In an interview with Nintendo Power, Rockstar Games cofounder Dan Houser explained why the company decided to to move the Grand Theft Auto series to the DS rather than the Wii. He states that “it didn’t really feel natural” to Rockstar and that “the DS felt like it had a lot of interesting challenges that would be totally different” than what the company has previously done.
Full question/answer below:
Q: It seems like a more natural progression for the series to move to Wii rather than the DS. Is there any reason why you didn’t take it there first?
A: It didn’t feel natural to us, I guess. It really was that the DS felt like it had a lot of interesting challenges that would be totally different from what we’d done in the past. The stylus and the chance to use minigames in that way was really interesting and exciting to us, and we thought we could integrate seamlessly between those two modes. And it would be the chance to make something really good on a handheld with our handheld-focused team. That was really why we went that way. We haven’t really done any concrete, major thinking about the Wii, one way or another. They’re sort of separate issues.