Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Though they had only about a dozen employees, the sense of loyalty was already tight. King started to call themselves the 575ers, for their Broadway address. With Sam leading by example with his passionate work ethic, they labored into the night, cast in the bluish glow of their screens. Later they'd head to their favorite bar, Radio Mexico, as alive and electric as the city outside, to guzzle cervezas and fried cheese balls.

  WITH THE ROCKSTAR BRAND and team in place, they set about on their most important job of all: publishing the kind of games they wanted to play, no matter how strange they appeared to the rest of the industry. Their inexperience, relative to the corporate giants who ruled the business, only made them feel more empowered. Yet they felt that the stakes were high anyway, and their dreams were theirs alone to lose.

  Rockstar wasn't limiting itself to GTA. The company had Monster Truck Madness 64 for the Nintendo 64 in the works, as well as Thrasher! Skate and Destroy, inspired by the skater magazine. Thrasher! gave an early hint of the cultural mash-ups Rockstar wanted in its games. Instead of the standard arena rock soundtrack, Rockstar licensed vintage hip-hop such as “White Lines” by Grandmaster Flash and, even more unusually, released a promo on 12-inch vinyl with a Japanese logo.

  By 1999, GTA had sold more than a million copies worldwide but remained little more than a culty underground anomaly. PC gaming was still dominated by the fantastical fare of D&D knock-offs (such as Asheron's Call and EverQuest) and first-person shooters (Quake, Unreal Tournament). Console titles, even more mainstream, stuck to the predictable worlds of zombie killers (Resident Evil), cutesy gorillas (Donkey Kong 64), and movie tie-ins (Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace).

  Rockstar, however, refused to give up on its quirky urban satire. Next would come Grand Theft Auto: London 1969, a mission pack of extra levels for GTA. Sam relished the opportunity of doing bobbies and robbers in his hometown, sort of a virtual Get Carter. “London in the sixties was slick, glamorous and cool but with an ever-present undercurrent of ultra-violence,” he said, when announcing the game.

  Of course, he could press more buttons back home, too. When Matt Diehl, a reporter from Spin magazine, interviewed Sam about the game, he found a long-haired, frenzied Brit with a White Album beard. “You're running bagfuls of speed to a Member of Parliament's hooker,” Sam effused, “and there's both female and male prostitution!” It was all part of his master plan. “We're about doing games that have relevance,” he went on. “Most games let you be Tommy the Dancing Leprechaun who slays the dragon. You can't go to the pub and say, ‘Wow, I just slayed the dragon, man! But if you say, ‘I just carjacked fifty-five cars and ripped off drags, that's relevant.”

  At the same time, Rockstar began work on a full-blown sequel, GTA2. Taking a cue from Blade Runner, they set the action in the seedy near future of an unnamed city in America. There'd be a sleazy Elvis Presley bar called Disgracelands and an overrun mental institution. Instead of only police chasing the player as his wanted level increased, there'd be the FBI and the National Guard on the trail, too.

  Yet what most excited Sam and the others were the gangs. Instead of random people roaming the streets, seven identifiable groups of criminals ruled the three districts of GTA2. As the player answered phones in different areas, nearby gangs would send him off on missions to complete. Each gang had its own symbol and style, just as in The Warriors: the Loonies, symbolized by a winking happy face, were gleefully violent hoods who doled out brutal jobs of killings and explosives; the Rednecks were represented by a Confederate flag and pickup trucks; and the Krishnas were back, chanting outside their temple.

  Depending on how players impressed or pissed off the gangs, they would reap either the reward or the sorrow. Rockstar swiped the tagline from mob films, “Respect is everything.” For the 575 crew, the game felt vividly autobiographical, as King said, “from growing up in gang culture and going through thick and thin as teenagers, to the way we were a gang at Rockstar like the gangs within these games.”

  With Rockstar now driving the future of GTA, the pressure mounted on Jones and the gang back in Dundee. Gone were the free-form days of anything-goes development and the luxurious four years they spent making the first GTA. Rockstar, for all of its employees' youthful glee, still had a taskmaster parent behind-the-scenes: Take-Two. Their urge to rebel brought tensions to the fold.

  As a public company with milestones to meet, Take-Two demanded a specific date for GTA2's release: October 28, 1999. This gave DMA a little more than twelve months to make the game, with a budget of about $1 million. Making a successful game took an enormous amount of time and effort, because the developers literally had to code—and test—a believable world from the ground up. Six-day workweeks (known in the industry as “crunch time”) became the norm. Gone was the time when Jones made games on his own; the development team had grown to thirty-five people.

  Despite Sam's rebellious tastes, he always worked as hard as—if not harder than—any guy in a suit up at Take-Two. This is what gave him his edge, having the vision of an outlaw but the work ethic of a Puritan. To show solidarity during crunch, Sam and the others would shave their heads (then let their hair grow long again after a game shipped).

  The staff sat hunched at their desks by 8 a.m. and left at 10 p.m., with Sam always the first to arrive and the last to leave. Rockstar producer Marc Fernandez later compared it to the way an NFL quarterback leads a team by example. “Sam wanted everyone to know that no one worked harder than him,” he said. “You couldn't really question his critique because he was out-proving you every single day.”

