The release of Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) in October 2018 became inseparable from a wider industry reckoning over "crunch" — the practice of sustained, often unpaid overtime in video game development. The catalyst was a single, off-hand remark by Rockstar co-founder and Vice-President for Creative Dan Houser, who told Vulture magazine that his team had been "working 100-hour weeks" several times in 2018 (Goldberg, 2018). What Houser intended as a badge of dedication ignited a controversy that exposed nearly a decade of overtime culture inside one of the most secretive studios in entertainment. This report examines the lead-up to RDR2's release, the precise wording of Houser's comments, the journalistic follow-ups that contextualised them, and the employee testimonials — both supportive and damning — that defined the public picture of Rockstar's working conditions on the eve of RDR2's launch.
Long before Houser's Vulture interview, Rockstar Games had a quiet reputation within the industry for relentless work cycles. The first major public crack appeared in January 2010, when an anonymous open letter titled "Rockstar Spouse" was published, claiming to represent the wives and partners of staff at Rockstar San Diego (Schreier, 2018). The letter alleged twelve-hour days, six-day weeks, and deteriorating health among employees during the development of the original Red Dead Redemption (2010). At the time, Rockstar publicly dismissed the letter as the complaints of "a few anonymous posters on message boards," but former San Diego staff later confirmed to Kotaku that the description was broadly accurate, with one ex-employee recalling roughly seventy-hour weeks and a culture in which leaving early earned "dirty looks" (Schreier, 2018).
Subsequent Rockstar projects reportedly followed a similar pattern. Max Payne 3 (2012) was characterised by one former Rockstar New England employee as a "death march," with workdays routinely running from 9–10am to 10–11pm (Schreier, 2018). Production of Grand Theft Auto V (2013) saw internal spreadsheets at Rockstar Toronto reportedly flagging anyone working fewer than sixty hours in a given week with the word "Under" highlighted in red (Schreier, 2018). For Rockstar San Diego employees between 2011 and 2016, multiple sources described periods when eighty-hour weeks were treated as mandatory, with idle concept artists redeployed to play-test GTA V if their primary work was finished (Schreier, 2018).
In an extensive feature published 14 October 2018 — twelve days before RDR2's launch — New York Magazine's Vulture writer Harold Goldberg detailed his visits to Rockstar's Manhattan offices and conversations with Dan Houser. Discussing the punishing pace of polishing, rewrites, and re-edits, Houser stated bluntly: "We were working 100-hour weeks" several times in 2018 (Goldberg, 2018). The remark sat alongside boasts about the game's scale: 300,000 animations, 500,000 lines of dialogue, 2,200 days of motion-capture work, 1,200 actors and a 2,000-page main-story script (Goldberg, 2018).
The quote, presented without further context by Vulture, was almost immediately seized upon across gaming press and social media as confirmation that Rockstar was extracting near-impossible hours from its entire workforce. A 100-hour week equates to roughly fourteen hours of work every single day with no days off — a regime widely considered both physically harmful and ethically indefensible.
Within twenty-four hours, Rockstar issued a clarification via an emailed statement from Dan Houser, sent to Kotaku's Jason Schreier and other outlets. Houser said his comment referred only to the senior writing team — himself, Michael Unsworth, Rupert Humphries, and Lazlow Jones — and only for a three-week period (Schreier, 2018). He added that "no one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard," characterising overtime as voluntary and passion-driven. Rockstar simultaneously lifted its long-standing social-media policy to permit employees to discuss working conditions publicly (Schreier, 2018).
Jason Schreier's subsequent investigation, published in Kotaku on 23 October 2018 under the title Inside Rockstar Games' Culture of Crunch, drew on interviews with seventy-seven current and former employees across eight studios in five countries. None claimed to have worked literal 100-hour weeks, but many reported sustained averages of 55–60 hours per week, with peaks of 80 hours during the worst crunch periods (Schreier, 2018). The Wikipedia summary article on RDR2's development corroborates the breadth of reporting, noting that Rockstar provided cross-company averages of 42.4, 45.5 and 45.8 hours per week across the first three quarters of 2018 — figures that critics argued were skewed by including teams not in active crunch and by averaging in days off (Wikipedia contributors, 2024).
Schreier's reporting revealed a fractured workforce. Some employees defended Rockstar fiercely: developers at Rockstar New England described "reasonable hours" and called it the best place they had ever worked, while several Rockstar North (Edinburgh) staff said RDR2's crunch was the lightest they had experienced (Schreier, 2018). Others described severe consequences. A Rockstar NYC employee admitted to 60–70-hour weeks for two consecutive years, conceding "100 percent" long-term damage to friendships and relationships, yet insisted the resulting game was worth it (Schreier, 2018). A former San Diego employee said they had been "pushed further into depression and anxiety than I had ever been," and started drinking heavily to cope (Schreier, 2018).
The quality assurance team at Rockstar Lincoln in the UK emerged as the most severely affected. Mandatory overtime there reportedly began in August 2017 and escalated to five evenings plus weekend shifts, with employees on rolling temporary contracts feeling unable to refuse (Schreier, 2018). Former testers described doctors recognising "another one" from Rockstar Lincoln when presenting with depression. A recurring phrase across six independent interviews was "culture of fear" — fear of bonus loss, of being denied a credit in the shipped game, or of being passed over for permanent contracts (Schreier, 2018).
Several structural factors emerged as contributors. Bonuses were tied to game sales, incentivising salaried staff to absorb uncompensated overtime in hope of a year-end payout (Schreier, 2018). Rockstar's policy of excluding leavers from in-game credits — only partially mitigated by a separate "Thank You" web list for RDR2 — discouraged early departure (Schreier, 2018). Creative iteration was another driver: late changes such as renaming the city New Bordeaux to Saint Denis (after Mafia III's use of the former) or adding cinematic black bars to every cutscene cascaded into weeks of additional work for cinematics, audio and QA (Schreier, 2018; Wikipedia contributors, 2024).
The "100-hour weeks" remark functioned less as a revelation than as a flashpoint that legitimised previously whispered grievances. Pre-RDR2 Rockstar was, by the accounts of dozens of its own staff, an institution that produced era-defining games at significant human cost. The 2018 controversy did not end crunch — but it did force Rockstar to permit public employee testimony, publish working-hour averages, and, by 2020, implement structural reforms in response to the publicity (Wikipedia contributors, 2024).
Goldberg, H. (2018) 'How the West Was Digitized: The making of Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2', Vulture / New York Magazine, 14 October. Available at: https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games-red-dead-redemption-2.html (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Schreier, J. (2018) 'Inside Rockstar Games' Culture of Crunch', Kotaku, 23 October. Available at: https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1829936466 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia contributors (2024) 'Development of Red Dead Redemption 2', Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).