Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘I remember the meeting with him, it was quite a moment,’ says Jones. ‘We described everything you could do in the game, and he said, “That’s great, I understand exactly what you’re facing. Here’s how we’ll basically just leverage it.” He told us how he would play it out, who he would target, what those people targeted would say.’ He guided Jones through the plan: which politicians could be relied upon to react in public, which papers would join the reactionary fervour, how stories could be planted, how long they could last and how the story would snowball. Clifford knew the media system, and how to play it. And, according to Jones, ‘every word he said came true’.

  In May 1997, half a year before it was due for release, Grand Theft Auto came to the attention of Parliament. Somehow word had reached the House of Lords that a scurrilous game was on its way, and questions were asked by Lord Campbell of Croy: ‘Is it true, as reported, that that game includes thefts of cars, joyriding, hit-and-run accidents, and being chased by the police, and that there will be nothing to stop children from buying it? To use current terminology, is that not “off-message” for young people?’ Not really, as it turned out. Lord Campbell’s feature list was remarkably similar to BMG’s own marketing campaign.

  In November, days before the game appeared, the headlines started rolling in. From the Daily Mail: CRIMINAL COMPUTER GAME THAT GLORIFIES HIT AND RUN THUGS. And from the News of the World, simply: BAN CRIMINAL VIDEO GAME. There were more thoughtful articles in The Sunday Times and Scotland on Sunday, but they raised the same fears. And those fears looked uncannily co-ordinated.

  ‘Max Clifford was the real genius here,’ says Dailly. ‘He made it all happen. He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved. He’s not called a media guru for nothing.’ He even planted stories. A developer’s minor car scrape became a driving ban for a ‘Sick car game boss’ in the News of the World. A story circulated before release that thousands of copies of the game had been stolen from a warehouse. ‘Oh yes, I remember hearing that as well,’ says Jones. ‘Nice little plant story there. He would do anything to keep the profile high.’

  The submission to the BBFC was part of the circus. Lord Campbell had specifically drawn Grand Theft Auto to the board’s attention in his speech to the House of Lords. The BBFC was concerned, and released a statement saying that the subject matter was ‘unprecedented’, but its claws had been cut by the Carmageddon scandal. The criminality of GTA was broader, and the urban rather than fantasy setting more relatable, enough to earn the game an ‘18’ certificate, but despite the concerns of the House of Lords, it was never seriously under threat from a ban. And the worries of Parliament were far from universal. When the matter arose in January 1998, Lord Avebury dryly entered the debate: ‘My Lords, is the Minister aware . . . that my twelve-year-old son, who has played the demonstration copy, assures me that he is not motivated to go out and steal cars?’

  ‘We never believed that it would actually cause that much trouble,’ says Hamilton. The controversy travelled word-wide – the game was banned in Brazil – but the development team never had a moment’s pause about the moral standing of their product. ‘We were partly a bit naive at the time, not realising the power of what we were creating,’ says Hamilton, ‘but I still don’t believe that there’s any harm in it.’

  Grand Theft Auto had always been lightweight, tongue-in-cheek and a game before all else. ‘We knew why every decision was made, and we were never ever influenced by “let’s do something to create a bit of controversy”,’ says Jones. ‘We always did everything purely from the perspective of what’s going to be the most fun. It just naturally kept pushing down the darker direction.’

  The moral panic that surrounded Grand Theft Auto was largely hollow, and mostly the construct of a PR consultant. It turned out that there were usefully malleable branches of the press, and even of government, who became effective if unwitting co-conspirators in seeking outrage and attention. ‘We tended to think of the politicians as idiots,’ says Dailly. ‘Complaining about a game that ninety-nine per cent of them would never have seen, let alone played. Calling it a murder simulator just showed how ignorant they were, and we knew it.’

  Clifford’s campaign worked. Grand Theft Auto was a good game with some amazing innovations, but its retrograde look could well have sunk its sales. Instead it was known throughout the country as something illicit to seek out, and this was the vital impetus that convinced players to look past the graphics for long enough to appreciate the gameplay. In Britain the game sold half a million copies that Christmas. And around the world, it sold a million more.

