Dan Houser Says His GTA: Vice City Writing Was “Awful,” Credits Ray Liotta With Making It Sound Good

The acting talent of the lead star helped tell the story of Tommy Vercetti.

In a recent interview, Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser shared his memories of working on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and of working with Ray Liotta, the actor who played Tommy:

My script is terrible, and he managed to make it sound good. Then again, all good actors can do that. What pleases me most is when an actor finds something that isn’t in the text. I think acting is an unusual kind of art, but it is still art. And when you see a truly good actor, you realize how much better he is than someone who is merely decent. Decent actors generally convey what I had in my head as the writer, or what we intended while working on the character. The best actors rise a whole level higher. And he definitely managed to do that.

Houser said the team contacted Liotta’s agent and offered “not some crazy money, but a perfectly decent sum.” According to the Rockstar co-founder, the actor worked for roughly four days in total:

He did only voice work and did not take part in motion capture. The evening before the recording we met him for dinner, and then we worked for two days in New York. A few months later, when the game was close to finished and we could record everything that remained, a colleague and I flew to Los Angeles. On the first day he came in and didn’t seem especially in the mood to work, and the next day he worked about five hours and recorded absolutely everything. He did a great job with it.

The creator of GTA: Vice City admitted that his “script was terrible,” but the actor made it “sound good” — Image source: Rockstar Games

In Houser’s view, Liotta gave Tommy Vercetti an authenticity “that would have been hard to achieve with anyone else.”

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