”I know I want to,” Dan Houser admits on a sequel. There’s ”a lot of directions” it could go, but he doesn’t see Jimmy ‘graduating’ to GTA. He’s not ”that level of degenerate.”
Houser thinks of Jimmy as more a ”white collar doofus.” Fans have practically begged Rockstar to return to Bully, hoping we might even play Jimmy again.
”Well, hopefully, you never know. There’s a lot of directions I could go with that one, it’s funny,” Houser told Polygon.
The Rockstar co-founder wasn’t for turning Jimmy into a GTA character. ”I never saw him as being that level of degenerate. 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,” continued Dan Houser.
”He’s at a shit 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 extant you could say the same was true of Niko in a bizarre way. But he’s not trying to burn down the school, he’s more trying to stand up to injustice.”
Bully didn’t go down so well in some circles with enough media backlash that the game was known as Canis Canem Edit in Europe instead of Bully. Even the creators of GTA were surprised by the pundit pushback.
”It’s a strong word, an emotive word. Maybe too emotive in some ways, but we were confident we were not making a game which you were a bully. You were equally not lilly white of course, but you were not a bully. You were sort of standing up to a culture that encouraged bullying by being this tough kid that wasn’t sucked into that kind of world and was friends with some of the weaker kids, but by no means a saint.”
”How we saw it, we were sort of being accused of training kids how to kill each other,” Houser said. ”I thought, ‘This is absurd.’ And that was obviously our reputation then and potentially still is, but it sort of proceeded us then.”
Bully: Scholarship Edition released later improving the original PS2 version and brought Bully to Xbox 360 and PC.
