Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Across the street from the convention, Sam and the cofounders partied with another group of rebellious game makers from Take-Two Interactive called Gathering of Developers—or GOD for short. GOD had transformed a parking lot into a rock-and-roll happening called “The Promised Lot.” Beer flowed. Bands played. Strippers cavorted in Catholic school skirts. King hammed it up in a photo with a fake-boobed dude in the Catholic girl get-up, pretending to chop up a pile of coke with a gold American Express card.

  To get a demo of GTA2, reviewers had to make a special appointment to meet with Rockstar behind closed doors. The preview couldn't have been more different from the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy of the massively multiplayer online role-playing games out on the floor. Gamers zipped around the cyberpunk streets of GTA2, running missions and road-killing pedestrians.

  Publicist Brian Baglow, now rechristened as Rockstar's “lifestyle manager,” made the rounds, hyping the new features—Gangs! Better missions! Better graphics! With Sam's ambitions growing, Baglow desperately tried to fill his boss's burgeoning appetite for rave reviews. Sam didn't want only the game press; he insisted on reaching hipster magazines such as Face and Dazed and Confused.

  Press members would be led into an interview as if they were meeting Oasis. Sam and Donovan would then take over, celebrating GTA2's gangs and grit. “You can sit and watch gang wars taking place while you're around the corner having a cigarette,” Sam would say, “and he does actually smoke in the game.” While other publishers shied away from the post-Columbine furor, Rockstar hit it head on. “Our responsibility is to 99.9 percent of the population who aren't actually planning to murder anyone in the next two weeks,” Donovan said.

  Even more unusual for a game company, Rockstar showed off a short live-action film it had shot to promote GTA2. With no budget and with King producing, the team approached it like their own indie Goodfellas. For props, Foreman and King had tracked down an underground weapons shop in New York. When the gun dealer flipped on the light, Foreman and King looked around to see shelves of MP5s, M16s, and M60s. “Most people making games didn't get to do this kind of stuff,” Foreman later deadpanned.

  They shot the film in Brooklyn with a small cast and crew, only to have the sky open up in a torrential downpour. Without the proper know-how or permits, the locals freaked out on the guys, throwing them out of locations. Sam and Donovan finally showed up in a huff, furious to find that King had spent $150,000 and counting. Donovan eventually got into the spirit, letting himself get tied to a chair, dressed as a Hare Krishna, as thugs pretended to pummel him senseless. Dan e-mailed a photo of the scene to the GTA fansite Gouranga! which promptly posted it online.

  Gamers at E3, however, watched the film dubiously. Who did these self-described Rockstars think they were? GTA, despite its cult success, was far from a mainstream phenomenon. Compared to the other games at the show—such as Sony's ultrarealistic Gran Turismo, showcased for the upcoming 128-bit PlayStation 2 system—GTA2 looked outdated. One writer dismissed it for having “chess-like 2D graphics.”

  Undeterred, Rockstar continued its outlaw campaign for GTA2 beyond E3. Increasingly confident, Sam and the cofounders insisted on doing it themselves, rather than take the standard route of farming it out. “This is a cultural product and we understand how to present it better than an advertising agency ever could,” Dan said. Sony, after all, had been brazen with its own outlandish campaigns—which included ads that showed a hip young couple with PlayStation controller button nipples.

  Yet Rockstar's overconfidence got the better of Sam and the cofounders when they pushed the controversy too far. The cover of the game showed a car against a black background with the tagline “Steal This Game” underneath. They took out Steal This Game ads on billboards and buses and TV commercials and planned to launch it at a football match in the United Kingdom. They even sponsored a GTA2 promo with the Monster Truck tour. Retailers didn't get the joke, questioning why they'd want to encourage people to shoplift. “If you run this ad,” one threatened, “I'm not buying any games.”

  Donovan's marketing team tried to salvage the ill-conceived campaign as best they could, spending a fortune on stickers that they slapped over the Steal This Game ads with the word Censored. When Baglow questioned the plan, he was told it was guerrilla marketing in action. “It's not guerrilla marketing,” he replied. “It's a fuck-up.”

