Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  The pitch worked. In March 1998, Brant paid $14.2 million in stock for BMG Interactive. The deal gave him staff and the rights to GTA and other games. Promoted to Take-Two's vice president of worldwide product development, Sam would now be in charge of both the development subsidiaries and third-party developers, including DMA Design and Jones, who would continue work on the GTA games in Scotland. Yet there was one catch: Sam had to move to New York.

  Everyone wants to live a dream life, working at a job that isn't a job at all but a passion. Making video games in New York City, for Sam, felt like a dream come true. Eager to convince his friends to join him, Sam broke the news to his peers at BGM. “I gotta go to New York,” he told King one day. “You want to come?”

  King's mind raced with images of a past trip to New York. He had been staying at a model's apartment in the Village and roamed Fifth Avenue in the snow while listening to Pharcyde on his headphones—determined to one day live here. Did he want to come to New York and oversee game production? “Done!” King replied. “I'm there! Just book the fucking ticket!”

  Then Sam made a call to his other key buddy: Terry Donovan. A childhood friend from St. Paul's, Donovan was a towering Brit who'd grown up in the same kind of pop culture trend–setting family as Sam and Dan. His father had directed the iconic video for the Robert Palmer hit “Simply Irresistible.” Donovan wore his lineage with rock star pride, boasting of his early brushes with greatness. “My first drug experience was at age seven, sitting in my living room with Mick Jagger, smoking a spliff,” he once said.

  These days, Donovan had been working as head of artist relations at Arista, putting out dance, trance, drum, and bass records. He'd also been deejaying around town, marketing himself and the clubs. Though his only work with computers was getting his PC to write “terry is cool” as a schoolboy, Donovan listened intently to Sam's pitch. “You gotta come out here because we're starting a new label within the Take-Two family,” Sam told him. “It's almost like an independent, we're going to try doing our own stuff from BMG, try and make games that are more modern, more accessible.” Donovan, who would oversee marketing, was in.

  Gary Foreman, BMG's quiet tech whiz, got the pitch to be technical director at Take-Two. When he told his erudite gamer friends at home about his opportunity with Take-Two, however, they scoffed. Compared to GTA, the games that Take-Two made seemed cheesy and lame. “Take-Two?” they told Foreman. “What have you done? Are you kidding me?” No matter, he was in, along with the others. It was time to move to Liberty City for real.

  SAM AND THE OTHERS WEREN'T the only British invasion coming to the States in 1998. So was their prized game, GTA. By now, Clifford's hamster had grown into a Godzilla-size monster, thanks to the British media. GTA madness had even spread to Brazil, which banned the game outright, ordering all copies to be taken off the shelves. Violators faced up to $8,580 in fines.

  After hearing about GTA on the Internet, gamers in the States were rabidly awaiting its release. An early GTA website, launched by a fan at the University of Missouri, went viral online. Players added news and tips about the game, spreading the word until the site had more than a hundred thousand visitors. Sam and the others made it the official hub for the game. Reports came in that hackers were copying the game and distributing it online, a practice that had yet to really break beyond the indie underworld. When the press caught wind, they hyped the real-life criminality of the game. “A top-selling Scots computer game is being stolen . . . by teenage nerds in America,” wrote the Sunday Mail.

  Although Take-Two had purchased the rights to release the PlayStation version of GTA later in the year, the game arrived in the States first on PC. A small start-up in Connecticut called ASC Games, which had released a bowling title and the Jeff Gordon racing game, secured the rights. ASC followed BMG's lead by milking the controversy to fuel sales. The company hyped the game in a press release titled “Amidst Storm of Controversy,” and irreverently promised “to unleash a crime wave on America.”

  On its release in the United States, the U.S. press heralded GTA's inventiveness and rebellious spirit. Official PlayStation Magazine called it “one of the most original, innovative, technically impressive and controversial PlayStation releases ever.” Computer Games Magazine effused, “The game's gleeful embrace of anarchy is a refreshing change from the normal do-gooder activities found in most games. Crude and profane, this brilliant little game allows us all to get in touch with our inner Beavis.” GameSpot said, “It won't win any awards. [But] Wanna-be sociopaths who can deal with the shortcomings will have a lot of fun.”

  Yet ASC quickly experienced the real battles that followed GTA. The ASC publicist handling the game learned this firsthand when he demonstrated the game for Entertainment Weekly. As he watched the writer, who seemed entranced with the experience, he figured he could count on a high score. He was wrong. The review came out with the lowest—and rarest—letter grade yet, an F. GTA got slugged off as a “shock-schlock game . . . as monotonous as it is discomforting (you earn brownie points with your Mob boss, though), leaving you with outdated graphics and a game that's guilty but hardly a pleasure.”

  The publicist called up, begging for an explanation. “Why the bad review?” he asked.

  “The editors,” he was told.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the content. The content's so awful, I couldn't give it anything higher than an F.”

  By the time the game came out for PlayStation in the summer of 1998, however, even the worst review couldn't slow it down. GTA had arrived in the United States, and so had the unlikely stars behind it.