  The tighter they became in New York, the more a sense of gang warfare emerged between Rockstar and DMA. “They were feeling that Dundee is this backwater place,” DMA producer Paul Farley later recalled. “There was definitely friction.”

  Jones had other reasons to feel disenfranchised. DMA was changing hands again. French publisher Infogrames was acquiring Gremlin Interactive, the company that Jones had merged with in 1997, for an estimated £24 million. Infogrames wanted to become “the Disney of videogames,” Jones said—and how could the Disney of games be associated with GTA?

  “OH, NO,” said Jack Thompson, as he tuned to CNN. It was just before noon on April 20, 1999, and the aspiring culture warrior was inside his Spanish-tiled home on a quiet suburban street in Coral Gables. His young son, Johnny, played in the background. With his wife, a successful attorney, paying the bills, Thompson had become a stay-at-home dad, caring for Johnny—as he kept one eye trained on the moral decay of America and his next call to action.

  It didn't take long to find it. Thompson watched in horror as terrified teenagers poured from Columbine High School. As the shootings unfolded on TVs around the world, millions of concerned parents desperately tried to make sense of this incredibly senseless crime. They needed something to blame, something controllable, something to assure them that this would never happen in their families. Thompson had just the answer: video games.

  Since his high-profile victories over rappers 2 Live Crew and Ice-T, Thompson had become an unusually potent crusader who built on three powerful traits, a savvy knack for media sound bites, a Vanderbilt-trained understanding of the law, and, perhaps most important, a tireless ability to fight. Thompson's best friend was his fax machine, which he used to flood the media with press releases about his latest cause.

  Now he had the game industry in his crosshairs. It started in March 1998, after fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on classmates during a school prayer group in Paducah, Kentucky. When Thompson learned of Carneal's passion for violent games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom, he worked with the attorney for three of the victims to file a $130 million lawsuit against the companies behind the titles.

  “We intend to hurt Hollywood,” Thompson announced at a press conference. “We intended to hurt the video game industry.” The press ate his hamster on cue. Thompson went on national TV to warn Today Show host Matt Lauer that the Paducah shooting would not be
the last of its kind. Seven days later, Columbine happened—making Thompson an even more credible media darling.

  Within moments of the shootings, he had the sheriff's department near Columbine on the phone. “Because of my research on the Paducah case,” he said, “I have reason to believe that school shooting—and now possibly this one—was the result of a teen filled up with violent entertainment and trained on violent entertainment, video games, to kill.” The media erupted the next day with news that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been inspired by the game Doom, copies of which had been found at their homes.

  For Doug Lowenstein, the staunch head of the game industry's Interactive Digital Software Association in Washington, D.C., Thompson had fired a devastating blow. Since the Mortal Kombat hearings of 1993, he had been successfully lobbying politicians to keep regulation at bay. A former journalist from New York City, Lowenstein had the First Amendment, as he said, “deep in my DNA” since his days working on his high school paper. He believed that it protected both Nazis to march in Skokie and developers to put out violent games. “That's the essence of free expression,” he said. “You can't compromise on free speech.”

  Articulate, intelligent, prematurely balding, and dressed in a business suit, Lowenstein presented a safely grown-up face for the industry that was still considered for kids. Yet in recent years, his successes in Washington had a downside. The industry had been coasting since the Lieberman hearings, regulating itself with its voluntary ratings board, the ESRB, and staying outside the fray of cultural debate—but not anymore.

  “Columbine fundamentally transformed everything,” he later recalled. “Suddenly, everything was back to square one, and the worst and most negative stereotypes about the industry were not only revisited, but in a way reaffirmed. You had never been in battle, but now you're fighting a war.”

  Lowenstein knew exactly what was on the line: a state and federal push for regulation. Sure enough, Lieberman called for an investigation into the game industry shortly after Columbine. President Clinton soon took up the call, ordering a federal investigation into game ratings and marketing. For Lowenstein, the stakes went beyond games. “Once you [accept] the principle that violent depictions can be regulated and restricted as obscenity can be,” he said, “you've opened the door to most pervasive and extensive government censorship that we've ever seen in this country.”

  Yet as Thompson made the rounds on TV, Lowenstein began to feel that he was losing the battle in the most influential arena: the press. Just one week after Columbine, Lowenstein went on the defensive when 60 Minutes grilled him during a lead segment on violent games. The show then cut to the story of Paducah and Lowenstein's new nemesis: Jack Thompson, who sat alongside Mike Breen, the attorney for the victims in Paducah.

  There on the most popular news program in the United States, Thompson, his graying hair neatly combed, had his biggest platform yet. This was his moment to take his culture war to a wider audience than ever before, to send a message to the players of the game industry that he was gunning for them. “What would you say to critics who feel that this is a frivolous lawsuit against defendants who have very deep pockets?” Ed Bradley asked.

  “Hold on to your hat,” Breen replied.

  “And your wallet,” Thompson said.

