Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Yet with Mortal Kombat still burning around the world, the media eagerly fanned the flames. Nintendo, which ruled the industry, had sold a Disneylike image of gaming to the public, but this was now in jeopardy. Video games were “dangerous, violent, insidious, and they can cause everything from stunted growth to piles,” wrote a reporter for the Scotsman, “. . . an incomprehensible fad designed to warp and destroy young minds.”

  While the medium was being infantilized by politicians and pundits, however, one of the biggest corporations in the entertainment business was taking up the fight. In 1994, in Japan, Sony was working to release its first-ever home video game console, the PlayStation, built on the idea that gamers were growing up. Phil Harrison, a young Sony executive tasked with recruiting European game developers, thought the game industry was being unfairly portrayed as “a toy industry personified by a lonely twelve-year-old boy in the basement.” Sony's research told another story—gamers were older and had plenty of money of their own to spend.

  The problem with reaching these players started with the hardware. Sony found that although children had no problem pretending their blobs of brown-and-peach pixels were Arnold Schwarzenegger, adults needed more realistic graphics to suspend disbelief and engage. The answer: CD-ROMs. Unlike the cartridges used by Nintendo, a CD-ROM could hold more content—including full-rendered video—and offer games that were more like what Harrison described as “sophisticated multimedia events.” Combining a high-end graphics machine with an entertainment console was sending a clear message to the industry: it was time for the medium to become more mainstream and grow up.

  Sam couldn't agree more. With the new BMG Interactive division pursuing game publishing, he desperately wanted in. Games were the future, he was sure, and he saw this as a medium through which a guy like him could finally leave his mark. The challenge was to change the meta-game, to bring the experience into a new era, just as the films and the music he loved had redefined their own industries.

  Sam urged the BMG brass to give him a break. “I want a go at this,” he told them. “I want to get involved. I'm not involved, but there's a lot of things I can bring to this situation.” Once again, his doggedness paid off. After graduating from college, he got transferred to the Interactive Publishing division. The game industry worked similar to the record industry. Just as labels put out CDs created by bands, publishers put out software created by developers. They oversaw the production of the game, doling out editorial direction while handling the business, marketing, and packaging. Developers dealt with the front-line creation of the games, from the art to programming.

  Hits paid for flops, and if one out of ten games scored, that was enough. BMG's early games (a backpacking title, a golf simulator), however, fell on the losing side. Yet Sam never gave up hope. Maybe he was crazy. Or maybe, somewhere out there, someone was making a game crazy enough for him.

  3

  Race 'n' Chase

  FRIEND PROFILE: DAVE “CAPO DI TUTTI CAPO” JONES

  Joining Jones for the following activities goes toward 100 percent completion of the game.

  Special Ability: Game Design

  Call Jones and ask him to make you a computer game. You can pick up the game and sell it for cash.

  It would be a grand theft. Stealing the high score in another gang's territory. Dave Jones couldn't help himself, though. He could see the Galaga machine flashing inside the fish-and-chips shop like a beacon. The tall black cabinet with the red-eyed, bug-shaped alien warlord on the front. The spiraling electronic theme song. He wanted to touch it. Slip his coin in the vaginal slot, and pound the buttons. Zap the invaders, get the high score, and put his initials at the top.

  Yet this was not the part of Dundee, the industrial town north of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he lived. This was Douglas, one of the rougher neighborhoods in a city known for being rough. Once famous for its jute, marmalade, and the invention of Dennis the Menace, Dundee's economy had tanked by this time in the early 1980s, taking its working-class residents down with it. Teenage gangs with names such as the Huns and the Shams prowled the street, looking for a fight like some Scottish version of The Warriors. Anything could set them off. The wrong look. The wrong football jersey. And especially a gawky, carrot-topped geek in glasses like Jones.

  Still in grade school, Jones lived with his parents across town near his dad's small newspaper shop. When he wasn't fishing for salmon in the River Tay, he played Space Invaders at the greeting card store near his bus stop. Every day before and after school, he'd make sure to keep the top score.

  As he passed through Douglas on an errand, he couldn't resist having a go at the Galaga machine. His coin dropped inside with a satisfyingly metallic plunk. Jones positioned his right pointer finger over the smooth red convex plastic button. He gripped the stick. Hit Start. The onslaught of alien insects on screen began. In a flurry of taps, Jones obliterated the invaders and took the top score—entering his initials for all to see. Who was the real player now?

  But the local toughs lurking outside had seen enough. Just as Jones stepped out the door, the gang surrounded him. Who comes here and sets the high score on our turf? Jones ran down the gray cobblestone streets, past the old ladies with their bloated plastic shopping bags, past crusty men smoking unfiltered cigarettes under the overcast sky. The gang tackled him to the ground. As the blows came, he could do nothing but wait for the punches to end. Wait and hope that he would be alive long enough to limp back to the safety of his neighborhood and his own machines.

