Rockstar Games has several beloved IPs under its belt. Grand Theft Auto goes without saying, and Red Dead Redemption has proven massively successful too — but a real fan favourite is Bully, also known as Canis Canem Edit.
The action adventure about a boy navigating his life through boarding school was a big hit on PS2, but despite this, it never received a follow-up. How come?
Well, this question was thrown at Rockstar alumnus Dan Houser, co-founder of the company, during a rare interview with IGN. Here’s the clip:
“I think it was just bandwidth issues,” Houser says. “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.”
He adds that his current company, Absurd Ventures, is structuring itself in such a way that it can handle more than one project at a time. “How we’re structuring Absurd, we’re trying to do two projects with a fairly small team, and it’s really trying to think through that. How can we do that, and keep them both moving?”
Obviously, Rockstar is an enormous operation these days, with multiple studios and hundreds of employees.
However, back when it was making games like Bully, it wasn’t working on quite the same scale, so it’s possible that it had to pick its battles when making numerous titles.
Remarkably, his response here is very similar to comments he made about a Bully sequel over a decade ago, when he said Rockstar opted to make Max Payne 3 rather than Bully 2 due to “limited bandwidth”. He’s consistent, at the very least.
Houser’s comments probably don’t tell the full story, though; we’re sure there will be various other reasons Bully 2 has yet to happen, especially as time moves forward and projects like Grand Theft Auto 6 become absurdly expensive, multi-year endeavours.