  The problems didn't end there. As Baglow later recalled, word spread around Rockstar that a website called “Fuckstar” had been set up online by a disgruntled former employee. When the team booted up the page, they found a vandalized version of the Rockstar logo—along with the sound of a toilet flushing. Sam and Dan hit the roof.

  After hiring an investigator to look into the matter, they realized they were the ones being had. Unbeknownst to them, a GTA2 marketing exec had planted the fake site as part of an elaborate ruse intended to build buzz for the game. The plan was to leak word that a Rockstar employee had nearly been killed by real gangs while doing research for GTA2—but that Rockstar covered up the mess. In retaliation, the scorned Rockstar had supposedly set up this vengeful site, Fuckstar. The elaborate hoax had been kept from the Housers to try to give it legs, but it proved to be yet another misconceived disaster.

  For Baglow, the marketing mishaps demonstrated how easily Rockstar could go off the rails. “During GTA2, we engaged PR and tried to court controversy, but it was not the slick PR machine that everyone imagined,” he later said. “It wasn't the shadowy masters behind the scenes engineering controversy. It was more like things came out, and then we were, like, ‘Oh, shit.' ”

  DAVE JONES had been called a lot of names since he started making games. Genius. Boy wonder. Spielberg. Yet while Rockstar was busy courting trouble with GTA2 in the United States, he earned a new moniker: sheep abuser. It had happened on the release of a quirky new DMA game called Tanktics. The game challenged players to create tanks from bizarre found parts—including sheep, for power.

  When word of Tanktics got out, animal rights groups protested. “I am sure they could have thought of something else to make the game exciting,” said a spokeswoman for one. “It has yet to be shown that a serial killer started by abusing animals in a computer game,” a DMA producer responded.

  Had it really come to this? Yes, Jones was rich. He had a Ferrari with a vanity plate in front. He saw GTA ruling the charts, and geeks were wearing their Rockstar tracksuits around Dundee (one guy gave one to his mother, who was seen sporting a velvety blue get-up while walking her dog). Yet Jones didn't want to be a rock star. He hated the press, the attention, and just wanted to make the next innovative game.

  One day, he called in a reporter to show him his dream project: a virtual city. It was something he had wanted initially with GTA before the game had gone deep into its criminal direction. Now he was bringing it back. Unlike GTA, this world would let players be anyone they choose, from a cop to a businessman. He compared it to “a computerized version of the film The Truman Show.”

  This as yet untitled game represented the underlying tension between Jones and Sam. Privately, Jones felt that despite their Rockstar posturing, they were increasingly demanding corporate executives at heart. If Rockstar was supposedly the rebel child of Take-Two, the guys seemed more like their parents instead. “There was definitely tension there,” he later said. “Should we be making a game to a deadline, or should we be making it to a quality bar?” GTA2 was proof: a lackluster sequel, in his opinion, that had been rushed out to cash in on the first.

  But as far as Rockstar was concerned, they weren't demanding at all. They were just trying to make the greatest possible games. Since Jones had sold his company, the guys in New York were losing patience and wanted to take GTA into a new direction: 3D. During a trip to DMA, Sam had become elated when he saw a coder toying around with what the guy called a 2.5D version of the game. Sam's eyes widened as the top-down view on GTA suddenly shifted in an isometric way, buildings lengthening, streets receding, until
he felt immersed inside it. “Oh, man, if we do this in proper 3D,” he said, “it's going be insane!”

  He got his chance soon enough. In September 1999, Take-Two bought DMA from Infogrames for $11 million in cash. Rather than enduring a new corporate boss, Jones took the money and vowed to start his own indie company devoted to making the next great franchise—whatever that might be. In the aftermath of the split, Jones and Sam battled over hiring the remaining developers at DMA—with Sam winning the core developers in the end. Take-Two secured the rights for the future GTA games and a core team, whom they moved out of Dundee to the hipper locale of Edinburgh for good. This was Rockstar's game now.