  AS JONES AND HIS OWN GANG of Scottish geeks knew, something electric was coursing over the cobblestone streets of Dundee. A computer revolution had begun. It started at the big brown Timex plant in town, which was churning out the UK's first popular wave of home computers, the Sinclair ZX81 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

  The Spectrum, with its jet-black keyboard and rainbow streak on the side, looked like a control panel to another world. All you needed to know was the code, and you were in. Word had it that Spectrums were “accidentally” falling off delivery trucks—and winding up in the hands of aspiring hackers.

  Jones's high school was among the first in the United Kingdom to offer computer studies, a course that he immediately took. Gifted at math, he taught himself to program and build his own rudimentary machines. On graduation, he scored a job at the Timex plant as an apprentice engineer, but what he really wanted to do was make games. A homebrew computer game scene was percolating from San Francisco to Sweden. Gamers made and distributed their own titles on Apple II and Commodore 64 machines. Jones joined a ragtag gang of computer coders called the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, who met at the local technical college.

  With cuts facing Timex, the company offered Jones £3,000 in voluntary redundancy pay—which he happily blew, in part, on a state-of-the-art Amiga 1000 computer (much to the envy of his pals). Though Jones had begun to study software engineering at the local university, his professors and family thought he was nuts. “This is never going to take off,” they told him. “You're never going to sell enough games to make a living.”

  Yet Jones believed in his dreams. With his grades plummeting, he spent late nights in his bedroom at his parents' house, hatching his plan. While the homebrew scene was dominated by fantasy and sci-fi games, Jones wanted to bring the fast action of arcade hits such as Galaga to home machines. His first game, a kill-the-devil shooter called Menace, was released in 1988 and sold an impressive fifteen thousand copies, earning critical acclaim and £20,000—enough for this car fanatic to buy a 16-valve Vauxhall Astra.

  To capitalize on the buzz, he left school and started his own game company, DMA Design, a reference to a computer term, Direct Memory Access. Jones hired friends from the computer club and moved the team into a two-room office on the second floor of a narrow red-and-green building, just above a baby accessories shop called Gooseberry Bush. Pasty-faced with polygonal hair, they looked like extras from a Big Country video. By day, they'd code; by night, hit up th
e local pubs or compete in games at their office. It was Animal House for nerds. They trashed the office so much that Jones's wife insisted on coming over to clean the toilet.

  This wasn't just fun and games, though. DMA exemplified the DIY spirit of the times: all you needed was a computer and a dream. Jones was on a mission to make games as cool and fast as his sports car. “We have three to five minutes to capture people,” as he once said. “I don't care how great your game is, you have three to five minutes.” The edict worked again. Blood Money, billed as “the ultimate arcade game,” came out in 1989 and sold more than thirty thousand copies in two months. Jones felt elated. He was on his way.

  In the competitive arena of game making, developers would compete to exploit the latest, greatest programming innovations. One day, a DMA programmer discovered how to animate as many as a hundred characters on screen at a time and made a demo for the team. Jones watched in awe as a line of tiny creatures stupidly marched to their deaths—smashed by a ten-ton weight or incinerated in the mouth of a gun. It was just the sort of dark Scottish humor that got everyone laughing. Let's make a game out of that!

  They called it Lemmings. The object was to save the creatures from dying. Jones's crew devilishly dreamed up the most punishing fates for the little beasts: falling into holes, getting crushed by boulders, being incinerated in lakes of fire, or getting ripped to shreds by machines. To survive, you had to assign each creature a skill, from digging to climbing, building to bashing. With more than 120 scenes of zig-zagging creatures, the game didn't only play—it teemed with life.

  Lemmings was released on Valentine's Day 1991 with a warning label: “We Are Not Responsible For: Loss of sanity. Loss of Sleep. Loss of Hair.” Lemmings became an immediate hit, selling fifty thousand copies on its first day alone. The game would go on to earn DMA more than £1.5 million, selling nearly 2 million copies worldwide. “To say that Lemmings took the computer gaming world by storm would be like saying that Henry Ford made a slight impact on the car market,” one reporter wrote.

  Just twenty-five, Jones was one of the wealthiest—and most famous—game designers on the planet. His journey from drop-out to millionaire made him one of the industry's biggest success stories. Ecstatic, he treated himself with his flashiest sports car yet, a Ferrari. Jones hit the road, speeding through the grim city past the gangs. If only there was a game in that.

  “FUCK! Fuck! Fuck!”

  It was just another day at DMA, and the biggest and most pungent coder on the team was having one of his tantrums again. Game making could be a mind-numbing craft—fashioning living worlds from abstract code—and sometimes this guy had to blow off steam. But as he stood banging his head against a wall and shouting, he saw a sprightly Japanese man beside him. “Oh, my God,” muttered another coder nearby, “that's Miyamoto!”

  Sure enough—it was him, Shigeru Miyamoto, the elfin genius of Nintendo, the inventor of Mario. Not long before, it would have been unthinkable that the biggest name in gaming would grace this little indie start-up in Dundee. Yet with the extraordinary success of Lemmings, Jones had scored a multimillion-pound contract to create two games for the Nintendo 64. “We think David Jones is one of the very few people in the world that are in the Spielberg category,” Howard Lincoln, now the president of Nintendo of America, told the press. Miyamoto, who took the screaming coder in stride, had come to experience the magic of DMA firsthand.

