Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  The company's faithful crew had more reasons than ever to celebrate. Vice City was on its way to becoming the best-selling video game of all time. The success came out of the gate, when it moved an astonishing 1.4 million copies in its first two days (more than most developers sold in a lifetime), making it the fastest-selling game ever.

  At the same time, GTA III continued to break records. Costing less to make than many indie films, the game has sold more than 8 million copies, generating roughly $400 million in its first year and eclipsing even that year's blockbuster film The Matrix. The GTA juggernaut bolstered Take-Two, still under an SEC investigation, and the game industry, which hit a record $10.1 billion in revenues for 2002, up 10 percent from the previous year.

  Vice City wasn't only a commercial hit, but a critical phenomenon, too. The game received raves from the most influential magazines and websites. “The depth and gameplay variety is through the roof,” gushed PlayStation magazine. Entertainment Weekly voted it game of the year, saying, “the reason Vice City blows every other game away isn't that it's a driving, shooting, action, or simulation game, but that it's all four combined into a criminally stylish package.” Vice City racked up the industry's top awards. “Hopefully, this time around, both parties will begin to ignore the controversy and recognize Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for what it really is,” wrote Game Informer, “a brilliant video game.”

  In the wake, the industry recently ruled by Mario and Tomb Raider desperately rushed to emulate Rockstar's new ruling style. As one game analyst put it, “They're not afraid to release titles like Grand Theft Auto, which is something that not many people would release before. Now everybody's moving to copy it.” Plumbers and Indiana Janes were out. Sex and violence were in. A new game called The Getaway grabbed headlines for its car-chasing violence. And another, BMX XXX, boasted lap dances—allegedly shot using motion capture of real strippers.

  “You wouldn't expect your average child's Christmas list to include a lap dancer, a series of savage murders or an armed hold-up,” warned the Daily Record in Glasgow. “But that's what most teenagers are wishing for this year—in the shape of some of the best-selling computer games of all time.”

  With its success growing, the Rockstar brand was cooler than ever. Emulating the DIY marketing of the recording artists they grew up admiring, the guys at Rockstar promoted its games by plastering stickers all over the city. It had become a badge of hipness to wear a T-shirt with the company's logo or to blast Vice City's nine-CD box set soundtrack (a packaging coup unheard of in the game business) in your car. GTA was parodied on Chappelle's Show and name-checked on a hip-hop track by rapper Cam'ron. New York disc jockeys Opie and Anthony began to effuse about Vice City on the air each day.

  When asked by Rolling Stone whether he planned to go even further with the content of future games, Sam said, “The answer to that is yes. At the end of the day, there's enough people in this country that would like to see us sort of thrown out or locked up than doing what we do, but my answer is, we're on it, one step at a time kind of a thing. Look at the trouble we got into for the prostitute thing. You'd be amazed at how conservative people are.”

  Rockstar had not only achieved the cultural cachet that Def Jam had in the 1980s, it had surpassed it in a new medium for a burgeoning generation. In fact, even Def Jam itself had come calling. After reading the Rolling Stone profile of Rockstar, in which they discussed their admiration of the label, Def Jam president Kevin Liles got Donovan on the phone. “You want to be like us?” he asked, dubiously. “I gotta know who the fuck you are.” The two met, and Liles said, “Let's figure out some shit to do together.”

  For the Brits who grew up dreaming of New York in their bedrooms in London, the fame felt mind-blowing. Gamers who found out their identities would stumble up to them and fawn, “Oh my God! You're the coolest people in the world!” When SoHo House, an exclusive new club, was recruiting members for its opening in mid-2003, the club's representative made a beeline for King, whom she met through a mutual acquaintance. “Oh, you're Jamie King! And you work at Rockstar Games!” she cooed. “And you're at the helm of something which is an extraordinarily exciting new venture.” King didn't merely join, he became an investor.

