Former GTA Boss Dan Houser Calls Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom the Hitchcock of Video Games

Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser just compared modern Zelda to Alfred Hitchcock. Not the pairing I had on my bingo card, but the way he explains it actually tracks.

How we got here

In a chat with Lex Fridman, Houser looked back at the messy magic of early 3D gaming. He said those first wave titles blew minds because, for the first time, games suddenly felt alive and believable in a totally new way. From there, the conversation zeroed in on Nintendo and how ruthlessly efficient its design ethos is — the idea that nothing on screen is wasted. Fridman put it this way: Zelda is the series that first really nailed the feeling of a world.

The Zelda-as-Hitchcock thing

Houser singled out The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom as the apex of that idea. To him, the recent games speak the pure language of video games. Everything in them operates predictably and interlocks with everything else — highly systemic, consistent rules that your brain just gets — and the way it all snaps together is kind of jaw-dropping.

"The new ones, they almost, to me, feel like Hitchcock. They are just speaking the language of video games."

He drew a direct film analogy: Hitchcock movies aren’t trying to imitate reality; they are movies with a capital M — stylized, precise, and designed to make you feel something through the grammar of cinema. Houser thinks the newest Zeldas are the same for games: experiences that could only exist as video games and nothing else.

By that logic, I wouldn’t expect him to be overly enthusiastic about the incoming live-action Zelda movie trying to bottle that lightning.

Meanwhile, back at Rockstar

Houser also admitted that building Red Dead Redemption 2 was rough. He said the whole thing wasn’t exactly fun while it was in progress because it didn’t feel like it was coming together, and the budget was so high he didn’t even want to think about it.