The man who created Saints Row reveals what the reboot got wrong and the secrets Rockstar could be hiding in GTA VI

Chris Stockman, the Design Director of the first Saints Row game, has called on Rockstar to look beyond the USA once work has been set on the inevitable sequel to Grand Theft Auto VI in an exclusive interview with Esports Insider.

Speaking ahead of the release of the highly anticipated title, Stockman spoke of his frustrations with the gaming industry but backed his former rivals to hit the mark with their return to Vice City.

However, the development lead for the original Saints Row did set out some ideas for how he’d like to see the creators of the GTA series freshen up its tried-and-tested formula.

Since founding Bit Planet Games in 2014, Stockman has poured his creative energies into VR gaming and explained how his team continues to push the envelope with their work on the Ultrawings series and their most recent release, Super RC.

Read the full interview below.

Stockman: It’s definitely a new frontier in the sense that there are all new problems to solve that haven’t been solved yet, and I find that fascinating. It’s a chance to be a big fish in small ponds.

It’s changed in the last 10 years quite a bit. The dynamics have shifted. The demographics have shifted.

The quality bar has gone way down. Our team [at Bit Planet Games] comes from that old school mentality where quality is paramount. It doesn’t matter if it’s indie or not. We really focus on quality and big scope games, even as an indie, and the VR market just does not care.

It’s all about social groups for 10 to 15-year-olds. They jump from game to game, whatever is the hottest thing right now, and it heavily relies on the social components. Social is first. Everything else is a very distant second.

There’s no way these AAA titles are going VR. The markets have shifted to the point where everybody expects free. If you don’t deliver that, it’s a tall hill to climb over. That’s just the way it is. 

PC VR never took off, and that’s not surprising considering the barrier of entry was extremely high. Standalone VR, there’s no friction there. You’re not tethered. It doesn’t require a multi-thousand-dollar PC to run. That’s where all the kids are at, and the kids don’t have money, or at least most of the kids, so the VR gaming market has turned into the App Store.

The race to the bottom happened. We’re there. Everything’s free. It’s all about monetising the whales. It makes me want to go work in big tech and retire in a decade.

I’ve made VR games for 10 years. I don’t think someone like Meta is getting out of VAR anytime soon. Maybe I’ll go work for them and collect stock and retire in a decade. If I had done that 10 years ago after we shipped Ultra Wings 1, I would have been retired by now.

I know a few people who have retired and it’s really about the stock. You can’t predict what stock is going to do gangbusters in the next decade, but it feels a safer bet than keeping on rolling the dice and trying to catch lightning in a bottle. 

The indie market is like that too, even in flat-screen gaming. You’re fighting against hundreds of games that release on Steam every week. It’s really, really tough. I’m very pessimistic about the whole video game industry at this point. 

Stockman: I think it’s just Rockstar. They’ve never failed.

I remember back in the days when they’d release that ping pong game just to test their animation system before they launched GTA IV. If you just look back into the history of Rockstar products, they’ve never missed. I have a hard time believing they’ll miss this time. They’ve spent forever and so much money.

I almost think they would just rather not release it and just keep pumping out GTA: Online content because that doesn’t seem to be letting up.

I think it’s going to do amazingly well. GTA: Online 2 or whatever it’s is going to be called will be another 10-year gravy train. 

They’re a one-release-every-five-years type of company. That’s crazy. But they seem to have the magic.

They’re kind of the only players in town for this type of game or this type of genre for the big, old, epic games.

Stockman: Yes. I think that if they get bought out by Microsoft or somebody else like that, I absolutely think you should be worried about that.

To diverge a little bit, I think that’s what it would take for another storefront like Epic to gain dominance. A big misstep like that. If Gabe did sell it to someone, or sells it to big tech, I think Microsoft would be the only ones willing to buy it at this point. 