  9

  Rockstar Loft

  MESSAGES

  Some of your contacts don't like to meet in person and will give out instructions on certain payphones around the city. These payphones will appear on your radar when they want to employ your special services.

  How did you hear about Rockstar Loft? Why do you want to go? If you could take someone, who would it be? What is it you don't enjoy about current nightlife in New York? What's the best movie you've seen in the last two years? Who is your favorite DJ? What has been the best moment in your life so far?”

  Across New York City in the fall of 1999, club kids stood at payphones, answering each of these seven questions as best they could. They had been lured there by calling a number advertised on fliers that promoted a mysterious new monthly party called Rockstar Loft. They figured they were phoning to get the secret location of the bash, but as they listened to the young person on the other end of the line ticking off interview questions, they realized that whoever was behind this party had a different mission in mind.

  The mission was clear to Rockstar Games the moment the guys decided to launch this event. The idea had come after they moved to New York and became disappointed by the club scene. “I realized there wasn't too terribly much to do in the evenings,” Sam sniffed. Similar to the game industry, the club scene wasn't hip enough for their tastes. So they decided to do a party of their own with the help of a famous promoter.

  Though it seemed odd for a game company to get into party promotion, the strategy gelled perfectly with the guys' unique ambitions. They wanted to build Rockstar as a lifestyle brand that included a clothing line coming from hip label Haze (baby-T shirts for the ladies and pinkie rings for the boys, available at Urban Outfitters around the United Kingdom) and a tour of the GTA2 movie at film festivals.

  The Rockstar Loft interview process was meant to weed out the players from the punks. “Fatboy Slim would be the wrong answer” to the favorite DJ question, Donovan told Zev Borow at the New Yorker. “You could have someone who says Cool Hand Luke and someone who says Notting Hill,” he said, “but the person who says Notting Hill could still actually be party-worthy.” As Sam added, “The worst thing people can say is ‘I'm so-and-so, and I own this company or run this record label, so I deserve to be invited.' We've made a lot of those people very angry.”

  Sam, shaggy and bearded, and Donovan, tall and bald, were deftly cultivating their public image to personify their games. When hipster magazine Raygun paid a visit, Sam and Donovan hammed it up for the photographer, posing on the rooftop in matching blue T-shirts and shades, Sam caught in mid-howl. Sam held up a copy of the game trade magazine with two stiff dudes in suits on the front. “This is the game business,” he said, derisively, then pointed to himself and Donovan, “this isn't the game business.” Donovan added, “Part of what we're trying to get away from is the lone, girlfriendless, pizza-ordering fat guy in the basement. We're just raising the tone of the entertainment to a point that we feel comfortable with.”

  For the launch of GTA2 on October 25, 1999, Sam took his show on the road back to London. During an interview with Steve Poole at the Guardian, he seemed energized to be back where it all began—his childhood, St. Paul's, BMG. As he drowned a plate of fries in ketchup at a diner, Sam played the part of being a Rockstar to the fullest. He told Poole how he'd been out to a bar in New York and got to chatting with a girl. “There's this game my friends are playing, and they're all talking about it. I wonder if you can help me?” she told him.

  “What's it called?” he asked.

  “Grand Theft Auto,” she said.

  Sam started dating her. He insisted that even the cops were groupies. “I met the NYPD,” he went on, “and they said, ‘We think your game's all right.' And I said, ‘What about the fact that you kill cops?' and they said, ‘Well, you know what? There's a lot of people out there trying to kill cops, and we'd rather they did it in your game than on the street.'”

  This felt like their first moment in the sun, and they were basking in it for all it was worth. To celebrate GTA2, Rockstar threw a big party in the East End of London. Word spread that Rockstar had invited convicted criminal Freddie “Brown Bread Fred” Foreman to the bash—only to be turned down. The game was apparently too controversial for the man. “As far as I can ascertain,” Foreman said, “the video encourages our youth to rob, steal, and murder indiscriminately, and that is something I'm totally opposed to.”

