Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Neither could their games. As the city reeled from the attacks, Sam and Dan wondered whether they should even release GTA III at all. Maybe it was too soon. “This beautiful city has been attacked,” Sam thought, “and now we're making a violent crime drama set in a city that's not unlike New York City. My God, I'm terrorized where I live, and on top of that, we've got this fucking crazy game that is not exactly where people's heads are at right now.”

  Instead of shelving the game, they, along with Sony, decided to make changes instead. No more sniper rifle shots to the limbs with body parts flying—too gory. No more buildings that looked like the World Trade Center in the game. Sam e-mailed Gouranga.com apologizing for the added delays. “Rest assured the game will be phenomenal,” he told them. “As ever, we really appreciate your continued support.”

  As they tried to recover from 9/11, people across America flipped on their TVs looking for escape. Some caught an unusual ad. In the background, a soprano sings the Italian aria “Mio Babbino Caro” from the 1918 opera Gianni Schicchi. Lyrical cut-scenes play on top, like an animated trailer for a mafia film the viewers have never seen. A sleek blue-and-white sports car peels around a corner. A foot chase of a guy with a shotgun running after a woman—until she turns and shoots him down. Then the title fades in on red lowercase, “grand theft auto III.”

  The ad promised something strange and new: less a game and more like a film you could control. Viewers watched the stoic antihero in his black leather jacket, walking through a lavish home as the Don, Salvatore Leone, puts his arm over the antihero's shoulder and makes a pact. This was the cut-scene setting up the “Bomb Da Base” mission, the one that had inspired Sam not long ago. Leone's promise was, in effect, the promise of Rockstar and the new era of gaming they wanted to usher in.

  “If you do this for me, you'll be a made man,” Leone says, “anything you want.”

  In living rooms around the country, on sofas and chairs, in bedrooms and dorm rooms, a generation of players clutched their Mountain Dew cans tightly, and said, “Hell yeah.”

  Bring it.

  12

  Crime Pays

  WANTED LEVEL

  Please welcome Colin Hanks!”

  It was January 16, 2002, and Jon Stewart, the host of the Daily Show, eagerly greeted his next guest. Hanks, the boyish twenty-four-year-old actor and son of star Tom Hanks, was in town to promote his latest film, Orange County. Yet what he really wanted to talk about was a new video game, Grand Theft Auto III, the mention of which elicited a burst of applause from one gamer in the crowd. “He knows what I'm talking about!” Hanks deadpanned.

  Stewart sank his head in his hands, laughing, as Hanks recounted his adventures with mobsters and hookers. “If you want your money back when she gets out of the car, you run her over,” Hanks continued, “problem solved!”

  Stewart replied, “Now I know what to ask for, for the holidays!”

  He wasn't the only one. GTA III was an immediate sensation. Game reviewers raved. GameSpy called it “an insanely well-made and fun game to play. . . . proof of the power behind the PS2's hardware.” GamePro magazine said it “makes an offer you can't refuse: Live a life of crime and reap the rewards that come with it.” Game Informer said it “shatters the standards set by its predecessors.” Entertainment Weekly deemed it “every bad boy's dream (and every parent's nightmare).”

  Players swapped tales of their adventures in the game as if they had taken place in real life. “The first few days,” posted one online, “I did nothing but run around the city stealing cars and running over hookers.” Though women played the game, GTA III was undeniably the stuff of dudes—raucous, enraged, frenzied. The game gave even the most powerless person a way to unleash his most violent fantasies, but in a world made from pixels where no one real got hurt. The most common reaction to flattening a pedestrian during the game wasn't a gasp, after all, it was laughter. To suggest that the game could cause players to run over people in real life would only make them laugh harder.

  A commentator on National Public Radio swooned about driving aimlessly within the game with the radio cranked while the sun set on the horizon. “You become like Emerson's transparent eyeball,” he gushed, “seeing everything, consisting of nothing.” For Dr. Henry Jenkins, the director of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, GTA III marked a new frontier. “Now that we've colonized physical space,” he said, “the need to have new frontiers is deeply in the games. Grand Theft Auto expands the universe.”

  Fueled by reviews and word-of-mouth buzz, GTA III became the fastest-selling, highest-grossing title for PlayStation 2 with more than six million games sold around the world. Take-Two's stock soared from $7 a share in October 2001, three weeks before the launch of GTA III, to almost $20 a share in January 2002. At one point, Rockstar held the top spots on the game charts, with GTA III number one, followed by its dark thriller, Max Payne. Including these two games and State of Emergency, Rockstar soon had three titles in the top ten.

  GTA III permeated the culture at large, just as Sam had always dreamed. The shout-outs on the Daily Show. Mix-tapes in New York with GTA sound bites. Even ecstasy pills allegedly floating around clubs with the Rockstar logo, not a company PR campaign but simply an act of love, it seemed, from fans. Rockstar also, got its due from the peers who once mocked them for having the audacity to name themselves Rockstar. When Rockstar producer Jeronimo Barrera, dressed in a zoot suit, accepted the trophy for game of the year from the industry's Game Developer's Choice Award, he said, “This is to show that video games don't have to be about hobgoblins and dwarves!”

