Rockstar Co-Founder's New Project Gets A Subdued Teaser
Our first peek at the Absurdaverse lives up to its name.
It’s been nearly five years since Dan Houser, the co-founder of Rockstar Games and lead writer on most of the famed developer's biggest hits, left the company to start his own creative venture. And over the weekend, the company gave its social media followers a first look at the characters that will star in the ambitious multimedia gaming project.
Developer Absurd Ventures showed an ensemble of 20 unnamed characters, each of which will play a role in the broader fictions the team is called the “Absurdaverse.” Among the wide mix of diverse characters are a top hat-wearing gentleman who looks pulled straight out of a western, a skater kid, a skeleton man, a balding corpo-political type, a viking-style warrior, and what appears to be the personification of the Grim Reaper.
“Prepare to meet some new kinds of heroes (and watch them suffer),” the company writes about the chorus of colorful characters on X.
The developer promised that more information about the Absurdaverse’s first animated projects and the “story-driven action-comedy adventure game” set in this world will come later in the year.
It’s hard to gauge what’s in store for the Absurdaverse based solely on this image. The reveal shows a mish-mash of characters who each wouldn't look out of place in various other genres and games. There’s also no central point of interest, but rather a bunch of elements that arouse more questions. While there’s not much to go on, the confirmation that there will be strong science fiction influences and seemingly the infusion of fantasy elements gives me the same vibes I get from Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staple’s award-winning space opera comic Saga. Just a hunch of course.
It’s a fairly subdued reveal that tonally follows the studio’s past updates. But it is worth noting its similarities to Houser’s past work. The decision to present these characters as animated stills as opposed to 3D models, for example, is reminiscent of both the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead franchises.
We know very little about the grand franchise Absurd Ventures is working on. Absurdaverse officially kicked off in 2024 with the release of a very meta science fiction podcast series called A Better Paradise. In 2025, a crime-fiction comic book series called American Caper, which seems totally separate from the audio series, is set to begin.
The two projects kicking off the Absurdaverse are not games, but a narrative podcast and a graphic novel set to start later this year.
While there’s no word on when the first game in this universe is set to release, Houser has confirmed that it will be an open-world action adventure. Last year, Absurd also announced that it is opening a second studio headed by Dead Space co-creator Bret Robbins. The studio, named Absurd Marin, is working on a “story-driven action-adventure game” separate from the open-world game.
