A shot of whiskey drops the audio for a few moments, settling to a moderate thud. You can almost see the thumping bass in his vision - a constant, jarring blur. With the club in full swing, Payne's perspective quick-cuts back and forth between grinding 20-somethings and potential troublemakers. You don't want to listen to advice from me.' I'm 500 miles from home, I'm armed and I'm drinking. When one of his youthful charges asks him for some life guidance, Payne is blunt: 'I'm standing in a nightclub, listening to music I can't stand. They literally take a helicopter to a nightclub.

In an early level, Payne is acting as a bodyguard for, as he calls them in a morose voice-over, 'the kinds of people that go to nightclubs in helicopters.' He's not being poetic either. They want players to see the world from his perspective, with all the blurring and haziness that you'd expect from a middle-aged drug addict. To tell Payne's story of redemption, Rockstar put a lot of work into getting inside his head. 'Part of him still yearns for a quest,' says Houser, 'a damsel in distress or some other simplistic and easy to understand scenario in which he can act like a heroic good guy once more, even though last time it did not turn out so good.'