  GTA III's success helped propel the U.S. game business to a record $9.4 billion in sales for 2001, a 40 percent increase from the previous year—and enough to dwarf the $8.38 billion in film box office sales. Sony, which had signed the GTA franchise exclusively to its consoles, rode the success to the top of the industry, outperforming rivals Microsoft and Nintendo, who had just released their new consoles, the Xbox and GameCube, respectively, in November (Xbox, ironically, was riding high on the success of Halo, the sci-fi shooter Take-Two had relinquished to Microsoft, after the company bought the game's creators, Bungie). Before long, Sony had shipped almost 30 million PS2 systems.

  Sony's Phil Harrison marveled at GTA III's huge reorders and crossover success. Like Sam, he had long wanted to expand the market for gamers, and Rockstar had tapped into something broad. “It demonstrated that Rockstar was thinking quite deeply about culture and the way that people would play the game,” he said. “GTA probably defined the zeitgeist better than anything else.”

  In Japan, home to Sony's headquarters, GTA III represented a seismic shift within the country's storied game culture and industry. Nintendo's two decades of family-friendly rule seemed quaint compared to the naughty new age of GTA III. Yet the changes raised eyebrows at Sony, too. Government ministries began to question Sony's execs. At a dinner party, the wife of Sony's founder was said to have admonished the PlayStation group over GTA III. “Oh,” she said, “I hear your games are very violent.”

  Harrison and others in the West did their best to reassure their counterparts in Japan. “Look,” Harrison would say, “if we're going to be a full-spectrum entertainment platform, we're supposed to have everything from Mickey Mouse to Mickey Rourke. We have to have a complete spectrum of entertainment on the platform if we're going to be truly mass market.” Japan formed its own Computer Entertainment Ratings Organization, similar to the ESRB in the United States, to help monitor the new generation of games.

  As outrage spread over GTA III—particularly, the hooker cheat—the game became a lightning rod around the world. It exposed the bias and confusion reserved for this young medium. Though similar battles had played out before—over pinball, comic books, rock music, and Dungeons & Dragons—this meant little to the public at large. Still viewed as a children's toy, video games were deemed an unacceptable forum for adult content. Although people clearly underst
ood the difference between movies and TV shows meant for children or adults, video games didn't get the same consideration. The fact that GTA III was explicitly and voluntarily rated M for Mature (with a mandatory label on its ads and covers) fell flat.

  In Australia, the Office of Film and Literature Classification Board, the country's federal body responsible for rating media products, denied it a rating due to its depiction of what it classified as “acts of sexualized violence.” GTA III was not only illegal to sell, but illegal to view. Retailers faced up to two years in jail and tens of thousands of dollars in fines for even displaying it. Players were told to bring the games back to the stores or face criminal charges if they were to show the game to others.

  In England, the director of a child advocacy group called Children Now warned that games threatened to desensitize kids to violence. A psychologist at the University of Northumbria said “newer breeds of increasingly sophisticated games encourage solitary behaviour and tendencies towards rebellion.” When the National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonprofit child advocacy group in the United States, released its annual Video and Computer Game Report in December 2001, GTA III was picked as the number-one game for parents to avoid. “We have enough violence in the real world,” said Senator Kohl. “We don't need to wrap it up in a bow and give it to children as a present.”

  U.S. representative Joe Baca, a Democrat from Southern California, introduced the Protect Children from Video Game Sex and Violence Act of 2002, which would make it illegal to sell an M-rated game to anyone under seventeen without permission from parents. “We saw what happened in Columbine,” Baca warned on CNN. “These are kids that are being programmed. They play the video games, they take the action and the character; they began to play that character, and then they began to commit those particular crimes. It's a shame when we have Grand Theft Auto III. We have another one as well—we have the State of Emergency. We look at a lot of the gang-by shooting that goes on, the riots that are going on in the immediate area. We have got to stop this.”

  Over at the IDSA, Doug Lowenstein tried in vain to counter what he called “the exaggerated claims of ideologically oriented politicians and media critics who favor putting government, not parents, in charge of the entertainment used by our kids.” Yet he refused to jump to the defense of the industry's most controversial publisher. “We shouldn't be spokespersons for the Housers,” Lowenstein later said. “That's their game.”

  CHEESE BALL! Cheese ball! Cheese ball!

  It was late one cold November night at Radio Mexico, the dive bar and restaurant downtown in New York City. Multicolored balloons with streamers bobbed against the low ceiling. Holiday lights wrapped the windows. Dozens of partying twenty-somethings in hoodies and trucker hats jammed inside, but the door was firmly closed to anyone passing by.

  In honor of Sam's twenty-ninth birthday, Rockstar was celebrating its most awesome tradition: the annual cheese ball–eating contest. The object was to devour more gooey, greasy, deep-fried, chili pepper–sauced, baseball-size globes of fat than anyone else. It wasn't easy. In addition to packing down the lard bombs, competitors had to endure chaos around them.

