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Dan Houser on Bully sequel -- "I know I want to"

Rockstar Games cofounder says "there's a lot of directions I could go with that one."

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Rockstar Games cofounder Dan Houser is interested in making a sequel to 2006 action game Bully, telling Polygon in a new interview that he has numerous ideas for this potential game.

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"I know I want to," Houser said about the potential for making a second Bully game. "Well, hopefully, you never know. There's a lot of directions I could go with that one, it's funny."

An idea some have suggested to Houser, he explained, is for Rockstar Games to make a future Grand Theft Auto game with a grown-up Bully protagonist Jimmy Hopkins as the lead. This probably won't happen, Houser said.

"I never saw him as being that level of degenerate," Houser said. "I saw him as a bad teen, because he comes from a tough home, who could go either direction. He's not going to be a carjacker. He's too white collar for that already. He's at a sh** private school, but he's going to end up being really happy because he's at the worst bit of his life, or being a sort of messed up white collar doofus."

"He was an unpleasant soul, but he had a heart. To some extent you could say the same was true of [Grand Theft Auto IV's] Niko in a bizarre way," he added. "But [Jimmy's] not trying to burn down the school, he's more trying to stand up to injustice."

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two filed a new Bully trademark in July.

In November 2011, Houser explained that after the original Bully shipped, it was decided that Rockstar Vancouver--the lead developer behind Bully--would work on Max Payne 3 instead of a sequel to the open-world game.

"So we knew that we didn't want to start doing the Bully sequel instantly at that second with those guys--even though it is a property that, like [Max Payne], we adore and might come back to in the future," Houser said at the time. "There was just no impetus to do that then. So we said, 'You can do Max, and then we will see what we can do with Bully.'"

If the Bully franchise is to return, it could be one of the multiple next-generation games Take-Two currently has in development. In May, CEO Strauss Zelnick said, "We also have a extraordinary pipeline of titles in development for next-generation platforms, including groundbreaking new intellectual property and releases from our proven franchises."

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