Do I think that will ever happen? I’d say I’m 60-40% on that. They don’t need the money. They’re rich beyond their wildest dreams. They have a near monopoly on the PC game market, or at least the distribution market. It would take something crazy to happen. I don’t even know the scenario in which something like that would happen.

I don’t know if he has any kids or what the succession strategy is for that sort of situation, but I think anything can happen. At some point, given that it’s privately held, Gabe could just wake up one day and say, ‘you know, F this. I’m out taking my ball and going home’. 

He could do it, and no one would be able to stop him. If Microsoft were to buy Steam, oh my gosh, I don’t think it would be the overnight kiss of death, but I think it would be a slow death spiral.

Stockman: I don’t know. Maybe. Is the IP worth that? DOTA, I guess, is probably worth a fair bit. Team Fortress and Counter-Strike, Half-Life. I think Microsoft are getting out of games, though, personally, so I don’t think they would even be willing to entertain a deal on those grounds. Maybe they would because you’d be stupid not to, but I bet they would because they so desperately want to own a storefront, and the Microsoft storefront is not a thing.

I bet Gabe takes it public before he sells it. That’s my guess. That, of course, has risks involved too. Suddenly, it’s no longer privately held, and you have shareholders, and you have to release quarterly reports, and there’s a whole load more trouble than what it’s worth. But if he retires and he decides I’m out, then what does he care? You know, it’s someone else’s problem.

Stockman: We were very fortunate back then when I joined Volition. They were already in very early pre-production of what became Saints Row. It started out as a PlayStation 2 game. Then it shifted into something next gen. 

They were really trying to figure out what the game was gonna be, and I came on board, and they said they wanted me to come up with a vision for multiplayer. I remember in the very first meeting, what I pitched was not ambitious enough. I played it safe. They told me it was not ambitious enough. Go back to the drawing board.

I came back with something wildly ambitious. It’s funny, looking at GTA:Online now, what I pitched took a very similar route, where I wanted the whole city to be the playground. The difference is you basically had the whole city with your team of 16 players, and then you could split off and go into the modes. 

I was most proud of this idea that you could form gangs, which were equivalent to clans, earning money based on your performance. Even if you lost, you got some money and you use that to buy your outfits. I became almost like bragging rights based on your clothing and what you wore. 

Every single one of the modes we shipped was a brainchild of mine, they approved it, we got a bit more money for it and then they promoted me to head up the entire project. That was my trajectory to head up Saints Row.

Stockman: GTA: Online has turned into this role-playing thing. I never would have envisioned that. It has sections where there’s a narrative too, and through the role-playing, people form their own narratives too. It’s turned into this whole game in and of itself. I watch TikTok streams of people playing as cops or emergency services, and it’s quite amazing. 

In terms of the wider games industry, I think narrative is still very important, and given the rise of AI it’s going to become even more important. I don’t think AI can replace humans in crafting really immersive narrative experiences.

I’ve played around with AI a bit. For narrative stuff, it is pretty terrible. I’m not saying it’ll never happen, but trying to craft stories by typing in a prompt is pretty terrible.

Stockman: It could. I just don’t think it will. Gamers will be expecting visual fidelity that can’t be done with VR unless you’re tethered to a very powerful PC, and I don’t think we’re there yet.

Maybe in a decade, we might get there, but even then, motion sickness will still be a thing. There are already games that are like trying to replicate GTA on Quest, and they all look pretty terrible. There’s no style to them. I think it turns off my generation and maybe the generation just below me.

I’m going to go on a limb here and say no, but I think there’ll be mods. There are already mods now for VR in GTA V, but I never see anybody use them. Not for VR. It’s entirely playable. It’s not made for it, so you’re going to have some jank, but no one streams it. You’ve got to question why.

I don’t think PC VR is a thing. I don’t think it will ever be a thing other than maybe for the smallest of the markets.

Stockman: When I found out that they were rebooting Saints Row, I spoke to an old friend of mine who was my old boss for Saints Row 1. He was the producer, and I was learning about what they were doing, and I thought, man, this is a terrible idea. 

