Fernandez, an aspiring filmmaker at nearby New York University, shared a love of film, a clincher for Sam—despite the fact that he preferred mainstream fare over Fernandez's artier tastes. “The real fun shit is Top Gun! Beverly Hills Cop!” Sam told him.
“Why?” Fernandez said.
“Because it taps into the mainstream,” Sam replied. “And if you can create art that communicates to everybody, it's much better than creating art that communicates to five people.” Sam reveled in the details of director Michael Mann's action sequences in Heat, such as the opening shot of the armored car whizzing across the street. “I want to translate this kind of craftsmanship into a video game,” he said.
Sam put Fernandez and Pope on the franchise closest to his heart, GTA. Fernandez became the self-described “details guy,” in charge of cultural research. This meant everything from making sure that car doors swung open the right way to roaming the streets of Chinatown, taking shots of storefronts for inspiration in the game. Pope would oversee countless hours of play-testing of the game.
Once again, Rockstar would publish the next GTA as a subsidiary of Take-Two, overseeing the production and marketing of the game, while the day-to-day development would be handled by the twenty-three coders and artists at DMA in Edinburgh. Sam knew how to bottle the lightning that made GTA magic in the first place: by fostering a highly collaborative work environment. As he later said, “Everyone working on the project, from the most junior to the most senior, everyone's opinion is of equal value.” They were all Rockstars here.
10
The Worst Place in America
OVERVIEW
Liberty City is a complete physical universe with laws, rules, standards, ethics, and morals. They are yours to shatter.
The moment the boxes arrived at 575 Broadway, the Rockstars hungrily ripped them open. They hurled the packaging to the side and pulled out the little black stealth tower with the ribbed spine down the middle. Each resembled a mini monolith from 2001, and they were the Neanderthals hooting and hollering and clanging bones. As they plugged in the objects and listened to the hard drives rev to life, they sighed deeply. “Oh, my God,” said Sam, “how are we going to do this?”
They had just received the PlayStation 2 development kits, the hardware with which they would create games for Sony's next-generation machine. In the game business, the big three console makers—Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo—advanced their industry and competition by releasing new platforms every three to five years or so. Players and developers breathlessly awaited this dazzling showcase of new technologies.
Coming in 2000 (first in Japan, then other countries), the PS2 promised the most living, breathing worlds yet. A powerful new central processing unit, nicknamed the “emotion engine,” meant uncanny artificial intelligence, characters, and creatures who would move and think more like actual animals. A breakthrough graphics chip would generate more dynamic images in real time, bringing a greater realism and fluidity to the scenes.
Because the PS2 could support DVD-ROMs, instead of only CD-ROMs, games could now store and stream troves more data—animations, music, environments. “Imagine a truck rolling into the level,” Phil Harrison of Sony told Sam enthusiastically, “and the back of the truck bursts open and suddenly fifty people are leaping out of the truck at you!”
With the PS2 in his tool shed, Sam knew exactly what kind of world he wanted for the next Grand Theft Auto: 3D. In video games, the term 3D didn't mean the same thing as in movies—with exploding watermelons flying off the screen when the viewer wore stereoscopic glasses. Instead, it was a misnomer, shorthand for the sort of vivid, deep, and immersive worlds popularized by games such as EverQuest and Tomb Raider. Although Jones had always trumpeted gameplay over graphics for GTA, no one stood in Sam's way anymore. Even better, they didn't need to spend long hours developing a new software engine for the game. They could simply license one—called Renderware—that would be perfect for GTA.
Sam had begun to develop a vital skill for success: intuitively knowing how to exploit the future without losing sight of the past. More important, he trusted himself to make the right call without second-guessing his gut. For the next GTA, that meant staying true to what made the franchise so special in the first place—the freedom, the choices, the central idea of casting players as outlaws and giving them choices for how to behave. By marrying GTA with PS2, Sam had a new mission with which to push their games: “to make the first interactive gangster movie,” as he said.
GTA III would be the first of a proposed trilogy based on each of the three cities established in the first game: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas. They'd start with Liberty City, all the more perfect because it was based on their new home, New York. Around the office, Sam ranted about the movies and the TV shows he wanted to emulate: The Getaway. Heat. HBO's new mob hit, The Sopranos.
Yet at the same time, Sam was also pushing himself to go beyond the limits of film. He swore off the experiments with live-action sequences, as they had tried in GTA2. “I'm not going to fuck with video, I'm not going to fuck with film,” Sam told Fernandez. “I'm going to do everything within the world of the game engine.”
To bring the 3D world to life, they rented out a motion-capture studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Actors would be filmed performing the parts, then the scenes would be translated into animations within the game. Rockstar hired a fearless young Iranian-born director named Navid Khonsari to direct the scenes. Before Khonsari went out, Sam and Dan kept repeating their mantra for GTA III: “real, real, real.”