  THEY CALLED IT THE COMMUNE. It was a ground-floor apartment on Water Street in the South Street Seaport area of Manhattan. Practically no windows. A cave of darkness. This was where Sam, King, Foreman, and Donovan moved in—along with Sam's three cats—when they landed in New York in the summer of 1998.

  Just to be in Manhattan was electrifying, especially after so many years idolizing the States. The honking horns. The Noo Yawk accents. The salty smell of hot dogs wafting up from street vendors. The Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. All of the great restaurants, from the dive Radio Mexico down the street to the trendy Balthazar in SoHo. The guys spent hours flipping through the channels on TV, just watching the wonderfully American excess pipe in: sensational crimes on local TV, the game show models, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, pornographer Al Goldstein on public access flipping off rivals with a big “Fuck You!”

  “I can't believe what's being pumped into the living room,” Donovan said.

  “We're here!” King effused. “We work on the games, they're risky and ambitious, we don't know what we're doing! It's exciting. It's amazing. Now we're here in games industry and totally high profile, whether we like it or not.”

  They were young, far from home, with no real clue how to run a video game company, but they had something crucial: the dream and the drive. Working out of a cramped office in SoHo, the guys began mapping out plans for a GTA mission pack set in London in 1969, along with a formal sequel, GTA2. At night, they'd return to the Commune to stay up late playing video games and plotting their future. Sam's job was to oversee the company's publishing efforts in the United States, including games beyond GTA. He also had a personal mission of his own: “to bring our attitude, try to make games that felt more relevant to the audience that was playing them.”

  The guys knew just how they wanted to do it, by starting their own video game label—“a hip, happening label, more about lifestyle, not toys or technology,” as Donovan once described it.

  “Take-Two has an identity, EA has their identity,” King agreed, “it's important that we have our own identity, and let consumers know what we stand for, a certain kind of branding.” As Baglow, who had come from DMA to handle PR for Take-Two, said, they wanted to create “an outlaw label,” something that reflected the renegade spirit of GTA.

  Sam phoned his brother Dan, who was still in London bu
t planning to join them in the States soon to work at Take-Two and oversee the writing of the games. Dan, like Sam, was sick of an industry telling grown men to play the roles of elves and wanted something more. He was convinced, as he said, “that there was this huge audience of people who play console games in particular and who were very culturally savvy and culturally aware, but who were being fed content when playing games they found slightly demeaning.”

  They wanted to make the games that they wanted to play. To do this, they didn't want to model themselves on other game companies such as EA, which they considered a crass, sequel-spewing machine. Their goal, as King later put it, was simple but bold: “to change everything.”

  ONE DAY SAM and the others piled into a car for a road trip to Six Flags Great Adventure, the theme park in Jackson, New Jersey. The guys loved roller coasters almost as much as hip-hop and wanted to celebrate their new move with a day on the rides.

  GTA was on its way to selling more than one million copies worldwide. They still weren't rich, but they were emboldened. They wanted to brand themselves while they were hot, so that consumers knew they weren't just buying into a game but a lifestyle. They just needed a name. They would still remain part of Take-Two Interactive but as a branded label. Grudge Games was Donovan's favorite, suggested because they were, as Sam once put it, “world-class grudge bearers.”

  “Minimum ten years,” Dan said.

  When they had run the idea by Brant, though, he balked. “You know, guys,” he said, “I know where you're going with that, but it's a little on the negative side.”

  During a recent trip to London, Sam had tossed out the name Rockstar. “I like everything, from the Keith Richards it evokes to the campiness it evokes,” he later said, “and everything in between. . . . at the end of the day you can't fuck with Keith Richards!”

  “It's a nod to the past and a snipe at it at the same time,” Donovan agreed. “And also, in a weird way, a snipe at the lameness of the present. In some ways, the golden age of the rock star is done. Not many Keith Richards around now. Now they're drinking herbal tea!”

  Foreman had one concern about calling themselves Rockstar: they had better deliver. “People will make fun of us,” he said, “we'll get shit, but then pressure would be on. We'll have to live up to it. We have to make sure our games are really, really good.” Yet that, for them, was a given. Now the cofounders of this label simply had to make it official.

  Over in the midway at Six Flags, they saw a vendor selling wooden plaques. For a few bucks, visitors could have their own messages burned into the wood, such as “Bon Jovi Rulez!” As the acrid smell of sizzling carbon filled the air, they watched the carny etch their new name into the wood: Rockstar Games.

  They decided to burn one more sign for good measure. Something they could hang next to this one in the Commune back in New York. A phrase to remind them forever of this day when their mission began. A cheeky message, perhaps, for anyone who might ever try to stop them.

  “Fuck Off Cunts,” it read.

  7

  Gang Warfare

  RESPECT-O-METER

  Who presently tolerates you and who wants you dead. Depending on who you're working for, you either have respect with a gang or you don't. If you've got it with one gang, then head to their neighborhood and get yourself employed. If you don't, you better mind where you stray. Find yourself in the wrong area with no respect and you'll get a pretty harsh hello.