  While they ate at a center table, Rockstars waved fistfuls of cash as if they were betting on horses. Wagering was encouraged; screaming, the norm. Dan, the announcer, shouted through a bullhorn so that he could be heard above the wailing sirens. The winning ball guzzler got $2,000, two plane tickets anywhere—and serious bragging rights, especially when the record count hit twenty-four. Some competitors wore yellow headbands scrawled with the words “Eat Strong.” In between cheese balls, they had to eat rounds of jalapeño poppers. Buckets were left around the room for vomiting, and they got used. Casualties rinsed with tequila and lime.

  Afterward, they passed out awards—such as “Most Likely to Fuck Someone in the Office,” “Most Likely to Be in the Office at 4 a.m.”—made from medallions with the Rockstar logo. “Despite the industry's reputation as being male-dominated, Rockstar was about an equal mix of guys and girls, all young, and all more than willing to get shitfaced on any night of the week,” Rockstar producer Jeff Williams later recalled.

  On the heels of GTA III, it was a good time to be a Rockstar. Money and drinks flowed. It was the ultimate private club, where members called one another militaristically by their last names. As a sign of

  faith, employees each received a pewter ring with the Rockstar logo. They also received real U.S. Army jackets, personalized with the Rockstar logo and their street number, 575, on the back. They wore them with pride, sauntering through game conventions as fans cleared a path.

  Few felt more empowered than Fernandez and Pope. “Imagine a company where a hundred people felt like they were in the Beatles,” Fernandez recalled. Pope credited Sam. “It's easy to see his genius in all this,” he went on. “He really understands you really have to have all the style in world, but have to marry that with really hard work and strong technology. He understands you need the whole package.”

  Weathering the controversy over Grand Theft Auto, however, was proving more difficult. Though they put out perfunctory statements assuring the public that the company “makes every effort to market its games responsibly, targeting advertising and marketing only to adult consumers,” they tried to stay out of the sociopolitical debate. “I didn't think we could win,” Eibeler recalled. Khonsari, GTA's director, got an e-mail telling him to lie low as the press descended on the hooker story. “This is going to blow up,” he was told. “Just keep your head down and don't talk to the press.”

  The nuances of the hookers in the game were lost on the general public. GTA didn't require you to kill a prostitute to increase your score or anything like that. Players who robbed and murdered the women were simply doing it of their own accord. It was, as King later put it, “an inadvertent consequence of sandbox gameplay. It was in the user, it was in his mind. What does this say about him?” At the same time, King knew that Rockstar was pressing buttons. “We put ourselves out to be the next poster child of this medium,” he said.

  No matter how erudite the founders of Rockstar were about American pop culture, they failed to take something essential into account: how puritanically people would view their games. This extended to their own peers. To their dismay, Jason Rubin, the cofou-

  nder of Naughty Dog, makers of the kid-friendly and best-selling Crash Bandicoot franchise, told the Los Angeles Times that selling GTA III was “like selling cigarettes to kids.”

  Though some on the outside might find it hard to believe, the attacks wounded the inner circle of Rockstar. They knew they were giving millions of people an entertaining outlet but couldn't help but wonder if they were crossing some dangerous line. “Are we doing something that's morally wrong?” King wondered. “We were always questioning ourselves and criticizing ourselves,” he later recalled.

  When a reporter for Rolling Stone came by the office for a feature on Rockstar, however, the cofounders dismissed any notion of responsibility. Ragged and unshaven as they sat in a back room, Donovan and the Housers took their critics to task. “If you realize PlayStation owners aren't all ten,” Donovan said, “there isn't some kind of social responsibility to have a redeeming social value.”

  “Why are we having this conversation?” Dan asked rhetorically.

  “It's insane. We get dragged into these stupid conversations about, ‘Are you brainwashing children?' or whatever rubbish it is that month. It's like, ‘How can we as adults be having this conversation when we both know that you're talking crap?' It's just not even complicated.

  “If this was a movie or TV show and was the best in its field, you'd give it loads of awards and put those award shows on television,” Dan went on. “I genuinely don't aspire to that, but I do aspire to not being called an asshole for doing the same thing in a video game. So what you're really saying is, ‘It's not the content, it's the medium.' You've proven that by your actions in other areas. So what is it about the medium you don't like
? Because maybe we should challenge those ideas. It's not what you think it is to a lot of people. To us, it's way of experimenting with nonlinear interactive storylines.”

  When asked about the violence, Sam threw his weight behind the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). “We adhere very strictly to the ratings system and take the ESRB guidelines on marketing mature-rated product very seriously,” he said. “What are the alternatives? Censorship? I sincerely hope not.”

  To ask games to be socially redeeming was missing the point. “What's socially redeeming about a fantasy world in which someone pats you on the back when you've done something well?” Dan asked. “That's just patronizing.” Sam shifted in his seat, as if trying to contain his outrage. They were not shallow shock jocks, they were hard-working artists and producers, they felt, and what was wrong with that?