In a lengthy interview posted over the weekend, Variety spoke with Rockstar co-founder and creative VP Dan Houser about GTA, controversy, the video game business in general and more.

Interestingly, although GTA has been a blockbuster franchise for Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive, and GTA IV could potentially become the top selling game for all 2008, Houser stressed that creativity is far more important than the business side of the industry.

"A lot of our competitors in the game sphere – all they want to talk about is business. Because they have creative guys making the games but they run it like, 'how can we compete?' We want to kill that stuff in some ways. We want to have very successful launches. We've had successful launches before but our angle is always creativity," he said.

"Mainly because we're in a position where we see games slowly gaining credibility as an art form as a medium. A lot of other people want to purely look at that from a business angle. For those of us who spend years slaving over making the thing, the thing isn't 'We make this much money.' That isn't interesting. The thing is, 'Does it resonate with people and take an interesting place in their cultural fabric?' That's an interesting story to us," Houser continued. "I often -- without mentioning any names -- think some of our big competitor titles, their marketing campaign is, 'Look at our great marketing campaign!' Ours is, 'Look at the game, experience the game hopefully.' Then we want to have further conversations with people once they play the game properly. But the two things we want to avoid are talking purely about this as a business -- its not, this is a creative activity. Obviously it's young and it's not fully mature but we are trying to move it forward as quickly as we can. And obviously the counter to that is everyone wants to go on the controversy story. I'm like, 'We can talk about anything in context.' Movies moved beyond that years ago."

It's this same philosophy that has prevented Rockstar from thoroughly milking the GTA series unlike certain other publishers who produce new iterations in popular series every year. Protecting the IP is key for Rockstar, which explains why there hasn't been a GTA Hollywood movie yet.

"The intellectual property is the main asset in the company. That's why GTA is still relevant 10 years later. We haven't put one out every year. We haven't fleeced it. And we haven't put it on 50 different formats," said Houser. "We're not per se against moving properties between different media but for GTA it just seems so perfect as a game. You lose a lot of what makes it what it is if you move it into being, say, a movie. It just never seemed interesting creatively."

There's far more in the full interview at Variety, so check it out.