  8

  Steal This Game

  THREE WEEKS INTO THE FUTURE

  The city is on the edge of collapse, with law and order beginning to break down completely. People are running wild, half-addled on good-additives and semi-legal pharmaceutical pills. A giant corporation controls every aspect of society, from entertainment to organ transplants. . . . Things are going to get way out of control.

  Get away from me!” screamed the half-naked man in the cage, as he struggled to remove the collar from around his neck.

  “Shut up, you freak!” shouted his master—an ape chomping a cigar—as he yanked the collar tighter.

  The scene came right out of Planet of the Apes but wasn't taking place in the movie. It was unfolding live inside the Los Angeles Convention Center. Pasty young guys jostled to photograph the women in leather bikinis inside the cage. A newscaster with spiky blond hair

  interviewed one of the actors dressed as a gorilla. “Chasing humans has always been my most favorite,” the gorilla explained, as a comely slave stroked its mane. “I like to run them down in the cornfields, yes!”

  This promotion for a new Planet of the Apes video game was among the featured attractions of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the video game industry's annual carnivalesque trade show. For three days in May 1999, more than seventy thousand wide-eyed and sore-thumbed players from the real world descended here to check out the latest, greatest games. More than nineteen hundred titles from four hundred companies flashed on giant screens in booths designed like Hollywood sets.

  Publishers spared no expense to dazzle players and outdo one another. Gamers crammed into Electronic Arts' giant booth to watch macho men Diamond Dallas Page and Sting hurl each other across a ring as part of a promotion for a new World Championship Wrestling game. The child star of the new Star Wars: Episode 1 film hyped the tie-in game. Throughout the sprawling two floors of the convention, seemingly every stripper in L.A. had been hired to work as a so-called booth babe—including a gun-wielding Lara Croft. Even David Bowie, one of the many stars promoting a game at the E3, professed himself a fan. “Of course, I play Tomb Raider,” he said. “Like every other hot-blooded male, I was in love with Lara.”

  Video games were sexy, and celebrities and publishers wanted to cash in. The allure of new technologies electrified the air. With the Internet booming and Wall Street soaring, the dot com bubble was churning out legions of young millionaires. Bill Gates's worth alone topped $100 billion. Video games were the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world. In the previous three years, the industry had grown by an astonishing 64 percent—on target to gross more than $7 billion in the United States alone and surpass total box office movie sales.

  Yet despite the boom, as everyone here knew, video games had never seemed more misunderstood. With less than a month having passed since Columbine, video games had landed in the crosshairs of the culture war. Thompson's crusade had reached Capitol Hill, where Senator Sam Brownback effectively put the business on trial in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. “A game player does not merely witness violence, he takes an active part,” he warned, “the higher your body count, the higher your score.” The Feds passed an amendment to the juvenile crime bill in the Senate on the marketing of violent games to kids.

  Lowenstein methodically countered the claims, pointing out the vast number of adults (and moms) buying games. “Video games don't teach people to hate,” he told Time. “The entertainment-software industry has no reason to run and hide.” Yet journalists at E3 couldn't find many industry people to talk to. Those who went seeking comments at an E3 panel called “Ethics in Entertainment: Will the Medium Ever Reach Maturity?” found an empty room.

  Among the no-shows were the guys from Rockstar Games, who were more concerned about making a splash of their own. To mark the debut of their label at E3—the trade show that epitomized the very corporate industry they were taking on—Sam and the cofounders sauntered past the Pokemon mascots and the furry apes in tracksuits designed by Hanes, the graffiti artist behind the original Tommy Boy record logo, and emblazoned with the R* logo. The fact that few, if any, gamers at the show appreciated the fashion statement was beside the point. “It didn't matter to E3, but it mattered to us,” King recalled. “We're an art house! We're an art collective! We were obsessed.”

  They had earned the swagger. GTA: London 1969 had debuted at number one on the UK game charts, followed by the original GTA at number two. And even more, GTA had been in the top twenty for the entire seventy-five weeks since its release, an astounding figure in an industry that usually saw games quickly fall off the charts. “The Grand Theft Auto franchise has proven to hold a longevity that is unusual to
find in a video game series,” puffed Sam in a press release. They had even struck a deal to bring GTA to the family-friendly Nintendo 64 and Game Boy systems.

  With GTA2 due in October, Rockstar's British invasion had just begun, but its strategy wasn't merely to promote the games at E3. It was to sell Rockstar as a brand. For Sam, it was a way to evoke the kind of obsession for music he felt while growing up. “People have the same passion toward the game as certainly I would have to Adam Ant or David Bowie or to Abba,” he later said. “People are frenetic about it and want to feel the same passion is going on behind the scenes.”

  Rather than demean themselves by joining the circus on the main floor, the guys at Rockstar seeded GTA2 like a Def Jam street campaign. GTA2 stickers got slapped on anything that stood. One of Sam's decrees was no longer to refer to the game by its full name but rather by its cryptic acronym. T-shirts were printed up with only the GTA2 logo on the front. GTA2 took swipes at other games, too—such as when players would get a message on their pagers in GTA2 from a Lara, thanking them for the hot time last night. Fake pills embossed with the GTA logo were reportedly found by gamers in small plastic bags around the halls though, adding to the mystery, there was no evidence that Rockstar was behind the ploy.