GTA 4 is a noticeably darker and more dour game than anything the series had put out before or since, but a lot of that stemmed from Dan Houser's life at the time.
Courtesy of the Lex Fridman podcast, the Rockstar Games' co-founder and GTA 4's lead writer gave a 'life imitates art' answer to the question of why the open-world hit felt so sombre. "I had been living in New York for a few years, and wasn't sure if I was happy," he recalled of the period where he was writing Niko Bellic's story.
