“I tend to try avoid talking too much about the violence because that's what it all gets boiled down to at the end of the day,” Sam said. “But when you do something wrong in the game, the police come and get you. . . . You don't just run around on a rampage and just carry on, carry on, carry on. You do commit crimes, and the police are on you. You commit more, and they're on you more, and you commit more, the FBI will turn up, the SWAT will turn up, and then the army turns up. If that doesn't reinforce a moral code in a game, I don't know what does.”
“HAVE YOU seen the New York Times?”
One day at Rockstar, Jamie King got this message from his dad. King had a good relationship with his father, who took pride in his son's accomplishments in the game industry. Yet his dad had phoned to warn him that maybe something seriously outlaw was taking place behind the scenes.
The headline of the Times's page-one business section story read, “Hit Video Games Overshadow Company's Woes.” King read on. “Can looting, drive-by-shootings, random beatings, prostitution and drug dealing compensate for accounting irregularities? Maybe—if the mayhem has really great graphics. . . . Take-Two, which has emerged as a leader in the game software market, admitted early this year…to having misstated seven quarters of financial returns. The Securities and Exchange Commission forced a three-week halt in the trading of its shares and is continuing to investigate. And at least five shareholder lawsuits are under way against Take-Two.”
Reports found that Take-Two had overstated revenues by $23 million in 2000. According to one analyst, this resulted in a sizable increase in reported profits for the year—a figure of $24.6 million, instead of the now-revised figure of $6.4 million. Another analyst said that the actions constituted fraud. Given Take-Two's extraordinary success since Brant entered the game industry, the financial community found the SEC investigation especially foreboding.
“With all this stuff about Enron and corporate responsibility, there's a wrong message here,” said one hedge fund manager who lost money on Take-Two stock. “It says, ‘Who cares about the past, now that we have a good game.' It says, ‘Crime does pay.'”
Eibeler and the other execs tried to keep Rockstar as separate as they could from the problems, but it wasn't easy. “Keep your head down,” Eibeler told them, “business is great, look at the success.” Yet privately, he felt the strain. “While the company was performing extremely well, financially we were under a real cloud,” he later said.
Though Sam kept his team insulated from Take-Two, the underlings weren't entirely surprised by the investigations. There had been a revolving door of Take-Two executives, after all. The problems hit especially hard on the two Rockstar cofounders in the shadows, King and Foreman. Since launching the company with Donovan, the Housers, and King, Foreman felt a split forming between the founders. It had started with the press and the positioning of Donovan and Sam as the faces of Rockstar. Foreman, shy by nature, had been happy to let them have the spotlight, but cracks were starting to show that he could no longer ignore.
Foreman would later recall the day when Sam came up to him enthusiastically and said, “Within a couple years, we can all be millionaires! It will be amazing!” Then Sam amended his comment. “You know,” he added, “I'm not going to stop until I get a billion.”
As Foreman watched him walk away. he thought about Sam's incessant passion for pushing boundaries, for pushing games, for getting the most out of whatever he could. “Knowing him,” he thought, “a billion won't be enough.”
13
Vice City
TONY: You be happy. I want what's comin' to me when I'm alive, not when I'm dead.
MANNY: Yeah, what's comin' to you, Tony?
TONY: The world, man, and everything in it.
As Sam watched Tony Montana drive down the neon streets of Miami, he couldn't get enough of Scarface. The film still blew him away—Al Pacino's incredible portrayal of this Cuban refugee's ascent, and descent, into becoming the king of the coke trade. The drugs. The violence. The cojones. The way Montana didn't take shit from anyone and always stuck to whatever he thought was right. Just as Sam had to keep his head down and work on his games, despite the mounting pressures around him. “Scarface is the ultimate, right?” Sam once said,
“Montana is the ultimate.”
