Senior producer Gary Penn—a former journalist with a streak of Johnny Rotten and a taste for bright green socks—felt dejected. “This is a fucking simulation,” he said, bemoaning the game's “stupid details.” Up in Dundee at DMA, the developers were starting to agree. By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor.
When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through traffic lights, a persnickety programmer reminded him that the stop lights needed to be obeyed. Were they building a video game or a train set? Even worse, the pedestrians milling around the game created frustrating obstacles. It was almost impossible to drive fast without taking people down, and, because the player was a cop, he had to be punished for hit-and-runs.
Race 'n' Chase hit a road block. There was just no way to have a fast and furious arcade-style game while playing by the rules. The DMAers stared at the screen, as the cars and the people raced around. Maybe there was another solution, they realized. Instead of having to avoid all of the pedestrians, what if you got points for running them over? What if you were the bad guy instead?
VIDEO GAME DEVELOPMENT is a highly collaborative work in progress, with constant feedback along the way. As the publishers of Race 'n' Chase, Sam and the others at BMG would frequently get new iterations—or builds—of the game to evaluate and comment on. The developers would then go off and implement necessary changes.
One day a new build of Race 'n' Chase arrived for Sam and the others to try out. At first, it seemed the same. With the top-down perspective, the gamer felt as if he were hovering over a city in a balloon, looking down on gray and brown rooftops. Puffy green trees poked of out of green parks. Horns honked. Engines roared. When you tapped your forward arrow on the keyboard, you saw your unnamed character, a tiny guy in a yellow long-sleeved shirt, stride across the street.
With a few more taps of the arrow keys, you maneuvered the character toward a stubby green car with a shiny hood, then tapped the Enter key. That's when it happened. The door flew open, and the driver—some other little dude in blue pants—came flying out of the car and landed on the pavement in a contorted pile. He got jacked. As you held down the forward arrow, the car careened forward, supple to the flick of the side arrows—left, right—with a satisfying vroooom. You headed toward a flickering traffic light. Why stop? This was a game, right? A game wasn't life. A game takes you over, or you take over it, pushing it in ways you can't for real.
So you drove through the light, squealing around a corner. As you took the turn too wide, you saw a little pedestrian in a white long-sleeved shirt and blue pants coming too close, but you couldn't stop. Actually, you didn't want to stop. So you just drove. Drove right into the ped—only to hear a satisfying splat, like a crushed grape with a wine-colored stain on the sidewalk, and the number “100” rising from the corpse. Score! This wasn't the old Race 'n' Chase anymore.
The moment that DMA let players run over pedestrians—and be rewarded with points, no less—changed everything. Instead of cops and robbers, the game became robbers and cops. The object was to run missions for bad guys, such as jacking cars, the more the better. The leap was radical. In the short history of games, players had almost always been the hero, not the antihero. You were the heartsick plumber of Super Mario Bros., the intergalactic pilot of Defender, the glacial-paced explorer of Myst. One obscure arcade game from the 1970s, Death Race 2000, let players run over virtual ghosts, and it got banned. Nothing put you behind the wheel to wreak havoc like this. As Brian Baglow, a writer for DMA, said “You're a criminal, so if you do something bad, you get a reward!”
Sam loved it. He had always been drawn to rebels, and now he was pushing games to be more rebellious too “Once we made you able to kill policemen, we knew we had something that would turn heads,” he later recalled. Yet this wasn't about manufacturing controversy. In fact, that didn't enter their minds. The game—with its ugly top-down view—was clearly so cartoonlike and absurd, someone would have to be crazy to take it for the real thing. The focus instead was on milking the tech to make it as insanely fun as possible.
Ordinarily, game making was a machinelike system carried out by artists, programmers, and producers. A designer would come up with the overall idea, then producers would dispatch programmers to code the engine—the core code that drove the game's graphics, sounds, physics, and artificial intelligence. Artists would create models of objects in the world and fill in the details of the scene with objects and textures.
But at DMA, the system had become a free-for-all. The developers scurried back to their desks in Scotland, to come up with crazy shit. DMA's nearly one hundred employees had taken over two nearby buildings, including one that housed a £500,000 motion-capture studio that no one had quite figured out what to do with. The Race 'n' Chase team worked separately in their own back section and quickly became the rebels of the group.
Up front, where coders worked on Lemmings sequels and other titles, bookish geeks toiled quietly at their desks. Yet the thump of rock music could be heard blasting from behind the wall in the Race 'n' Chase room. Back there, a dozen or so members of the team had transformed their corner into their own bad playground. A team of seven musicians had set up real instruments to record a soundtrack for the title (far removed from the electronic soundtracks popular at the time).
DMA's screaming gamer, in particular, was not real concerned about his hygiene. One day, someone stuck air fresheners under his desk. The next, little pine-tree fresheners hung from his lamp. Finally, he came back to find his entire desk covered in variations of air-freshening aids. For fun, they'd leave rotten food in one another's desks over the weekend.