  Fuck off! Go home! Go back to England!”

  It didn't take long for Sam and his gang to read how their competitors felt about their calling themselves Rockstar. Game development companies, whose employees are predominantly male, are a unique breed of frats—brainy, creative, self-effacing members who are expected to be comfortable in their underdog status. They'd sooner compare themselves with Napoleon Dynamite than Keith Richards.

  After Sam announced his label's name in a December 1998 press release—“the Rockstar brand will finally deliver an elite brand that people can trust,” he promised—the flames hit the online gaming forums. Game developers bristled over the cocky New Kids On The Block. The fact that these Brits were in New York City, far from the hub of game development on the West Coast, only made them more outcast.

  Yet characteristically, the antagonism only emboldened the guys further. King, always ready to burst into a stream-of-consciousness rant similar to Sam's, fumed about how no one seemed to get their sense of mission or irony. “Rockstar came from growing up and being in awe of all the rock stars and the musicians and the hip-hop artists having limos, trashing hotel rooms, having stories like you snorted a fucking load of ants because you were so high!” he'd say, breathlessly. “The glamour! The photography! The backstage! The groupies! The T-shirts!”

  It was as if the other developers actually liked being dismissed as nerds. “Everyone's saying we're a bunch of geeks in a garage on a Saturday night who should be out dating,” King went on. “Fuck you! We've got Grand Theft Auto coming! It's a wake-up call to everyone. Games are going to be cool!”

  The plan started with their office. The team moved into 575 Broadway, a gorgeous red brick building in SoHo over the Guggenheim Museum annex. They arrived to work from the Commune, walking from the subway past models, hipsters, and artists. Upstairs, they took over a rundown loft with glassed-in offices in the back.

  Sam hung up a poster of his idol, the late movie producer Don

  Simpson, who made the blockbusters he'd worshipped as a kid: Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Days of Thunder. Simpson personified the kind of high-concept entertainment that they wanted to bring to video games. The fact that he died young, a drug-addled sex fiend, only made him more of an antihero to the team. “When you have a vision and you're creating something new, no one's going to understand that,” King later said. “Everyone's going to throw obstacles in your way, and you must overcome that. People like Don Simpson are an inspiration because they did it. They're pioneers, and fuck everyone else.” That's the kind of game makers they wanted to be.

  With their office in place, they needed a logo for their label—as iconic as Def Jam's. When they marched into Take-Two's office to unveil their plan, however, they drew blank stares. “We want to make stickers, and we want to make T-shirts!” King said.

  The guys in suits just stared back blankly. “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?” King responded. “Because it's cool!”

  Sam shared King's frustration with his new corporate parents. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked Dan. “Take-Two isn't even in the top twenty-five game publishers. They're nobodies. All they have is a few corporate guys and a couple of accountants. That's it.” Yet their ambitious boss, Ryan Brant, insisted on giving the boys their freedom, despite being a subsidiary of Take-Two. Rockstar commissioned a gifted young artist named Jeremy Blake to design the logo. After several iterations, they decided on the winning one: a letter R with an asterisk, R*.

  As they battled to brand their identity under the corporate parentage of Take-Two, Rockstar began to build its team. As president of Rockstar Games, Sam would oversee the vibe and the vision of their products. He began hiring people who shared their mission to change the gaming culture and industry. All that it took was a few minutes with Sam for prospective employees to fall under his spell. Who was this shaggy, bearded Brit, spitting and ranting about making games cool? As one early hire said, “I bought into his vision and charisma.”

  Yet if you wanted to join the game industry's most elite gang, you had to play by its rules. Baglow, the former writer and publicist for DMA, learned this quickly after he showed up in New York to head Rockstar's PR. Accustomed to the more typically geeky office culture back in Dundee, Baglow had simply bought a bunch of T-shirts to wear to work at Rockstar, a different color for each day. Donovan, mountainous and chrome-domed, looked down at Baglow as if he were a lowly Hobbit. “Fucking hell, mate, are you just changing your texture map?” he joked, referring to the graphic scheme used to color ob
jects in video games.

  The next day, Sam and Dan took Baglow along to the hip shops on Broadway, buying him a wardrobe they felt was more worthy of their new international PR manager: Dockers, hoodies, and a gray T-shirt with their logo and the words “Je Suis Un Rockstar” on the back. “I look more like a Long Island white boy than a dick from Dundee,” Baglow quipped, after he donned his new garb. Baglow was told he had to, as he put it, “learn the Rockstar way.”

  The Rockstar way didn't end with the wardrobe. It was built on attitude, as Baglow learned one day during lunch. He had come back into the office with a bag from a nearby Chinese take-out place. Sam snarled at the sight of the restaurant's name on the bag. “Oh, no!” he snapped, “you're not getting that!” Baglow learned that the restaurant had done something inexplicable to piss off Sam and had landed on the boss's burgeoning black list. “There are places we can't go because Sam had a bad experience,” another Rockstar explained to Baglow.