A stylish guy with close-cropped hair and rectangular glasses, Khonsari knew this meant nailing the most iconic moment in the game: the carjacking. He molded a car out of sandbags and gymnast bars, piecing them together like Legos. He added weights to the bars, to make the doors feel heavy to open. When the actors came into the studio, he quietly told the driver to hold onto the steering wheel for dear life. Then he secretly told the other actor to yell at the top of his lungs when he ran up to the car. Khonsari watched with glee as the scene unfolded, with the driver freaking out—as expected—at hearing the unscripted scream.
Soon afterward, Sam, Dan, King, Donovan, and the rest gathered nervously to see an early prototype of the carjacking scene. Despite their bravado, they still smarted from the insults over the early GTA's graphics and hoped they could finally leave Lara Croft in the dust. Onscreen, the silent scene appeared in wireframe form because the rest of the art had not yet been completed. An orange car appeared, with two men inside. Suddenly, a blue wireframe man stepped up to the side, yanked open the door and pulled the passenger out, then tossed him to the ground. The driver then fled in a panic, as the carjacker took the wheel. “Holy shit!” King exclaimed.
It worked. They weren't just looking down on Liberty City anymore, they had been teleported inside it. They watched the carjacker over and over again, grabbing the wheel and taking off just as Rockstar was determined to drive their industry.
THE ONLY THING more empowering than playing a video game was creating it. Reality was imperfect, but the simulation could be controlled. You could put in what you wanted and leave out the rest. You started with a city of your choice, then filled it with the people you designed. The cars you wanted to drive. The shops you wanted to frequent. The music you wanted to hear. And when the weather wasn't up to snuff, you could change that to your liking, too. No matter how much freedom players had in your game, they were living in your world.
GTA III started with Liberty City, which would be “the worst place in America,” as the Rockstars labeled it, in the best possible ways. They would simulate New York City—not the actual one outside their door, but the larger-than-life fantasy that, in some ways, was more real. They broke Liberty City into three areas: an industrial section, similar to Brooklyn and Queens; a commercial center that resembled Manhattan; and burbs that looked like Jersey. As players drove around, they'd pass seedy and awesome places: the fish market and the Laundromat, the
ammo shops and the Pay 'n' Sprays, the Italian restaurants and the busy streets.
With so many places to go, they coded the transit system with which to get there: the tunnels and the trains and the bridges and the boats. Using the Renderware engine, the PS2 created lavish blue waves that crashed and rolled with lifelike physics. The water reacted to the stimulus, too, creating weather systems of storms and rains. A thick Bergmanian fog rolled into a makeshift city block running on the PC screen. And with weather, that meant they could cycle through different times of the day—with missions in the daylight and at night. When the sun set over Liberty City, the creeps would hit the streets.
The muscle power of the PS2 transformed the experience of exploring in the game. The physics of the cars changed, based on the size of the rides, with even greater precision than in the early iterations of the games: the sluggish minivans, the nimble sports cars, the cabs and the ambulances and the ice cream trucks. With eighteen collision points on each car, the vehicles smashed and crumbled even more realistically, too. In the past they'd had only a handful of speaking characters in the games, but this time they'd have more than sixty. That meant scaling up from ten thousand to more than a hundred thousand lines of dialogue, from a pedestrian shouting, “Haven't you got respect for your elders?” as he got shoved, to a driver in a fender bender screaming, “Watch the wheels, gringo!”
As the city teemed to life, so did the story. Dan drew from his literature studies at Oxford, meticulously shaping the narrative of the game. The action began with the player cast as a nameless crook getting freed from a police truck on his way to prison. From there, he'd have to work his way back up through the underworld, running more than eighty missions for increasingly powerful bosses and gangs.
Rockstar wasn't limited to dispatching in-game missions over clunky phone calls anymore. This time, players would get jobs by meeting a motley crew of gangsters in person. For continuity, Rockstar scripted cut-scenes, interstitial cinematic shorts sandwiched between the missions to, say, burn down an enemy's hangout or whack a rival. Compared to GTA and GTA2, the cinematics added a layer of drama and intrigue. It was one thing to pick up a phone, and another to sneak through the back door of a sex club to get a job.
To provide voice-overs for the parts, they continued to pioneer the use of celebrities, and hired some of their favorite character actors: Michael Madsen, Kyle MacLachlan, Debi Mazar. One day on set, they marveled when one of their biggest heroes walked in the door, Frank Vincent. The silver-haired tough guy had been in three of their favorite Scorsese flicks ever: Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino, as well as The Sopranos. Now he was here to do dialogue for a mob boss named Salvatore Leone in their game. He took one look at these scruffy Brits and said in his thick New York accent, “I don't know shit about video games. I don't know what the fuck this is.” Khonsari reassured him, “It's no different than a movie.”
Balancing the nearly eighty missions with the open-ended freedom wasn't an either/or proposition. “I thought people would like to do both,” Dan said, “[have] some time hanging out . . . and sometimes following the game through its path.” There had always been a built-in sort of morality to GTA, with a player's wanted level rising according to his crimes. In GTA III, players didn't even have to be the bad guys at all. They could drive an ambulance or a cab around town, completing little mini missions that boosted their standing. The choice to pursue good or evil was in the paws of the gamer.