With so much freedom to play and design Race 'n' Chase, anything was game. The developers included references to Reservoir Dogs, James Bond films, The Getaway, and chase scenes from the French Connection. They reported back to the meeting a week later, where Jones would shape the overall vision to go where no game had gone before. If someone brought him a feature he'd never seen in another game, he gave it his full backing.
He had Sam's and Penn's complete support, too. Sam had grown from an iconoclastic kid to a renegade businessman. “Fuck it,” Sam would say. “Just put it in the game, I don't give a shit what people think!” He had a goal to push games into new terrain and wouldn't let any obstacle get in his way. He knew what he was up against: a surprisingly monolithic industry that had grown comfortable with formulaically heroic tales that, by and large, lacked originality.
He had refined his own style in working with DMA to produce the game. “If the game isn't coming together properly, I'll apply focus, drilling it in and pushing it through,” he once told Dan. “I don't lay down the law, I'll just go in with enthusiasm and energy and do it in a pleasant but aggressive way. I don't take no for an answer. I don't do it by being difficult. I do it by putting the right effort in.”
The simplest thing Sam wanted was clear: freedom. Just like Elite and the other games he had loved as a kid, the newfangled Race 'n' Chase seemed like more than just a game. It was, most important, a world. The game takes place within three fictional cities, each modeled after a real town. Jones, the savvy entrepreneur, wanted to choose cities that would have the most impact on the market—and that meant the United States.
There was palm tree–lined Vice City, based on Miami; hilly San Andreas, based on San Francisco; and gritty Liberty City, based on New York. To receive a new mission, players had to stroll up to ringing telephone booths in town. A mob boss, say, Bubby, would then explain the mission, described in a subtitle on the bottom of the screen. You'd have to go, say, steal taxis or kill rival gangsters. One mission, taken from the movie Speed, required you to drive a bus at more than fifty miles per hour; otherwise, it would blow up.
The thing was, some play testers didn't want to do the missions at all. Given the bad-boy nature of the game—cars to steal, pedestrians to crush—they had more fun recklessly joy
riding around. Baglow, who oversaw the play testers, would politely tell them it was time to stop driving and go answer a phone for a mission, but he could sense their disappointment over being restricted from simply joyriding around.
Penn, the producer at BMG, thought the game should let players do what they wanted. “It's a virtual space,” he fumed, “you're allowed to do what the fuck you like!”
THE AMAZING THING about creating a video game was that you could code your own solutions out of thin air. You didn't need to reshoot a massive scene of a movie with thousands of extras, you could just think and type. Gary Foreman, the thoughtful young programmer in charge of the technical production for BMG, came up with a solution for the mission structures on his own. There was no technical reason why the missions had to progress in a linear fashion. “Can't we just make it so you can answer any phone?” he asked.
Why not, in other words, just let the players proceed along their own paths, at their own pace—answering a phone whenever they wanted to or simply speeding off and having fun? This wouldn't be the first time that a game would let players freely roam in an open world or a sandbox. Games such as The Legend of Zelda offered degrees of undirected exploration. The Race 'n' Chase team also reminisced about an old Spectrum game called Little Computer People, which let players roam a two-story house doing random chores. Yet bringing that kind of freedom to a criminal world would break down the fourth wall as nothing ever had before.
Sam knew this sort of DIY freedom was revolutionary for the medium. “The problem with other games is that when you hit a point that's frustrating, you can't get past it,” he once said, but in Race 'n' Chase, “when you hit a point that's tough, just go do something else. That's fucking great!” Even the audio became freer. If players could drive anywhere in the cities, why not have different radio stations in their cars, too? Such as country music when you steal a truck. Late into the night, the musicians stayed up recording the different radio tracks.
Jones had his worries about creating such an open-ended game world. Games were all about having an object, a purpose, a goal—shoot the aliens, get the high score. How would gamers respond to something as unrestricted as this? He hatched an idea of how to give them some focus: setting a goal of accumulating one million points. When he looked at Race 'n' Chase, the cars zipping around from here to there, he thought of a different model for the game: pinball. “Pinball, for me, is the ultimate,” he said. “You have two buttons, and that's it. It's just superb for teaching players about getting feedback and hooking players for hours.”
Race 'n' Chase could be similar, encouraging players to rack up as many points as possible—even by running people over. Not everyone dug the increasingly untamed direction of the game, though. One programmer stubbornly insisted on continuing to play the game as a simulation—and others walked by to find him dutifully stopping at the traffic lights in the game. Yet they realized that was the beauty of what they had created. You had the freedom to do anything, good or bad.
The only limitation was your “wanted” level. If you caused enough mayhem, a cop's face would appear on a meter at the top of the screen. Police cars would give chase if they spotted you. Commit more egregious crimes, and your wanted level increased. Now an in-game APB was put out on you. At wanted level three, police would begin to set up roadblocks. If you got busted, you got carted off to jail, and your weapons were confiscated. Yet to keep all of this from happening too frequently and ruining the game, Baglow suggested that there be Respray Shops, where you could pull in the car and get a new coat of paint.
Their living, breathing world teemed with life. DMA programmers would sit at their PCs and pull back the camera on the game, just watching cars drive on and off the screen. “The good thing about [the game],” said one coder at DMA, “is that you don't have to go down a predetermined path. And there's nothing as much fun as spinning a car over your friend's head six times.”