  As Take-Two's revenue topped $1 billion, there was plenty of cash to go around. As one Rockstar recalled, “Once stock options came in, people were making money and buying houses.” The company gobbled up more game development houses to complement its satellite studios in Vienna, San Diego, and Vancouver. While dozens of fresh employees milled about the loft, veteran Rockstars—the “575 crew,” as King proudly called them—such as Pope and Fernandez felt that a new era had begun. Yet it wasn't entirely the one they expected.

  Maybe it was just the hangover of the seventy-hour work weeks of Vice City finally setting in, but when Pope looked up wearily from his new desk one day, he thought they weren't the same happy family anymore. As if in slow motion, he watched the Brits parading around the loft in cashmere sweaters with tiny R* logos sewn fashionably over the breast.

  Sam had always made such a big deal out of the Rockstar gear, doling out army jackets and rings to everyone as a sign that they were all part of their gang. But in the eyes of Pope, the fancy sweaters seemed to be reserved for the Rockstars at the top. The cashmere gamers were a gang of their own.

  BANG! BANG! BANG! POW! Foreman looked up at the horrific smashing sounds coming from Sam's office and waited for the inevitable words to follow. “I need a new phone!” Sam shouted to him. Foreman pulled out an equipment purchase order and filled out yet another request for one of Sam's broken phones.

  As Rockstar's reputation grew, such rampages were becoming more routine. Foreman later recalled. “He'd flip out if someone told him something he didn't want to hear. We replaced his phone an awful lot of times.” Foreman hated the favoritism shown in the cashmere sweaters. Though he, as a cofounder, received one, he felt ashamed to wear it. “It was a ‘fuck you' to everybody,” he said.

  Even the military jackets and the rings didn't seem so glamorous anymore. One day Pope looked at the Rockstar ring on his finger and felt like a chump. “We've been manipulated so a five-dollar ring means everything to you,” he realized. “There was rivalry, but it was never articulated. It was a dividing line.”

  But what some saw as runaway egos could also been seen as merely more determined image control. So what if a boss wore different swag, or got pissed off when something didn't go right? If games were the new rock and roll, then such antics went with the territory. Rockstar also understood that part of their allure was their enigma, and they were dead-set on preserving it—by any means necessary. Though the game industry was big on sharing knowledge at conferences and events, Rockstar limited the exposure. Foreman found this out firsthand when he told Donovan he'd been asked to speak on a panel about game development. “No, you can't do it,” Donovan told him.

  “Why?”

  “We don't do that.”

  “I won't even mention Rockstar, aside from my intro, that I'm CTO of Rockstar. It will be a generic talk.”

  “We don't do that.”‘

  Foreman thought he knew why they had kiboshed it. Because of “the fear that you may talk about something that was outside of their control,” he later said. “They never wanted the world to know the secrets.” Yet for him, the secret was obvious and nothing to hide. Rockstar's success was built on hard work and dedication, more than anything else. “The secret is to be really, really passionate about what you do and put in a lot of effort to realize it,” Foreman said. “That's it.” All of the broken phones and the tantrums fed these amazing games. “No matter how messed up it might be,” Foreman recalled, “it worked.”

  The cashmere gang wanted to control real life the same way they controlled their games. They would sit at their computers, anxiously waiting for the reviews of their newest games to be posted online. They wanted everyone to see the games to be the masterpieces they imagined. “The magic that I see
in this game in particular, I don't think has been captured in words on a piece of paper,” Sam once griped.

  The guys who once considered calling their company Grudge Games proved they could still live up to that moniker. Negative press drew a backlash from Rockstar, in which ego trumped economics. Not only would writers get their access to the company cut off, but Rockstar would boycott ads in the offending publication. “They were crazy about the media in general,” Dan's assistant, Gillian Telling, later said. “They'd get a 9 out of 10 score and call them up and threaten to pull ads forever.”

  Pope and Fernandez needed a break, and bad. One night, with Vice City done, they and some others went to celebrate at a nearby restaurant. After going straight from GTA III into Vice City without a stop, they relished the chance to unwind. Yet no sooner did their drinks arrive than Pope's phone rang. “Come back to the office!” Sam exclaimed enthusiastically on the other end of the line. “Let's talk about San Andreas!”