For King, the open world of GTA III felt not only freeing but autobiographical. “It was about kind of mirroring what life is for us growing up,” he later said. “You are running around and, whether you like it or not, you are living on the other side of the fence. So instead of rescuing the princess at the end of the dungeon, you're driving cars and listening to music that's engaging.”
Buoyed by the increased fidelity of their cheeky outlaw world, Rockstar turned up the volume on the sex and violence, too. Coders wrote a script that allowed players to snipe limbs off pedestrians, leaving them in puddles of blood. One day, Pope booted up a new build of the game when he noticed a new pedestrian on the side of the street—a hooker in thigh-high fishnet stockings and a bra underneath an open shirt. There had never been anything like this in a game before. When he pulled his car up, she leaned over. He let her climb in his car, then he drove off to a side street and waited. He saw his money go down, representing her taking his cash. Slowly the car began to rock, as his health meter soared.
Yet it didn't take long to make a certain leap of logic. In the game, players could beat up pedestrians and steal their money. So why not steal the cash back from the hookers after they had sex? Soon enough, a player at the office had pulled the hooker back out of the car after their tryst and pummeled her into a bloody heap—as his cash refilled. “Wow,” Pope thought, “people will love this.”
No matter how edgy GTA became, Sam stood by it. “You often can feel like you're doing things nobody is going to appreciate since the games are full of thousands of arcane details,” he confided to a game reporter one day. “If you start thinking, ‘Is this one really important?' you have to kill that in your head.'”
IT WAS A GRAY day inside Liberty City. Rain poured down on the Callahan Bridge, casting the buildings in a wispy haze. Cars streamed up and down the highway—the buses and the police cars, the sentinels and the patriots. Sam knew just which one he wanted, the blue banshee with the white stripe down the middle. He jogged up beside it, then tapped the triangle button on his controller as he ripped open the door and tossed the driver to the side. “He's taking my car!” the driver cried, as Sam held down the X button, flooring it.
Tapping the rectangular button with his left pointer finger, he flipped through the stations. There were nine of them now, one for every mood. Click. The subtitle “Double Clef FM” on top of the screen. The strains of opera. Click. Flashback 95.6 with Debbie Harry singing “Rush, Rush.” Click. Game Radio FM, underground hip-hop. Royce rapping “I'm the King.” Sam tapped the X button and accelerated.
He wasn't just playing, he was observing. This was his world and it had to be perfect. His eyes and ears scanned every detail rushing past him in the game. The hum of the accelerator. The squeal of the tires and little black tire tracks when he took a corner. The splat of pedestrians under the wheel. The way the hood flew up off the front, exposing the metallically intestinal engine, followed by a terrible stream of smoke.
The guys at DMA had coded the physics to let players drive over lampposts, knocking them down to the ground so that nothing would stop their pace. Sam clipped the lampposts like pathetic sprigs, as his wheels jumped a curb for a short-cut through a green, tree-lined park. “I'm an old lady, for Christ's sake!” shouted a ped as Sam raced by.
Once he hit the highway, that's when he did it. Tapped the Select button to change the camera view of the action, which the DMA guys had coded for the first time into GTA. Click. First person POV, as if he were strapped on the hood of the car. Click. Third person, overhead looking down on the ride. Click. His favorite, Cinematic mode. It appeared as if the camera were saddled on the lower left side of the car like a chase from a film. As Sam tore through the town, the camera automatically switched to other cinematic angles, as if some brilliant invisible William Friedkin was directing.
“This is the future of moviemaking,” Sam believed. “Because here's my set, I can go anywhere and put my camera anywhere. I can do anything again and again and again from any angle I want.” The more he played GTA III, though, the more he felt something inside him change. He was twenty-eight now. A man living his childhood fantasy. Long after he first saw Michael Caine and his mom zooming down the streets in Get Carter, he had been fascinated by action films. Now as a pedestrian flew over the hood of his car, and the sun beamed down in its simulated brilliance, he was the star of his own revolutionarily cinematic game.
He wasn't merely watching a movie, he was inside it—and this realization made him feel as if he'd never be able to watch
a movie the same way again. Games weren't about one person's authorial vision. They were stories told by a new generation of creators and players in a language all their own. “To me, as a film nut, there was something about GTA III that just drew a line in the sand between games and movies,” Sam recalled, “and it felt like this is us taking over now.”
11
State of Emergency
GETTING AROUND
Liberty City is full of many different kinds of cars and vehicles, all of which are yours for the taking . . . approach the car and press the triangle button. Be warned, while some drivers will be scared and hand over their vehicle without too much resistance, others may not be too happy about it and will put up a fight.
A car cut past the palms of Miami, Florida. City of vice. The drug dealers in the art deco alleyway. The players in their fancy cars. The rollerblading models, women and men in thongs. The depravity pulsed like neon outside Jack Thompson's window as he made his way home, but the nearness only served to remind him of his fight.
Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto Page 9