Dan Houser’s Next Big IP Project, ‘Absurdaverse,’ Will Bring New Games and Animation

Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games, left the company in 2020 and started a new venture called Absurd Ventures. Now, his team is revealing their first major project, something called the Absurdaverse.

It won’t be just a game—it will be a whole new IP designed for multiple forms of media. There’s already an animation project coming later this year.

This isn’t just about gaming. Absurd Ventures has been working on other creative projects, including an audio fiction series, A Better Paradise, which is set to expand into comics and animation soon. The company is clearly going all-in on storytelling across different formats.

The game itself is described as an ‘original story-driven action-comedy set in the Absurdaverse.’ Houser has always focused on narrative, but this feels like a step in a completely new direction. GTA and Red Dead Redemption had dark humor, but this sounds like something else entirely.

What’s really unusual is how they’re introducing this. Instead of unveiling a specific game, they’re pushing the entire IP first. That’s the kind of move we’ve seen before, sometimes with bad results. The promotional image adds even more mystery. I

t shows a mix of characters that don’t quite fit together—a guy who looks like he stepped out of Vice City, a kid in cargo shorts, a bulky hippie, plus a skeleton viking, a dwarf, and even what seems to be the Grim Reaper. There’s no clear theme tying them all together, but it suggests something weird and unpredictable.

If Houser’s past work tells us anything, expect something with strong storytelling, even if the tone is a lot lighter than his previous hits. Of course, this is still early days, but one thing’s for sure—this is shaping up to be nothing like GTA. Whether that’s good or bad, we’ll have to wait and see.

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