So, he thought, was Miami in the eighties. He considered it to be “hands-down the grooviest era of crime because it didn't even feel like it was crime. You had Cuban hit men coming across and gunning people down in the street, but it was still celebrated in a sort of haze of cocaine and excess and Ferraris and Testarossas, and it was a totally topsy-turvy, back-to-front period of time. It was everything that was crazy about the eighties, and it was in America so it was crazier.” What better time and place to set a game?
With GTA III racking up awards, sales, and controversy, Sam could feel the anticipation growing for the next game. The one thing he knew he didn't want to do was a listless sequel, as the other publishers did. At the same time, however, Rockstar was a subsidiary of a public company, and Sam had the added pressure—and tension—of pleasing his corporate parents at Take-Two. But could he top himself? “You gotta repeat the impact of GTA III,” he said. “That's scary.”
Although they had already mapped out the idea of having the next game set in Vice City, the Miami-themed locale from the first GTA, they still had to figure out the era. In New York at the time, the eighties were making a comeback. At clubs, INXS and New Order thumped from the speakers, and cocaine was making a comeback, too. For Dan, the time period “glorified values we felt the game could satirize very effectively—greed, the love of money, bad clothes . . . and the music was something we were all interested in, as it was a time when we were growing up and first getting interested in such things.” Bolstered by the success of GTA III, he was finding his voice as a writer—not a novelist, not a screenwriter, but a writer of games. Someone who could carry a narrative over cut-scenes, picking the right moments to unleash the player into the fictional world.
When Sam went around the Rockstar loft effusing about setting GTA: Vice City in the eighties, however, some people didn't get it. “What are you on about?” he recalled one employee asking.
“No, no, no,” Sam insisted, “it's so slick!”
“The eighties, man?” another said. “That's a rough one, isn't it?”
“Yeah, of course it is!” Sam replied. “But that's all the more reason to do it!”
Sam had one key believer on his side: Co-founder Jamie King. With his ready enthusiasm and charm, King had assumed a key role within the company, acting as a buffer between Sam's full-throttle passion and the team's pressure to deliver. When he heard team members questioning Vice City's direction, he'd say, “It should be fucking Flock of Seagulls!” and that they needed to trust Sam. So they set about winning over the skeptics instead. Sam rented out a movie theater nearby and took the team to a private showing of Scarface. They watched Apocalypse Now Redux. Miami Vice episodes were not on DVD, so Sam surfed eBay and snatched up every VHS copy of the show he could find between the seasons of 1984 and 1989.
At lunch, he'd rush home to pop in another cassette and watch an episode or two. He reveled in how perfect the series was for a game—from its action scenes to its missionlike structure. Vice City wasn't just a game about the eighties, Sam insisted, it was specifically 1986—the peak of the decade, as far as he was concerned. Sam and Dan had Fernandez build a web system and populate it with all of the cultural research he could find: photos of parachute pants, DeLoreans, pink-lensed aviator shades. Sam was exacting in his details. He didn't want just any Ferrari in the game, he wanted the Ferrari Spider GTB from 1986 with one side-view mirror, not two.
Ewing, the scruffy producer of State of Emergency, walked into the Rockstar loft one day to find Sam sketching on a white board like some inspired mad scientist. Ewing saw all kinds of seemingly random but hilarious eighties terms scrawled on the board: Flock of Seagulls, Miami Vice, cocaine. Lines
and arrows pointed from these words to the center of the board, where Sam had drawn the word Arnold, referring to Gary Coleman's character from the hit eighties sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. “It was as if Arnold had become a fulcrum of understanding,” Ewing recalled. “It was just a little window into Sam's mind and how he was pulling cultural threads into a product.”
Sam's gospel took hold. Employees started walking around the loft in Members Only jackets. Rockstar flew the DMA developers, now renamed Rockstar North, from Edinburgh to Miami and checked everyone into snazzy hotel on Ocean Drive. They stood out front, thirty pale Scots with cameras around their necks. “Live and breathe this place,” Sam told them, “learn this place, this is what we're going to put on the screen!” Oh, and one more thing. “Get me neon!” he said. “I've got to have neon!”