  A little more than a decade later, in April 2008, Grand Theft Auto IV went on sale simultaneously across Europe and North America, and in its first week sales topped six million copies. That number eventually rose to twenty-two million, estimated to have earned its publisher and developer nearly half a billion dollars. But buyers queuing overnight for an early copy would find neither DMA nor BMG mentioned on the game’s packaging. And it had been a long time since the franchise had been made in Dundee.

  In 1996, BMG had invested in DMA. Their four-game contract had cost them over three million pounds, and during the making of Grand Theft Auto, the publisher had left the games-maker to its work. ‘Yeah, that’s the way BMG set it up,’ recalls Jones. ‘Because they knew we were creative guys, and just trusted us to get on with it.’

  But within BMG Interactive, factions were emerging. The company was splitting across the Atlantic, and across business cultures. According to Jones, ‘The guys in the UK were terrific to get on with – while we were developing GTA for a couple of years, everything was going great. It only changed when the US side of things took on a lot of EA people. So they had this kind of mismatch. Everybody in the UK was not from the gaming industry – they were from the music industry. So you had this kind of clash of cultures internally within BMG, which was kind of strange.’

  Where the UK arm of the publisher saw the tempting prospect of milking controversy, the staff in the US had a classic games-marketing perspective. How did it look? Was it visceral? Was it cutting edge? ‘They thought this would never work in the US – that the consumer was too tech-savvy now, and they would look down upon something that wasn’t full 3D,’ says Jones. With only three months to go to the game’s American launch, BMG US was pushing to have it cancelled. It was only the appeals of the company’s London office that saved it.

  But the relationship between DMA and BMG was still mixed. ‘The BMG deal as a whole was good and bad,’ says Dailly. ‘It did give a massive cash injection, and DMA’s size jumped from 50 or so to 130. It was also the beginning of the end . . . DMA took on too many projects, and this meant some didn’t get the staff and work they needed – a downward spiral in terms of cash drain.’

  In the wake of Grand Theft Auto, DMA once again had a spurt of income, and the team were feeling very positive. Jones wanted to cement the success and reduce his company’s distractions from development. He brokered DMA into a takeover by the Sheffield-based publisher Gremlin Graphics. On the surface, it was a good fit. DMA was quirky and original, but successful. Gremlin, a publisher since the 8-bit computing era, was solid, and perhaps a little dull – its main range of games was a series of reliable sports simulations. Jones thought they would complement each other, an imaginative developer and a responsible publisher.

  DMA’s acquisition by a publisher was permitted by its deal with BMG, but it complicated the relationship. In a sense, though, that was already moot. ‘Strangely enough, BMG had already made the decision to get out of the gaming business,’ says Jones. ‘They were in the process of closing down their US division, so Grand Theft Auto was actually then licensed to a non-BMG company in the US. Which I thought was a real shame, because they hadn’t had much success with gaming, and along came GTA and really started to trail blaze just as they were pulling out of the industry.’

  The US licensee was ASG Games, which peddled the same contro
versy in America as BMG had in Britain. But ASG was a tiny publisher and the rights for the US PlayStation version that followed a few months later belonged to a larger company called Take Two Interactive. Within two years all of these companies, DMA, BMG, Take Two and Gremlin Graphics, would have finished a complex game of musical chairs that would leave control of Grand Theft Auto with a new development team and a new boss, and on a different continent.

  ‘On the first GTA it was always BMG, there was no Take Two,’ says Hamilton. ‘We had various people visiting from the US. It was quite late on before we actually saw Sam.’

  Sam Houser worked for BMG Interactive in London during the making of Grand Theft Auto. He was an English public school boy, the son of prestigious players in London’s swinging heyday – his father was one of the owners of Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, and his mother an actress who had played opposite Michael Caine in Get Carter. Houser had grown up connected to the media world, and had landed some work experience with the music arm of BMG while retaking his A-levels. After working his way through a slew of junior jobs in the company, including directing early video footage of Take That, he had manoeuvred himself into the division which he saw as the most exciting: computer games.