  Flush with cash, DMA had moved to a 2,500-square-foot office in a mirrored, militaristic building inside the Dundee Technology Park on the west end of town. Jones invested £250,000 in outfitting their rooms with the best technology they could buy. DMA was said to have one of England's biggest installations of refrigerator-size Silicon Graphics computers—so big that the minister of defense expressed security concerns. DMA needed the muscle power to bring Jones's geekiest dream to life: “a living, breathing city.”

  Virtual worlds were the stuff of science fiction but still not much of a reality in gaming. The appeal was obvious. Real life could be unpredictable and frustrating, but a synthetic world was something you could control. Jones had, as he put it, “a fascination with how alive and dynamic we could make the city from very little memory and very little processing speed. How could we make something living inside the machine?”

  Jones set his team free to come up with their answers. Programmer Mike Dailly engineered a cityscape from a top-down point of view. Another DMAer coded dinosaurs running through the streets. Another replaced the dinosaurs with something cooler, more contemporary, and closer to the boss's heart: cars. As Dailly watched the little virtual cars speed through the city, he thought, “We have something.”

  Jones liked the concept of Cops and Robbers—casting players as the police out to bust the bad guys. “Cops and robbers is a natural rule set that everybody understands,” he said. “They know how to drive a car. They know what a gun does.” Thinking Cops and Robbers too generic a title, they renamed it Race 'n' Chase instead.

  Walking into DMA was like seeing a bunch of grown men playing with a Hot Wheels set—except on their PCs. From the overhead view onscreen, tiny pixilated cars cruised the streets, blips of people climbed onto buses and trains that stopped along their routes. Jones pushed for a more and more realistic simulation. Though cars could speed down the street, they had to stop at traffic lights that blinked from red to green. Jones watched gleefully as his little world teemed with life.

  When a demo was ready, he took the game to a prospective publisher in London, BMG Interactive. The company wooed Jones heartily, eager to get into business with the UK's boy wonder of gaming. Jones left with a deal to deliver four games over the next thirteen months for Sony, Sega, and Nintendo. He retained ownership and received an estimated £3.4 million. “They will treat computer companies in the same way that they treat their music companies,” Jones effused to a reporter.

  Back in the BMG office, Sam and the others booted up Race 'n' Chase. There was just one problem: the game kind of sucked.

  4

  Gouranga!

  WEAPONS

  NERF CROSSBOW. The Crossbow takes three Basic Arrows or five Mega Darts, with a maximum firing distance of forty-one feet and one shot per 2.28 seconds. The range makes this killer ideal for long-range battles.

  NERF BALLZOOKA. This blaster pumps out a whopping fifteen ballistic balls in just 6 seconds, with a maximum distance of thirty-four feet. Rate of fire is an impressive one shot per .37 seconds. It will have your enemies screaming, “It's raining balls!”

  If you took a job at BMG Interactive, you needed to be properly armed. At any given moment, the Nerf guns would be drawn, unleashing a flurry of bright-yellow foam darts and balls across the room. The playful atmosphere went with Sam's new territory. He was making only £120 a week, but he was living his dream. As the English oddballs of the German music conglomerate, the gamers relished their outsider status, having taken over a backroom of the company's London headquarters.

  They had reason to get their game on. By 1996, a new era in video gaming had dawned, thanks to the success of the Sony PlayStation. After releasing the new PlayStation console in Japan in December 1994, the company had sold five hundred thousand machines in the first three months. Sony called the £300 million debut “our biggest launch since the Walkman.”

  Sony hired the stylish ChiatDay ad firm to handle the U.S. release. In England, they marketed the machine to an edgier, hipper demo-graphic—“the cool kids of London,” as Sony's Phil Harrison put it. The company created a promotional lounge at the Ministry of Sound nightclub, filling it with PlayStations and sleek displays. Fliers got passed out to clubgoers with the words “More Powerful Than God.” Sony was on its way to sales of more than 8 million PlayStations worldwide for the fall of 1996.

  So much for Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Games were becoming edgier, and Sam had a kinetic new colleague who shared his passion, Jamie King. A slim, handsome twenty-six-year-old with a nervous excitability, King was a fledgling music vide
o producer who'd been introduced to Sam through a mutual friend. King could keep up with Sam's encyclopedic passion for pop culture. They shared a love of John Cassavetes and the French black-and-white gang flick Le Haine, fashion and art, Tribe Called Quest, and JVC Force. King, brought on as an intern, quickly proved he could keep up with Sam's indefatigable work ethic, too.

  What they needed to work on now more than anything was this new game: Race 'n' Chase. Though it had technical chops, it was missing something crucial: balls, preferably as big as the yellow ones flying around the room. On his screen, Sam looked down on the virtual city, the buildings rising in chunky colored blocks. Little cars puttered along gray streets with white hash-mark lines. Traffic lights blinked from yellow to red. Antlike people paced the sidewalks. Sam pressed one button on the keyboard, and the door of a car swung open. He pressed another, and it closed.