The weather at first was stormy and gray, just the kind to send the Scots into a pub. When the clouds parted, the guys took to the streets, snapping photos of the buildings, the palms, the sunsets. By the end of the week, they had hundreds of photos—and thirty really bad sunburns. Since leaping into 3D with GTA III, they could simply focus on refining the technology—rather than reinventing it—for Vice City. The goal was to use the tech to make the world teem even more actively with life. They'd stream scenes faster to immediately immerse gamers. They'd tweak code so that pedestrians moved more believably. A refined physics engine let them expand the choice of vehicles, such as mopeds that drove with just the right feel and degree of nimbleness.
Perhaps most important, the game's new lighting system gave them a broad and expressive palette to render Vice City in all of its sunny, neon glory. Most action games came in depressing shades of grays and browns, but Vice City would burst with color. They populated the palm-lined streets with exaggerated characters like those out of R. Crumb or Felix the Cat. Curvy women in bikinis on skates. Greasy dudes in ball-hugging briefs. Hustlers in baby-blue Don Johnson leisure suits. “Ours is kind of the look Walt Disney might have gone for if he was more of a psychotic substance abuser with authority issues,” said Aaron Garbut, the art director at Rockstar North.
Rendering this detail took countless all-nighters. The introduction of planes and helicopters meant the scenes had to be viewable from the sky, as well as from the street. They weren't merely giving players a richer, more vibrant world than in GTA III, they were creating a stronger sense of place. In Vice City, the player was cast as Tommy Vercetti, a small-time hood who would complete missions for the warlords and the drug kings in town. This time, the player would get his own apartment on a virtual Ocean Drive. He'd walk inside the shiny Miami lobby and up to his room. These kinds of tropes were usually the domain of role-playing games, the idea of living in a simulated home, but it all fit in with Sam's mission to bring games to life. “It's giving the people a sense of owning something,” he said, “. . . it's there and it's real.”
Nothing would be more real than Vice City's radio stations. This time they had nine, from the metal of V-Rock to the Latin sounds of Espantoso. Dan, who also wrote the satirical radio commercials, sat for hours listening to FM radio ads from the 1980s—the goofy voice-overs, the jingle singers—culled from ad agencies. They spoofed slasher flicks and donut dealers, self-help gurus and hairstyling products (“May cause dry mouth, dilated pupils, paranoia, heart palpitations and nose bleeds, plus your hair will be great!”). They also poked fun at the low-resolution eighties games they had grown up playing (“Defender of the Faith . . .” save the green dots with your fantastic flying red square!”).
One morning, Fernandez's phone rang in his apartment on Spring and Elizabeth, just a couple blocks from the Rockstar loft. “Hello?” he said.
“Fernandez!” It was Sam. “Meet me downstairs!”
Fernandez was happy to be at his boss's beck and call. He considered Sam a true genius, a producer on the scale of Bruckheimer or Geffen. He loved how Sam promised Take-Two he'd sell ten million copies of the game. Sam had the nerve to stand up to the corporation and maintain their leverage over their “parents.”
Fernandez also appreciated how much Sam valued him and Pope. Not long before this, Sam had come over to Pope's East Village apartment to check out his new surround sound system. They had drinks and watched Lord of the Rings, as Sam effused, “Your standard of living is better than mine!” In fact, Sam treated himself to a new Porsche and gave Dan a Rolex. He was buying a house in the West Village and wanted Pope to help him set up his home theater. They were friends.
When Sam's call came to Fernandez that day, Fernandez quickly brushed his hair, no time for coffee. Outside, he found Sam at the ready. In his hand he held a chunky white device with a screen and a sleek dial. “What's that?” Fernandez asked.
“An iPod!” Sam said, referring to the new device from Apple. Sam began to walk up briskly toward West Fourth Street, and Fernandez trailed after him. “Fernandez!” Sam told him, “let's drive around the city and listen to the songs I'm thinking about for Vice City.”