What is it trying to be? You’re rebooting it, but why are you rebooting it? There’s a lot of characters in the series that people love. It wasn’t Saints Row at all. Just call it something else at that point. There’s a level of expectations for a Saints Row game, and they missed the mark on all of them.

What I would have done was to take the franchise back to the 70s and do a period piece, a prequel of how the gangs from the first one started. You’re running around with a crew of teens that ended up as the main characters for the first game. You could really go all in on the 70s theme with big Afros, bell-bottoms, and the music of that whole period. 

I’d have taken it into a different direction so you’re not competing with the modern-day GTA games. You’re zaggng when everyone else is zigging, so to speak.

Stockman: That’s what I would do. I would stick with it being an open-world game. I love open-world games. I love making them. It’s just so much fun and so much about the sum of their parts, so to speak. I would say it’s what I’ve been pretty successful at in my career at making them.

What’s the umbrella company that owns the Saints Row IP now? [Embracer Group], if you’re listening to this, contact me. Let’s go. I can bring much of the old band back together who worked on Saints Row 1. I could turn that IP around with a decent budget. They don’t even have to fund it. I could get other outside people to fund it. I could turn the franchise around. I know I could.

It would be a story in and of itself. I’ve even thought about going to my pals and Meta to say, hey what about doing a Saints Row VR project? I think with the technology coming in the future, I think an open world game could work, but it’d have to be heavily stylised. We wouldn’t be trying to compete with GTA, but I don’t think anyone can compete with GTA anymore.

I think you could back it with Quest 4’s technology, and it could look pretty good. It’s not gonna look as good as Saints Row 1, but it’ll be close-ish. You bring Saints Row back to its roots, or go and do the 70s prequel I was talking about and blow it out the box.

I’ve thought about it. To try and resurrect the IP and be the first real quality open world story slash sandbox game for VR, going it in bite-sized chunks that VR is so good at in five or 10 minute core loops. I’ve thought about it. I think it would be amazing, and it would have its own identity. 

I’m not trying to one-up GTA, but you could essentially be the GTA 800-pound gorilla of VR. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think I could do it, let’s put it that way.

Stockman: Maybe that’s the thing that they haven’t revealed yet? 

I think there’s a lot of stuff they haven’t revealed. That could be interesting, although it’s very tough. Saints Row 2 did it. You can play the whole game co-op, but it’s a very tough thing to do, especially given how narratively-driven the GTA series is. But if anybody could do it, Rockstar could. 

I think there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about GTA VI that we’ll find out within the next six months. A lot.

Stockman: Honestly, I can’t pick a weakness. I just hope that they offer more choices in the story for how you can progress through the game.

Give us a little bit more player agency so I can steer my character or characters down one direction to change the outcome of things, rather than playing through a very long 50-hour movie.

Player choice is what I would lean towards. We talked about doing that on Saints Row 1. We tried to incorporate a tiny bit of it, but it ultimately ended up as what order you took the gangs down. It didn’t really change anything. If I had been on the sequels, I would have done more of that.

I would have had multiple gangs, but it’d be interesting if you took down one gang; it changed the story structure quite a bit depending on complexity, because that goes down a really deep rabbit hole. Think Mass Effect. It becomes a spider web. That’s the kind of thing I would like GTA to start exploring with elements of a choose-your-own-adventure.

Stockman: Saints Row has always been a bit ridiculous. Even the first one, when we had insurance fraud and stuff like that, which was just over-the-top fun with physics. That was not realistic in any stretch of the imagination.

I think the problem, and I’ve said this before, is that they just kept trying to one-up themselves with the ridiculous content and at some point, where do you go after you’ve gone to hell and fought aliens, where do you go from there?

I guess that’s why they had to reboot it, but then again, people love Saints Row 3 and they’re widely considered to be the pinnacles of the series.

