Rockstar is gearing up for the launch of GTA 6, but, of course, Grand Theft Auto isn’t the only series the developer is known for. Alongside the likes of the beloved Red Dead Redemption games, there are many fans of another open-world adventure from the studio: Bully.
Released in 2006 and originally known in Europe as Canis Canem Edit, Bully tells the story of unruly student Jimmy Hopkins getting in and out of trouble during a year at Bullworth Academy. A smaller-scale, less X-rated version of GTA, it launched to critical acclaim. But the road towards launch was far from easy.
“The development was hard,” former Rockstar VP and writer of Bully, Dan Houser, said in a new interview as part of our IGN30 Icons Series. “The game was in trouble all of the time. It was difficult. It was an out-there concept. We were struggling with it. I wasn't sure it was going to be any good. We really wanted it to come together. It was really fun afterwards because it came together really well. The team did a great job. It was a sort of really strong game at the end. It kind of came together very late.”
Houser went on to explain why the development of Bully proved such a challenge, coming as it did just over a year after GTA: San Andreas. “New IP is very stressful because you're doing something that no one's ever done before,” he said. “And particularly that game, there was all of this controversy around it to do with the name, or people misunderstood it when they'd never seen it. So I think one of the challenges with that game was it never got the attention it deserved. We were too focused on trying to at least get people to stock it or to not protest it before it even came out.”
The mid-2000s was an era when controversy followed Rockstar games whenever one was about to hit store shelves, whether it be the snuff-film-fuelled ultraviolence of Manhunt, or the sex minigame mod, Hot Coffee, uncovered in the code of San Andreas. Bully was no different, with some members of the public worried about how its explicit content would translate into a school setting.
“There was huge hysteria around it,” Houser stated. “We had to spend most of 2006 diffusing it, so we couldn't positively promote the game in the way we normally would've done. I think that didn't help it. I mean, that was the same time as Hot Coffee, and it felt like things were imploding. It was very stressful. And just go to work each day, wonder who's protesting you that day, and hope that things can shake out properly. I wasn't directly involved. Luckily, I was just sort of right off to the side, and wasn't directly involved in organizing most of that stuff. But it was really stressful for the people involved.”
But it wasn’t just external pressures that made the development of Bully difficult. Rockstar also had to wrestle with how to make its style of open-world action-adventure work from the perspective of a teenager. The school setting meant driving cars and shooting guns had to be parked to one side — two vital gameplay mechanics of any GTA.
“Developers were struggling with what the IP was, and we'd made some changes, and some people had moved out there from New York, and it was starting to get a bit better, but it was still really struggling,” revealed Houser. “It was really, well, if you take away the cars and you take away the guns, what is the game? What are you doing? And the lead designer, who was really talented, began to put in the schedule and began to put in the lessons, and it was starting to get there.
“Then, one of the designers put this thing where you could stick a Post-it note on the back of a character that said ‘Kick me’ on it. Then an NPC would run up and kick them. And just seeing that work, you're like, that's a great moment. So then you're, okay, we're starting to get somewhere. So I think that moment was probably when I always remember going, this IP that wouldn't work in a GTA, obviously; it's not interesting. But as a kid, and suddenly it was the scale of the school and the scale of a kid's life, it started to feel really fun.”
Bully was indeed very fun. So much so that fans have been begging for a sequel ever since. While ideas for a follow-up were once floated around at Rockstar, Houser revealed to IGN in 2025 that it never got off the ground due to “bandwidth issues.”
I do miss the days when you’d get a new Rockstar open world to roam around in every year, but I guess at some point I have to give up yearning for the PS2 era. It was 20 years ago, after all. Luckily, Grand Theft Auto 6 is only weeks away from release.
For more on GTA 6, you can read our full interview with Rockstar co-studio head Rob Nelson, how the game will tackle the current political climate, and why Dan Houser says he won’t be playing it.