At the garage, the driver pulled out Sam's Porsche. Sam shot straight for the FDR Drive, the long stretch of highway on Manhattan's East Side. He reached for the iPod, which he had hooked up to his car stereo. “Let's see which one of these songs feels the best when you're driving fast,” Sam said and hit the gas. He pressed a button, triggering “Crockett's Theme,” the theme of Miami Vice. The pulsing synthesizer. The drums coming in. Then the weird sort of coke come-down chords, the strange almost Japanese plucking of a simulated harp. “This is the vibe of the game,” Sam said.
Fernandez leaned back as the golden city and more songs blurred. Teena Marie. Slayer. Phil Collins. As each played, he scribbled down the name, and they assigned it a rating for how well they thought it would fit. When one song in particular came on, Sam turned it up, and something came over his face. This was a song from his childhood, one that Dan and he had listened to back in the day. “More than this,” Bryan Ferry crooned, “you know there's nothing more than this.”
IT WAS EARLY one Sunday morning when Fernandez heard his phone ring again. He rolled over, pressed it to his ear. “Hello?”
“The build is here!” Sam said. “Come check it out.”
Fernandez and Pope followed Sam inside the loft and booted up the first build of the game. With a scheduled release date of October 2002, the guys had only had a total of ten months to make Vice City—with seven left to go. As the simulation based on Ocean Drive spread onscreen, Fernandez hopped into a Ferrari GTB and hit the road, watching the beach roll by. “Wow,” he said, “this is it.”
Pope climbed to a rooftop in the game and just sat there. Sat there looking out over the water, as the sun set in crimson and orange over the copper-blue waves. The palm trees swayed, and seagulls fluttered by. My God, he thought, it's beautiful.
Sam loved to just drive, cruising around the maps to get the vibe of the game, the perfect little world the team had created in a box. He jacked a motorcycle and hit the road, popping wheelies as he drove by the neon storefronts. Over the roar of the engine, as he heard “99 Luftballons” play, he felt something strange begin to shift. The screen on his computer monitor rippled in waves, like glass turning to jelly until there was no glass anymore. There was just him, inside the game, not in a crazy way but real. He thought it felt “like crossing a line between the reality and the fiction.”
Yet he also felt gripped with anxiety. What if this didn't sell? With a budget of $5 million, Vice City was their biggest title yet. The script alone dwarfed the average game or movie: 82 cut-scenes, 200 pages, and another 600 pages of pedestrian dialogue, and 300 pages of radio scripts. They were squeezing every last bit of possible content onto the DVD. Sam and Dan wanted to push the celebrity voice-overs as no game had before. “We thought what's cool about TV shows are all the guest stars showing up,” Dan said, “like sports stars in an episode of Magnum, PI.”
“Like a fallen sports star and now doing other things, things like in Miami Vice, always guest starring Phil Collins or Frank Zap
pa,” Sam concurred. As King said, they just wanted an excuse to meet these stars. They started with Vercetti, who, unlike the star of GTA III, would now have a voice. To inject personality into such a big world, they needed just the right actor—Ray Liotta, whom they'd been obsessed with since Goodfellas.
King hit the phones, hustling with his usual determination and style. It wasn't easy. King kept getting told that Liotta was looking to change his reputation and do a family film. Finally, he got through to a sympathetic young Hollywood agent. Next thing he knew, they were sitting at Peter Luger's Steakhouse in Brooklyn with Liotta himself, drinking and laughing and effusing about how much they loved his films. Then suddenly Liotta went cold for no reason, staring them down. “Why the fuck are you laughing?” he snapped.
The guys gulped. Liotta cracked up. “I'm fucking with you!” he said.
“He totally Goodfellaed us!” King said.
Liotta signed on, but the Goodfellas shtick wasn't entirely an act, as Khonsari later recalled after taping the voice-over session. Liotta limped in, bitterly sore from a basketball game. “The last fucking video game I played was Pong,” he said wearily.
Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto Page 12