Red Dead Redemption 2 will now debut on October 26.
Red Dead Redemption 2 debuted on October 26.
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Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick: ‘I’m charged with making hard decisions’

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 9 min

Strauss Zelnick is very efficient with his answers. When I interviewed the CEO of Take-Two Interactive last week at the 2018 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game industry trade show in Los Angeles last week, he gave some short answers. But when it came to topics that interested him, he gave engaging replies.

Zelnick says he’s not a creator of video games, and he doesn’t pretend to be. But he’s certainly one of the smartest people in the business. His New York publishing company has more than 4,200 people across 17 studios, including Rockstar Games, the maker of Grand Theft Auto V and the upcoming epic Western game Red Dead Redemption 2. And he proudly notes that his company generates more revenue than 14,000-person-strong French video game publisher Ubisoft.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.