  15

  Cashmere Games

  PERSONAL SAFETY

  There isn't a neighborhood in the entire state of San Andreas that we would categorize as “safe,” so we recommend carrying a weapon at all times. Actually, 2 is better. Visit the local Ammu-Nation superstore (see map for details) soon after arrival for firearm supplies.

  Grim city. First-person point of view. Gazing out a car window. Dead palms. Broken doors. Graffitied storefronts. Dudes in bandannas and baggy jeans. Random snippets of pedestrian dialogue:

  “Never gonna get it, never gonna get it, beyatch!”

  “These clothes? Yeah, they're tight!”

  “Hey, homie, you've been hitting the weights?”

  “Where the fuck am I?” wondered Fernandez, as he made his way through a dangerous part of East Los Angeles. He was here as part of his cultural research for GTA: San Andreas, soaking up details they might use in the game. Stout and dark-haired, he was sitting in the passenger seat of a slow-moving car driven by a bald Mexican American with ripped, tattooed arms. Fernandez pointed a microphone out his window as he rolled, recording passersby whom he heard over his headphones:

  “Now, when I slap you, don't trip!”

  “You smell like pasulo!”

  Though a Latino from Miami himself, Fernandez felt nervous and out of place here in this 'hood. He could pass for the guys in the street, but he was a geek at heart. At least he had someone who knew this area behind the wheel, Estevan Oriol, the former bouncer and hip-hop tour manager who now ran one of the hippest clothing lines in the area, Joker Brand. Who better to show him around?

  With Vice City topping the charts, the pressure had immediately set in on Rockstar to raise the bar once again in San Andreas. “Man, how the hell are we going to follow this one up?” Sam asked. “What's after Miami in the eighties? Well, of course, the Bloods and the Crips and the L.A. early-nineties gang-banger culture!”

  San Andreas had been established in the first GTA as a San Francisco–like town, one of the three cities that included Liberty and Vice. For the stand-alone version of San Andreas, Rockstar knew exactly where and when to set it: in the era of hip-hop West Coast culture they had grown up admiring. The game would cast the player as a young gang member trying to find his way back through the hood. It would be biggest GTA so far: more than two hundred hours of gameplay in a virtual world almost five times the size of Vice City. It wouldn't be only one town; it would cover an entire state.

  Over inspired late nights in New York and Edinburgh, they mapped out their vision. They would have three cities in one game—a mock Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. With vast distances to travel through hills and forests, over bridges and mountains, San Andreas would feel epic. Sam didn't merely want it set in the early 1990s, he wanted it to render 1992, the era of Rodney King and films such as Colors, Boyz in the Hood, and Menace II Society.

  Gangs had always been central to the evolution of GTA—from Dundee to The Warriors and the real-life gang that Rockstar had become. For the guys, rendering the gangs of San Andreas fulfilled their ultimate dream. “We aren't just a bunch of marketing guys who think we can make a buck,” King said. “It was more about ‘That's fucking cool! Look at the way they're dressed! Look at their cars and look at what they go through every fucking day! Amazing!' That's us living out our fantasy of being able to engage in it with a video game. . . . We were all wannabes.” He went on, “But then, we were from England. What do we know?”

  To boost their credibility and realism, they hired the best consultants they could find—Oriol and his Joker brand partner, the famed tattoo artist Mr. Cartoon. After recording pedestrian dialogue for the game, Fernandez was going with Oriol to talk with a friend who had been shot. They made their way through the neighborhood, down a narrow street, when suddenly a car came toward them from the other direction. There was nowhere for them to go. Fernandez's heart pounded. Then the car stopped, and a gangbanger got out and headed toward them. “Lower the window!” Oriol shouted to another guy in the car with them. “Lower the window!”

  Fernandez panicked, imagining a gun fight. “Don't lower the window!” he said.

  “Lower the window!” Oriol repeated.