  At first Houser was merely one of the BMG Interactive team reviewing the builds of Grand Theft Auto that DMA sent from Dundee to London every couple of weeks. He was a producer of the PlayStation conversion, but wasn’t well known to the Dundee team until after thoughts turned to a sequel.

  GTA 2 transformed the franchise from an also-ran project for DMA’s new recruits to the star of its slate. ‘It was different now, in that we were no longer the unfortunate project of the company,’ says Hamilton. ‘We were now the big one that everybody wanted to be working on.’ GTA 2 had a bigger budget, and by now Sam Houser became involved. He was still based 400 miles away, but slowly becoming more visible. ‘I do remember him coming over,’ says Hamilton. ‘I remember a short, hairy guy. That would be Sam.’

  There was a shift in the development style, too. Grand Theft Auto had been led by the design and technical aspects of the game: programmers threw in ideas, guided by the limits of the technology. For GTA 2 the technological framework was taken for granted and, as Hamilton observed, the game became more ‘artistically’ led.

  Houser wasn’t a games coder, and in fact he had no computing background at all. But he was a games player, and a cultural sponge: during his teens he had immersed himself in hip-hop and East Coast rap. In this respect he was more BMG music than DMA games – his youthful interests rarely overlapped with those of kids who spent hours poring over code in their bedrooms. For the programmers, GTA 2 was about a more professional development cycle, and a complete technical rewrite of the code. For Houser, it was the chance to introduce gangs to the franchise. They were the subject of the game’s introductory video. Houser directed it himself.

  Since the start of Grand Theft Auto’s development, David Jones had known that his game was a technological stopgap. ‘Everything was going 3D and we were still last-generation in terms of technical ability,’ he says. ‘But we enjoyed playing it so much that the gameplay would make up for the 3D that some of the other games were showing.’ There was an implication behind DMA’s trade-off. If the processing power had been fast enough, if the graphics had been advanced enough, then they would have made Grand Theft Auto in immersive 3D. The player would have seen the streets as their character did, from the car seat or wandering the pavement. But that technology simply wasn’t ready. On the PlayStation, most driving games reached the limit of the hardware by streaming a single racing track towards the player. Showing the matrix of roads and buildings needed for a city seemed impossible for this generation of consoles.

  Then, in 1999, a few months before GTA 2 was released, Martin Edmondson’s company Reflections released a PlayStation game called Driver. It had been in the planning stages for some time while his other franchise was in development. ‘I wanted to get started on Driver immediately after finishing Destruction Derby, but Psygnosis wanted a sequel,’ says Edmondson. ‘We had to build that first.’ That delay might have given Grand Theft Auto’s top-down viewpoint a vital window of plausibility, because when Driver finally arrived, it delivered a fully realised 3D playground that GTA players would have yearned for.

  Driver gave the player the free run of San Francisco. They were locked in their car, and the street map had shrunk, but the fully 3D city, and the freedom to throw a car over its hills and around its corners, had arrived. And it had arrived in style; the game used seventies muscle cars with squashy, bouncy suspension. Fenders crumpled as collisions piled on, and when the player violated traffic laws, which was often, the police pursued them with reckless abandon. The game even had a ‘Director’ mode, so that gamers could replay their finest stunts and crashes.

  Edmondson’s influences had been motor sport and car-chase movies. As a youth he hacked his video player into pausing The French Connection so that he could marvel at the cars as they weaved through traffic and pulled off outrageous manoeuvres. He packed the same adrenaline and skill into his game: unlike GTA, at its heart Driver was about car chases rather than crime. And it was bloodless, too. Driver’s pedestrians always managed to jump out of the way of oncoming cars.

  It was a prodigious achievement, and also an inspiration. Many gamers, especially those with PlayStations, had found their enjoyment of Grand Theft Auto frustrated by its primitive, sometimes obscure, appearance. If Grand Theft Auto’s gameplay could take place in Driver’s city, it could unlock incredible experiences.