  The hype seemed to work. The GTA2 demo was downloaded more than a million times in only its first three weeks. Take-Two announced it would be shipping 1.2 million copies of the game, estimated to bring in $33 million in revenues by the time the company's fourth quarter closed on Halloween.

  Sam jetted back to New York in time for the first Rockstar Loft party on Saturday, October 30, 1999. Out of thousands of applicants, only five hundred had made the cut. The chosen ones rushed the secret location in Chelsea, brandishing their pink tickets. Inside, they heard a Parisian DJ cherry-picked by Donovan. Sam and the rest partied late into the night.

  Yet the hangover was harder than they expected. When the New York Times dismissed the Loft as “The Anti-Elitist Elitist Party,” complaining about the surly doorman and the fruit plates, Sam steamed. “It took one article for me—one journalist to say a bunch of dot com yuppies in Ralph Lauren T-shirts in our parties, some really snippy irrelevant bitchy remark,” he said. But the experience focused him. They were Rockstar Games, after all, not Rockstar Parties. And games were what they had to create. “That other stuff was very important to us until we figured out how hard being a game publisher is, how much time that takes,” Sam later said. “Then we suddenly realized, we've got serious proper jobs here.”

  AFTER THE INITIAL RUSH of GTA2 was gone, reality quickly set in. Sam got an unexpectedly forlorn visit from two suits at Take-Two, and they weren't happy about GTA2. Apparently, the Rockstars had made a youthful miscalculation about the level of their success. The numbers told a more tempered story. The reviews were middling; the sales, disappointing. Sam despaired that another game, Driver, seemed to get better reviews just because of the graphics.

  Rockstar had erred in its ways—celebrating prematurely, and losing focus. Yet the guys had the gumption to own up to their slip-up and tried to make it a teachable moment. “That was a humbler,” Sam told Dan, “don't count your fucking chickens. Don't take anything for granted. That's what we learn from this.” If GTA2 didn't meet their high expectations, then it was time for them to push their games harder than ever before.

  There would be no rest. After building Take-Two up from nothing to become a top-twenty publisher, founder Ryan Brant had his sights set on crashing the top ten. He had just the guy to handle the business side, while Sam oversaw the games: Take-Two's new president and director, Paul Eibeler. A street-smart jock from Long Island with a thick New York accent, Eibeler had started out marketing nail-guns for Black & Decker, before getting into software. He brought a pragmatism to whatever he did, looking at office staplers and video games both as consumer products.

  Take-Two continued to innovate. Eibeler landed a creative PR deal to get their games promoted in movie theaters around the country. Brant successfully took Take-Two public, using the money to buy smaller companies—from DVD distributors to smaller game publishers. They invested
in a small developer called Bungie, owning around 19 percent of the company, which was working on two titles at the time, a shooter called Oni, and a little sci-fi game called Halo (a demo of which was already blowing the guys away).

  With his parent company prospering, Sam's cockiness soared. One day, he showed up at Rockstar's office wearing a T-shirt for EA Sports—the label of Electronic Arts that churned out Madden sequel after sequel and represented the corporate machine the game industry had become. “I'm going to work for EA!” he joked.

  With his infectious passion, Sam attracted a dream team of employees. He had, as he once put it, “a philosophy of hiring very slowly and hiring people extremely talented and those fit in with our culture and committed to the hard work and the insanity.” Few were as committed as Sam's most dogged prodigies: Jeremy Pope and Marc Fernandez.

  Pope, a slight and affable young game tester, accepted a pay cut just to be part of Rockstar's renegade band. “We're going to take over,” Sam told him, “we're going to be the Def Jam of video games, and no one going to stop us!” Late at night, they'd pop in the latest PlayStation game and crack up. “Can you believe it?” Sam would say. “People are still making games for kids. We want to make games for adults, games that we want to play.”