Personally, I would consider Saints Row 3 to be the pinnacle of the series because the production values were through the roof compared to the previous two. It was a bit less of an open world and more structured. But even Saints Row 2 started venturing off into crazy territory.

I guess I just never would have done it. I would have preferred to keep things relatively grounded in a pseudo-reality. I was actually against naming it Saints Row because I felt it was too restrictive. Saints Row was a place in the world. It was a neighbourhood in the world. The name loses meaning if you’re not in that area. Maybe I’m overthinking it. 

I just feel that naming games is very important. Grand Theft Auto is a brilliant name because you could go anywhere with it at any time, and it still means something. Saints Row, I felt was too restrictive. 

I would have gone the route where each game went through different time periods, but you could carry some characters over as part of the same universe, almost like Assassin’s Creed, but not go ridiculous with it like they did. I think that would have been interesting in a gang-themed open world series of games.

I think the Saints Row franchise could still be alive if we’d done that but I could have been totally off base. I just don’t like to play it safe.

I think maybe even Rockstar is afraid to do that now because of what happened to the Mafia series when they did the period piece idea. It was not well received. Mafia 3 was set in the 60s, which was a turbulent period in the USA politically, which may have contributed to it but I like games that are daring and different. I would have absolutely gone down that road. 

Stockman: Absolutely. Why are we stuck? Is it because they want to sell as many copies as possible, and they don’t want to go to different non-American cities? There’s a world of huge cities out there that are very interesting. London. Tokyo. Rio de Janeiro. There’s almost too many to list.

I believe they think it wouldn’t sell if they moved the games away from America, and it cost so much money to make that it’s too big a risk that they don’t want to take. But it’s like they keep mining from the same locales. San Andreas, Vice City, Liberty City, and that’s it. Is that it for America? I know we went to their version of San Francisco in San Andreas, but where’s Dallas?

I would like them to mine from a different  location rather than just dipping their toes in the same three cities over and over and over again.

Stockman: The budgets are unsustainable. Big tech has kind of ruined it. You have a brain drain going on where people are leaving for big tech, and the creativity is switching to indies now. 

But it’s so easy to make games now that everybody and their mom can kind of pump something out, so now it just becomes way harder to get noticed. 

Games will always be a thing, but It’s tough to break in, and I think with AAA budgets, something’s going to have to change. It’s going to get far worse rather than better.

Stockman: Don’t hold your breath. I don’t think we’re ever going to get it at. I think they’ll sell off BioWare or whatever is left of it. Maybe they’ll sell off the Mass Effect IP. 

I think the future of EA is going to become Madden, EA FC and Battlefield with College Football and the NHL game. And that’ll be it. They’ll microtransaction the hell out of everyone because that’s what people do these days, even if you pay $60-80 for a game.

Stockman: They’re the only ones that can get away with it. 

I don’t think it’s a rising tide that floats all boats. I think that there’ll be a tremendous amount of backlash if everyone switched to $100. Not all games are created equal. I think GTA is the only one that can get away with it, and I hope they do. I really hope it’s $100. I think it deserves to be $100.

The scope and magnitude of this production deserves that price tag, but not everything is treated equally. It would be a disaster if everyone tried to match them.

Stockman: No, but one of my best friends worked at Rockstar in New York at their headquarters, and he worked there during the development of Saints Row. He’s long since gone, but he worked on San Andreas.

I would talk to them and ask what does Rockstar think about what we’re making? And I can’t even remember the conversations that we had, but he told me that they were aware of what we were doing and that they were keeping a close eye on it. 

We did pioneer some stuff in the first Saints Row that all open-world games ended up taking on. We did the first GPS system, where you could lay out a waypoint and it would guide you there. Everyone did it after that. 

We got to be on a next-gen platform, launched at a time period where there weren’t a lot of games that came out at the time, and it was new tech. We had day-night cycles. We had a lot of new things that no one had seen in that sort of open world series. I’m not taking sole credit for any of these little bitty things because it’s not like that. We all take stuff from each other.

