Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser wanted to kill Niko Bellic at the end of GTA 4, and only stayed his hand because the studio was ‘Full of fear’ and the game didn’t quite work with it

Red Dead Redemption’s ending—which, heads up, I am gonna spoil here—is famous for a reason. Gamers are a cosseted bunch, and it was (heck, it continues to be) very rare that an open world didn’t stick you right back in the protagonist’s boots after credits rolled, so you could go mop up whatever side quests and activities you hadn’t done yet.

RDR bucked that expectation when it straight-up killed poor ol’ John Marston at the end. Sure, you could still keep playing as his son Jack, but the guy you’d come to know and love over tens of hours of playtime was cold in the ground. It hit like a sledgehammer, and it’s still tough to play through the game’s ending even now.

Turns out, though, that Rockstar would have liked to subject you to that emotional trauma even earlier. In a chat with Lex Fridman, Rockstar co-founder (who has since departed the company) Dan Houser said that he would’ve really liked to break your heart in GTA 4. “I would like to have, at the end of GTA 4, killed Niko,” said Houser, with what I can only describe as a bit too much relish.

Why didn’t he? Because unlike RDR, killing off Niko just didn’t quite gel with how Rockstar had set up GTA 4. “You know, the game doesn’t work like that. So it was this thing where we hadn’t done it, thought about doing it, hadn’t done it, and then going ‘Let’s do it’ [in RDR].”

Which makes a degree of sense, I suppose. There wasn’t really anyone else in GTA 4 it would have made sense for you to play if Niko had carked it. His cousin Roman was… not really cut out for the gangster lifestyle, he had no kids, who was left? Brucie? Little Jacob? Actually, maybe a Jacob game would be kind of fun.

I can’t help but think Rockstar probably just didn’t feel quite confident enough to do something like kill your character when GTA 4 released. Sure, it had put out a whole bunch of games people loved—San Andreas is still, probably, my personal favourite GTA—but it was GTA 4 that really established its narrative bonafides. I can’t help but think the plaudits it got for GTA 4’s story gave its writers the boost they needed to feel confident enough to waste John Marston in 2010.

After all, Houser does recall that “people were really upset and angry at us for doing it [in RDR] because they didn’t think it was going to happen.

“It was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that,” says Houser, “and then it worked. So I think that was something that was very… full of fear [for Rockstar], and it worked out okay.”