Dan Houser Reveals Rockstar's Struggle to Create Bully

20 years later, Dan Houser reveals how Bully's intense controversy turned it into one of Rockstar's most difficult games.

Rockstar is gearing up to release GTA 6, but, of course, Grand Theft Auto isn't the only series the developer is known for. Along with games like the popular Red Dead Redemption, there are many fans of another open world adventure from this studio: Bully.

Released in 2006 and originally known in Europe as the Canis Canem Edit, Bully tells the story of rebellious student Jamie Hopkins who gets in and out of trouble over the course of a year at Bullworth Academy. It was a smaller-scale, less X-rated version of GTA that was critically acclaimed. But the path to the launch was far from simple.

"Development was hard," Dan Houser, former Rockstar VP and writer of Bully, said in a new interview as part of IGN30's Icons series. "The game always struggled. It was difficult. It was an outside concept. We struggled with it. I wasn't sure it was a good thing. We really wanted it to come together. It was really fun after that because it came together so well. The team did a great job. It was a really strong kind of game at the end. It kind of came together too late."

House went on to explain why developing Bully proved such a challenge a year after GTA: San Andreas. "New IP is very stressful because you're doing something that no one has done before," he said. "And that game in particular, there was all this controversy about the name, or people got it wrong when they'd never seen it. So I think one of the challenges with that game was that it never got the attention it deserved. We were too focused on at least getting people to save it or not protest it before it came out."

The mid-2000s were a time of controversy whenever Rockstar games hit store shelves, whether it was the ultra-violet violence of Manhunt or the sex minigame mod, Hot Coffee, discovered in the San Andreas codex. Bully was no different, with some members of the public concerned about how its explicit content would translate into a school setting.

"There was a huge hysteria around it," Houser said. We had to spend most of 2006 playing it, so we weren't able to promote the game as positively as we normally would. I think it didn't help. I mean, at the time the coffee was hot and it felt like everything was going to explode. It was very stressful. And just go to work every day, wonder who's going to object to you that day, and hope things work out right. I wasn't directly involved. Fortunately, I was kind of on the sidelines and not directly involved in organizing most of those things. "But it was really stressful for the people involved."

But it wasn't just external pressures that made Bully's development difficult. Rockstar also had to wrestle with how to make the open-world action-adventure genre work from a teenager's perspective. The school environment meant that driving cars and shooting guns had to be parked in the same direction - two vital gameplay mechanics of any GTA.

"The developers were having trouble with the IP, and we had made some changes, and some people had moved there from New York, and it was getting a little bit better, but it was still really struggling," Houser revealed. "It was really good, if you take away the cars and you take away the guns, what's the game? What do you do? And the lead designer, who was really talented, started putting in the program and started putting in the lessons and he was getting there.

"Then, one of the designers put in this thing where you could stick a Post-it note behind a character that said 'kick me.' Then an NPC would run and kick them. And just seeing that work, you feel, it's a great moment. So you, okay, we're getting somewhere. So I think that moment was probably the one I'll always remember going to, this IP that didn't work in GTA, obviously. "It's not fun, but as a kid, and suddenly you get to the scale of school and the scale of a kid's life, it starts to feel like a lot of fun."

The bully was really a lot of fun. So much so that fans have been begging for a sequel ever since. While ideas for a follow-up were floated once on Rockstar, Houser revealed to IGN in 2025 that it never got off the ground due to "bandwidth issues".

I miss the days when every year you got a new Rockstar open world to roam around in, but I guess at some point I'll have to stop wishing for the PS2 era. That was finally 20 years ago. Fortunately, Grand Theft Auto 6 is only a few weeks away from release.

For more on GTA 6, you can read our full interview with Rockstar studio head Rob Nelson, how the game deals with the current political climate, and why Dan Houser says he won't play it.

Simon Cardy is a senior editor at IGN who can mostly be found engrossed in open-world gaming, engrossed in Korean cinema, or despairing over the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.