doing, is satire in the truest Rockstar sense. It is a satire of an imagined future rather than the America of today or decades past, but it is satire nonetheless. Rockstar has form when it comes to nailing a certain time period. Absurd Ventures is trying to nail the future.

Where do you start? AI, it seems. I roll my eyes at the thought — I’m already sick of AI and it’s just getting started. Absurd Ventures, though, is coming at it from a Rockstar-style perspective. That is, how do you take the piss out of AI in 2030? In 2040?

Back to NigelDave, a comedy AI character with a split personality. In the A Better Paradise story, NigelDave, played by British actor Paterson Joseph, is an AI created by a fictional future video game development team to help build the open-world game they’re working on. In the process, NigelDave tries to work out what humanity is all about, and struggles a bit.

Here’s the Black Mirror bit: A Better Paradise imagines a future where AI is used to create advertisements in real-time to manipulate the viewer into buying a product. “We are headed in that direction,” Lazlow says, more annoyed than concerned. Perhaps we’re there already.

It started small, just Dan Houser and Lazlow Jones and two dogs in the early days, but Absurd Ventures has grown steadily as work on three(!) different universes, two of which are announced, ramped up. Other former Rockstar developers have joined the team. Something, it seems, is happening here.

Three different universes, an audio fiction series and a video game set in one, a graphic novel set in another, and who knows what else set in the third — it’s too much for a developer without a single title under its belt to take on right off the bat, surely? Lazlow has an answer for this, and it goes back to his time at Rockstar, where the team worked on loads of different types of media for GTA and Red Dead all of the time, all at the same time.

“This morning I was working on A Better Paradise Volume 2, and when I run out of gas on that, I jump over to American Caper or the third IP that we haven’t officially announced yet,” he says, enthusiastically. “And so it allows my creative brain to jump between different things and vastly different universes. It’s exciting.”

It’s a lot, then, but a lot quicker, too. Rockstar takes a long time to make video games. It’s one of a handful of developers in the world that can afford to do so. There will be a 12 year gap between the release of GTA 5 and GTA 6, assuming GTA 6 does indeed come out fall 2025 as Rockstar has said it will.

Hopefully it won’t be long before we see something of this video game Absurd Ventures is working on. Perhaps we’ll see it before GTA 6 comes out. But what is it, exactly? Don’t spend too long wondering, it’s not that deep.

“We’ve confirmed that we’re working on a game that’s in the A Better Paradise universe, and people that are trying to dig around about what does that feel and sound like?” Lazlow starts. “Well, the audio fiction series is about a fictional game team in the future, making an open-world game. As you listen through the 12 episodes, there are scenes where the dev teams working on that open-world game are having conversations about its features. You hear people playing the game, you hear people inside the open-world game exploring around, especially as it starts to get weirder and weirder with the AI creating different aspects of that world. So a lot of the questions could be answered by listening to the series.”

It’s all very meta (not the Facebook kind), and, I think, all very The Truman Show. It’s a world within a world, but one we play around in knowing full well that we, the players, are a part of the story. It’s a video game “developed” by a fictional video game developer, itself created by a real-life video game developer. I think Absurd Ventures is trying to say something here.

Perhaps it’s trying to say something about the future (the now?) of video game development. In A Better Paradise, people find they’re getting dangerously addicted to this open-world game, but it’s because the AI has mined their memories and is tailoring the game world to their experience. One character sees a dead family member in the game, another has a conversation with a clone of himself. Players can’t put the controller down because the game is just so personal, and then things start to go wrong.

A Better Paradise is set 10 or 20 years in the future, but it feels like a satire of a future right around the corner. I wouldn’t be surprised to see, say, Ubisoft or EA or even Rockstar giving such an AI-driven video game experience a good go, no doubt powered by some impossible to understand Nvidia tech that has shareholders salivating. On PlayStation 6? The next Xbox? Why not? It doesn’t sound so absurd.

For Lazlow, his exit from Rockstar a now four-year-old memory, he’s getting to play in a different way, too. “Facebook’s going to bring us all together,” he remembers of the social network’s original promise. “You are going to be able to see when a friend from high-school had a baby and, oh my god! It’s going to be this heartwarming future. But Facebook has turned into this thing that has turned the downfall of Western civilization into entertainment.”

A Better Paradise indeed.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.