Rockstar Games Cofounder Dan Houser Reveals the Real Reason Bully 2 Never Happened
The culprit was prosaic but punishing: bandwidth issues that throttled traffic and triggered delays across the network.
Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser finally said the quiet part out loud about Bully: it was a victim of bandwidth. Not scandal, not secret drama — just the very unsexy reality that a small leadership team can only spin so many plates.
So, why no Bully 2?
Quick refresher: Bully launched in 2006 and instantly picked up a cult following by squishing GTA-style open-world chaos into a foul-mouthed boarding school. You pulled pranks, sprinted to class, and played mini-game lessons like your GPA depended on it. Fans loved it. It just never turned into a full series the way Rockstar’s bigger guns did.
Houser — the co-founder of Rockstar Games and the lead writer on essentially every Grand Theft Auto, plus Red Dead Redemption 2 — told IGN at LA Comic Con that the studio didn’t follow Bully with a sequel because the team simply didn’t have the capacity.
"I think it was just bandwidth issues... if you’ve got a small lead creative team, and a small senior leadership crew, you just can’t do all the projects you want."
It’s a very inside-baseball answer, but it tracks. Rockstar’s output was (and is) shaped by a tiny core group making giant, meticulous games. A sequel to a beloved boarding school troublemaker just never made the cut.
What Houser is doing differently now
Houser’s new shop, Absurd Ventures, is structured to avoid that same bottleneck. He says they’re actively managing two projects with a fairly small team and focusing on how to keep both moving in parallel — basically building in the bandwidth Rockstar didn’t have back then.
- An open-world game is already announced and still early in development.
- They’ve kicked off several new multimedia universes (think cross-format storytelling from day one).
- They’ve also teamed up with veterans from Immortals of Aveum on another project.
On why GTA can be funny when other games aren’t
Houser also weighed in on comedy in games. He thinks most titles struggle because straight-up comedy often doesn’t make a lot of sense in them. Rockstar gets away with it, he argues, because each GTA is built to satirize a specific place and time. When the whole world is designed as a roast of a city and era, the jokes fit the mission.
Bottom line: Bully didn’t stall out because Rockstar didn’t care — it lost the bandwidth battle. Now Houser’s trying to engineer that capacity from the start at Absurd Ventures, with multiple worlds and an open-world game already on the runway. If you’ve been waiting for mischievous schoolyard mayhem to get another shot, this at least explains why it never did — and how his new team plans to avoid the same trap.