Rockstar probably thought of us as an annoying fly. They were always the 800-pound gorilla and we were just trying to make something that was the alt version of GTA.

We were just incredibly fortunate to also be a pretty fun game to boot.

Stockman: Yes, but that’s without knowing how much he contributed as a writer. I think there’s a possibility that you’ll lose some of the edginess or maybe some of the really biting satire that GTA is so good at. That’s a factor that can’t easily be replicated by another writer. 

It’s very possible that we’ll lose some of that, and it becomes more, less edgy, I guess, and more straight and grounded in reality. 

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve always been a big fan of the series. I remember when GTA III came out on the PlayStation 2, and I was working at another game company at the time. I brought it into the office, and I loaded it up, and we just sat around it and said, ‘my god, this is the future of games’. 

It was just eye-opening. It was so revolutionary. I miss those days. I miss that.

Stockman: I guess making it an even more massive world than it already is. Make San Andreas of GTA V look like a playground. Just something incredibly massive.

If the story dynamics changed throughout the game so you can make things drastically different, that would be groundbreaking for a game of this scale.

I don’t think they’ll bring it back, but I remember in San Andreas, you could eat and get fat or not eat and get skinny, or work out and gain muscle, and I wish they could have kept that in the game to make your character your own.

Stockman: That’s one of the reasons why I got into VR. I felt like it takes me back to the roots of creating more interactions and the cool things you can do with your hands, to feeling like you’re really a part of the world and you’re not just playing a role and less on graphical fidelity. You’re doing the things that otherwise would just be button presses on a controller. 

You’re picking up stuff. You’re interacting with things. The Ultra Wings series, and Ultra Wings 2 specifically, is probably my favourite project to have ever worked on and the one I’m most proud of because the scope is huge. It was the first open-world game of its time for the Quest platform. 

The interactions inside the aircraft, flying the different aircraft, was unparalleled. We didn’t make a flight simulator, we made a flight game. In every flight simulator, you’re always 30,000 feet in the air or thousands of feet in the sky, and the terrain doesn’t matter. You’re not flying past buildings because all the aircraft go at real speeds. Try flying an aircraft at hundreds of feet in the air through a city and see how far that gets you. It’s impossible. You’d crash 100% of the time.

So we made the world and the areas that you fly around just as important a part of the gameplay as flying the aircraft themselves, and it made the topography of the islands critical to the game itself. The vehicles never moved at realistic speeds like their real-world counterparts did, but it didn’t feel slow because it’s all relative. You’re close to the ground. It feels a lot faster

The dogfighting, like we had multiplayer, taking place between skyscrapers, it was just so wildly different from anything else out there. People still play it to this day. Multiplayer is still played by groups of people. There’s no progression system in multiplayer. There’s no modes, there’s none of that. It’s just pure dogfighting. Now here we are, two plus years later, and people are still playing it.

Stockman: It’s been an interesting development cycle. Let’s put it this way. When we first came up with the idea, it was really meant to be Ultrawings, but with RC cars. You start with a basic car. You do some stuff to unlock the other cars. You paid 20 bucks, you went down this gameplay loop, and that was the game.

As things evolved and the market changed, and we were finding out what was fun and what wasn’t, everything shifted into becoming more of a racing sandbox game. We changed the business model to become what we call a la carte gaming where you pay one fee to get a part of the game, and then you buy the cars separately. We’ll see how it goes. No one’s kind of done this before the way we have.

It’s a very interesting game. It’s racing, but there’s a lot of track elements and craters, and it’s a lot of fun and incredibly intuitive to build the tracks with your hands, almost Lego-style, snapping things together and then being able to test drive it instantly. Then you can take it online and race against other people in online multiplayer. I hope people like that. It basically means that you have an unlimited number of tracks available to you. It’s not like any racing game for that matter, Track Mania aside.

It’s the most complex game our team has worked on. It’s not open-world, but the multiplayer side of it is very complex.