They weren't only running over one another, however. Baglow, DMA's writer and PR guy, had an idea of other people they could mow down in the game. The inspiration came from his own real-life travels. Whenever he passed through London airport, he always got hassled by Hare Krishnas, urging him to be happy. “Gouranga!” they'd say, a Sanskrit expression of good fortune. Baglow hated it. Then a lightbulb went off over his head.
Back at BMG, a new build of the game arrived. King slipped it into his PC and began to play. As he tore down the road, he could see a line of small orange-robed figures moving down the street. The closer he came, the louder he could hear them chanting and drumming. Holding down his forward arrow, he careened toward them, plowing down each one as a point score floated up above them. As he smashed the last one, a bonus word flashed onscreen: “gouranga!”
“Dude!” King exclaimed, “I'm running over Hare Krishnas!” The BMG crew marveled at this wicked weird world the gang in Scotland had created. Race 'n' Chase had come a long way from the geeky simulation that DMA had submitted a year before. It was time to give it a new name, something that captured its outlaw spirit: Grand Theft Auto.
5
Eating the Hamster
WANTED LEVEL
Grim city. Aerial view. A blaring police car tore through narrow streets in pursuit of two cars. Inside the vehicles, the gangsters seemed young, dressed in black suits, white shirts, black ties, and shades. They leaned out their windows, waving guns in the air. The cars passed phone booths and restaurants, buses and pedestrians.
It looked like something out of a video game, but this was real life. Down by the docks along the river in Dundee, the cop pulled the car over. When he approached, he saw one of the blokes holding a video camera. “We're making a promotional video for a computer game called Grand Theft Auto,” said Baglow, the diminutive DMAer with short blond hair and glasses. The get-ups and the toy guns had been inspired by Reservoir Dogs, and, as Brian Baglow and the other geeks from DMA in the cars explained, they were just making the video for fun. The cop arched his brow. Grand Theft Auto? What kind of crazy game was that?
Though the cop let the guys off, he had reason to be dubious. As Grand Theft Auto—or GTA, as the crew had begun to call it—developed, the darkly comic urban action game couldn't be more different from the biggest title around: Tomb Raider. Released in the fall of 1996, this action adventure of swashbuckling Indiana Jane, Lara Croft, had become gaming's greatest phenomenon in years. It milked the muscle power of the PlayStation like nothing else, with players jumping and swimming and shooting from mountains to crypts. Lara, with her big breasts and almond eyes, was eye candy personified.
This couldn't have come at a worse time for GTA. Games were often judged by appearance alone, and compared to glitzy Tomb Raider, the top-down, 2-D racing scenes couldn't look more outdated. The brass at BMG wanted to cut the game. Or, as Penn put it more bluntly, “they were trying to kill it every fucking month.” Jones remained defiant. “Gameplay! Gameplay! Gameplay!” he said. “Graphically, it may not be at the cutting edge, but I believe this is going to change the world.”
Luckily for Jones, he had BMG's crew of Nerf gun–wielding players on his side—along with a new member of the BMG team, Sam's younger brother, Dan. Fresh from studying literature at Oxford, he'd begun to compose questions for what would be a hit trivia video game, You Don't Know Jack. Dan shared Sam's passion for GTA and how it defied the wizards-and-warriors fare usually associated with the industry. “Here was a game that was commenting on the world,” he later said. “It was like being in a gangster movie, rather than a game.”
The decision to focus on gameplay over graphics was well thought out. As with any creative endeavor, making a video game was all about the allocation of resources. A computer had limited processing abilities. Rather than spending that currency on power-sucking eye candy, DMA took a counterintuitive approach: putting the power toward the city's action, physics, and artificial intelligence instead. They shared the stubborn conviction that players would agree. “It doesn't matter what it looks li
ke. If it is a compelling and fun experience,” King said, “people will play it.”
The Nerf gang succeeded at keeping BMG at bay, while assuring Jones to stay on target. Yet privately, they were starting to sweat. Something about GTA was amiss. The cars drove unresponsively. The story seemed clichéd and uninspired. Worse, the game kept crashing—freezing to a halt mid-play. It was, as Penn distilled, “a fucking mess.” When the DMA guys sent around an unofficial in-house survey to see which game they thought was most likely to fail, GTA topped the list.
THE PHONE RANG URGENTLY, as it always did, at Max Clifford Associates. In the United Kingdom, publicists didn't get much bigger or more controversial than Clifford. Having built his career representing everyone from Frank Sinatra to Muhammad Ali, the quick-witted, silver-haired Clifford had become, as one journalist put it, “a master manipulator of the tabloid media, the man many Tories blame for discrediting their government with a string of well-publicized scandals.”
Perhaps most notoriously, Clifford resurrected fledgling singer Freddie Starr's concert tour in 1986 by planting the sensational headline “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” in the Sun. Like the rumor of Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head a bat, the story generated so much attention that it sold out Starr's tour. Clifford pioneered a new game of journalism in which publicists could feed the most outrageous stories to a willing and hungry press.
Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto Page 4