  “Don't lower the window!” Fernandez shouted back. As Fernandez feared for his life, the window came down, but this passerby wasn't looking for a fight. He was just a friend of Oriol's and wanted to say hi. Fernandez felt like an asshole. “What the fuck am I doing?” he thought. “I'm making a video game. I can look at movies and see this shit!”

  “HEY! HEY! Get a grip! Calm down!” James Earl Cash pounded against the door of the execution chamber, ignoring the disembodied voice that came from the speakers overheard. A young con sentenced to death, the last thing he remembered was being pinned down to a gurney and injected with a lethal cocktail. Now he was desperately trying to escape. Suddenly, the door cracked open with a blade of light. “You've had an unexpected reprieve,” the voice said. “Do exactly as I say, and I promise this will be over before the night is out.”

  This was the opening scene of Manhunt, another Rockstar game in production in early 2003. Manhunt cast the player as Cash, a pawn in a sick game of his own. A twisted movie director had hired gangs to hunt and kill Cash, chronicling the chase with surveillance cameras for the ultimate snuff film. Now Cash had to use any means necessary—wires for strangling, glass shards for throat-slitting, bats for pummeling—to survive.

  Unlike GTA, which was, at its core, a driving and action game, this fell under the genre of survival horror, popularized by the zombie franchise Resident Evil. Survival horror games thrived on suspense, the chilling feeling of being stalked down alleyways by murderous beasts. Yet once again, Rockstar had flipped the script, bringing games into a contemporary reality. The player wasn't only being hunted, he was hunting, too, sneaking around corners with a plastic bag to pull over an unsuspecting gang member's head.

  There would be no zombie fantasy to relieve the tension of the violence. These victims were vividly human. The brutal ways in which they could be killed—the spray of the arteries when cut with a sickle, the bone-crunching snap of a twisted neck—were unheard of in the industry. If the politicians freaked out about the cartoonish spine-ripping move from Mortal Kombat, what would they make of this?

  For Pope and some others at Rockstar, the grimness of the game evoked a starker reality of their own. Life around the loft was changing. A darkness drifted in the air. A sense of being like Cash, trapped with some all-powerful director calling the shots as they struggled to survive. Sam's joke of wearing EA Sports shirts to mock the corporate game machines didn't seem so funny anymore. “In a way, we were becoming that,” Pope later said, “a big nameless faceless machine that turns out these titles. You're just one cog in a huge corporation. . . . We were churning out GTAs as fast as we could.”

  The tensions mounted the day they went from completing Vice City to starting San Andreas with no break. Promises of a party to celebrate Vice City came and went. Foreman worried that th
e company had descended into “constant crunch mode,” with days going into seventeen hours. He felt that they were working so hard, they never had time to enjoy their success. Pope began working so long, dreams blended with reality. He'd go back to have nightmares about blowing off people's limbs while staring down a rifle scope.

  One producer who had been there since 1999 thought the company was taking on “shades of Miramax,” the legendary but volatile film company Manhunt became especially divisive. “There was almost a mutiny at the company over that game,” as Rockstar producer Jeff Williams later blogged, “…there was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line.” And the powers-that-be didn't take kindly to being told otherwise. “Every day, someone would say something they didn't like about a game,” Pope recalled, “and they'd tell them, ‘You're a fucking idiot.'”

  It wasn't just only the underlings getting pawned, it seemed to Pope, it was one of the founders himself: King. As the person in charge of juggling the games and overseeing the day-to-day production, King carried a great deal of weight. Pope watched in dismay as King appeared to buckle from the constant stress.

  Pope felt a chill. “If that could happen to Jamie,” he thought, “it could happen to me.” In confidence, he approached Fernandez, his best friend at the company and, like him, one of the closest guys to Sam. Fernandez had been entrenched in researching San Andreas. He had traveled from L.A. to Vegas, where he stealthily recorded the dialogue of players at gambling tables. As Pope poured out his frustrations to Fernandez, however, his friend didn't entirely see eye-to-eye.