  Driver was the first free-roaming driving game of its kind, but Edmondson is realistic about the idea’s novelty. ‘Had we not released Driver ourselves, someone else would have done something similar,’ he says.

  And indeed DMA would. Twice.

  Computer game development is volatile, and even in the glow of Grand Theft Auto’s sales, DMA, which had now opened an Edinburgh office too, found itself overstretched and resorting to desperate measures. ‘DMA had other projects that were not successful and that were burning a lot of money,’ says Hamilton. ‘My understanding of the situation was that Dave basically rescued the company by selling the rights to GTA to BMG, for enough money to keep the company going in its own right. It was a massive mistake when you look back on it, one that would be worth billions eventually. But we didn’t know that at the time.’

  Sam Houser rarely gives interviews, but every account of him suggests that when he is passionate about a subject, he is a juggernaut of a personality. In the midst of GTA 2’s development, Houser managed to persuade Take Two to buy BMG Interactive, and they appointed him vice president in charge of both the UK and the US operations. Since the subsidiary could no longer be called BMG Interactive, and Houser wanted to keep it distinct from Take Two, a new name was chosen, which would reflect the attitude of Houser’s new company: Rockstar Games. Grand Theft Auto was Rockstar’s premier IP, and when Houser chose to live in New York, the centre of gravity for the franchise that BMG had acquired from DMA moved with him.

  Back in Dundee, Jones was struggling with another setback. Gremlin Graphics had sold itself to Infogrames, a rather conservative French publisher. Infogrames was unhappy about owning Grand Theft Auto in any form, not wishing to hold onto DMA Design for long, and in Rockstar they found a willing buyer. Keen to ensure that there were no loose ends to its ownership of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar made Infogrames an offer. By late 2000, the IP and its developers had been reunited, and Jones found his former company and his biggest title owned and controlled overseas by an outfit he didn’t want to work with.

  ‘I never really saw eye to eye with Take Two, to be honest,’ says Jones, ‘so I had to make a decision at that point. Did I then want to become part of Take Two and stay with GTA? Or was it time to go and do something else?’ He decided to try something new.

  Jones’s decision may have been affected by another wrinkle in DMA’s fortunes. The whole company agreed that a Drive
r-style Grand Theft Auto game was the next stage for the franchise, yet even within DMA there was a split. ‘There were two projects going on after GTA 2,’ says Hamilton. ‘There was “GTA 2 and a half”, where we were taking the GTA 2 engine, making it in 3D, and setting the game in 1980s Miami. At the same time GTA III was underway, but being developed in the Edinburgh office, mostly by the team who had previously worked on Body Harvest.’

  The new technology, and DMA’s geographical split, had resurrected the inter-team rivalry from the era of of Race ’n’ Chase’s inception. And Take Two’s buyout only seemed to heighten the division. ‘We thought this was Sam rescuing us,’ says Hamilton, but it quickly became apparent the Body Harvest team in the Edinburgh office were being favoured with the ‘real’ Grand Theft Auto sequel.

  Dailly, Hamilton and their colleagues were considering breaking away to form their own development company, when Jones approached them with an offer. He had secured funding for a new company in Dundee, would they like to join? ‘It was a case of choosing between Dave and Take Two,’ says Hamilton. ‘And our loyalty was much more with Dave. The day after we left, they shut down the Dundee office and laid everybody else off, or moved them to Edinburgh.’

  Even though their departure was their choice, it had felt like a necessary, rather than joyful, end to their careers at DMA. ‘It was a slightly acrimonious split,’ says Hamilton. ‘We were annoyed that the game had been given to this other team, most of whom had had nothing to do with the first two versions of it.’ Within a couple of years, DMA’s Edinburgh office, by then one of the most respected developers in the world, had been renamed Rockstar North. And the original DMA, the have-a-go Dundee start-up that had created Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, had entirely dissolved away.