Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  As Donna lit a cigarette outside, she said she was surprised that Will was backpedaling from blaming the game. Yet she also wondered whether he wasn't backing off for another reason: “Because the kids inside there are fans of Grand Theft Auto, and they told him if he gets the game pulled from the shelf, they're going to beat him up.”

  17

  Boyz in the Hood

  WANTED LEVEL

  Jamie King felt the AK-47 burning in his hand with every shot he fired. Tall and lanky with longish brown hair, he crouched in a gun range in Las Vegas, firing off weapons during a research trip he'd organized for GTA: San Andreas. The idea of this one, ostensibly, was to take artists and programmers from Rockstar North to Vegas—which would be simulated and satirized as the city of Las Venturas in the game. Scots had roamed the neon streets with digital cameras and audio recorders, chronicling the garish steakhouses and the gaudy nightclubs for inspiration.

  Coming to Vegas was also an excuse to shoot some really big guns. Rows of pasty coders stood beside King, nervously handling their weapons. Most hadn't handled guns before. In fact, some even refused to come inside—for fear of getting Dick Cheneyed in the glasses. King told the guys to listen closely to every shot, feel the recoil of the weapons in their hands. This was the level of authenticity he and the other cofounders of Rockstar demanded.

  As King unloaded the gun, he needed to blow off steam. Despite clawing their way to the top of the $10 billion video game industry, Rockstar, privately and publicly, was under fire. Behind closed doors, the company was still reeling from the shocking departure—or betrayal, as Sam might have it—of Sam's key men, Pope and Fernandez, who, even worse, took a handful of other Rockstars with them. When word came that Pope and Fernandez were calling their new start-up Cashmere Games, it only mocked Rockstar more.

  The pressure grew on King. The company now had five Rockstar-branded studios around the world churning out games. As production coordinator, King was constantly traveling between them, trying to keep the process going. Yet everywhere he landed, he'd hear complaints and moans. Then he'd be dealing with pressure in New York, racing to complete games at the eleventh hour or hopping into Brant's Porsche to run urgent missions for the team.

  In a way, King thrived on the drama, but the work was whittling away at his soul. Still, he had plenty of other problems to manage. While internal strife grew, the fallout of the media frenzy over GTA continued to grow. On any given day, the Rockstars would open an e-mail that read something like, “You should be taken out into the streets and stoned to death.”

  The Rockstars knew who was chiefly responsible for stirring up the storm: Thompson. His name echoed down the halls like exclamation points in a comic book word balloon. Every day it seemed as if a new crime was being blamed on the game. Eibeler fumed. “You realized it made no sense at all, and it was a pretty tough stretch,” he recalled, “but if you were sued, you had to deal with it.”

  Any time Thompson spoke out, it seemed, dozens of in-bound calls came to the Rockstar publicist's phone. The company's PR consultant, put out the flames as best he could. “Be responsible, don't engage,” was his mantra. On the calls, he stuck to his script. “We're rated,” he told the press, “we don't support selling the game to anyone under eighteen.”

  Eibeler worked the political lobby behind the scenes. Take-Two sponsored a baseball game between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. Eibeler made the rounds on the Hill and encountered the same pattern. Whenever he walked into a congressman's office to meet with the chief of staff, there would be a young guy at the door. “Take-Two! You guys are rock stars! Grand Theft Auto is the greatest game ever made!” Then he'd get back to the chief, who would say, “We gotta be careful about the effect on children.”

  “The average age of a gamer is twenty years old,” Eibeler always replied, to no avail. He went back to NYC, only to see the same politicians grandstanding against video games on TV. “They'd all be receptive” at first, he said, “but in reality all politicians love a sound bite.”

  As Eibeler fought on the frontlines, Rockstar's founders privately reeled over Thompson's campaign against them. Here they were in a country teeming with protests over the war in Iraq, and people were getting up in arms about a video game? “It's weird that every day someone was speaking out against you,” King later said of Thompson. “Thankfully, a lot of what he said was ridiculous.”

  King believed that their games were cathartic. “We're human beings,” he said. “We're the only species on the planet that commits genocide on our own race. We are barbaric. We are warring nations.” Rather than “suppress it and then have outbursts that are catastrophic, put it in the living room, and allow you to engage in it . . . in a video game exercise, those feelings of frustration and anger. See it for what it is, laugh about it, smile and have fun. Versus ‘I don't have an outlet I don't have a video game I don't have a book, I don't have a film I don't have anyone to talk to, I'm feeling alone, I'm getting trapped, and I'm building up, building up so I express them through some extreme fashion.' For whatever reason we often as human beings don't like to confront things that are uncomfortable.”

  Yet they also wondered, What if Thompson was right? What if the games were having some kind of effect? They had made a game casting players as bad guys, and now they were being painted as bad guys themselves. “Are we bad people?” King once asked the others. “Are we wrong?” Then, after a beat, he said, “Fuck that. This is our lives!”

  DAYCARE CENTER pedophiles. Travel club scam artists. Shady tow truck companies. Newscaster Arnold Diaz had exposed them all in his running “Shame on You” feature on the local CBS-2 news show in New York. On November 6, 2003, he inducted his first video game maker into the hall of shame: Sam Houser. “While much of Vice City's violence is random and indiscriminate,” Diaz said, “‘Shame on You' found as you get deeper into the game, it takes an ugly, racist twist. Players are instructed to exterminate an entire ethnic group!” With that, he cut to a GTA gamer, who said that “My mission in the game is to kill the Haitians.”

  “That's right, ‘kill the Haitians,'” Diaz said. Though Vice City had been out for more than a year, the media was still looking for new ways to exploit the controversy, and Diaz had seemingly happened on a fresh new shocker. “Just read the game's dialogue,” he said, quoting from the game script. “‘I hate these Haitians. We'll take them out, we'll take these Haitians down.”

  It was true, sort of. The words were spoken by Umberto Robina, the Cuban kingpin in Vice City, in a cut-scene preceding the twentieth mission in the game, “Cannon Fodder.” As in every GTA game since GTA 2, Vice City depicted wars between rival—and stereotypical—gangs: rednecks, metalheads, bikers, and, yes, ethnic groups such as Cubans and Haitians and Italians, too. Robina was sending the player, Tommy Vercetti, on a mission to take a crew of armed Cubans into the Haitian gang's enclave—and attack. But when Umberto said, “Take my boys over there, and then we'll take these Haitians down!” he wasn't talking about taking all Haitians down, he meant only the drug-dealing gang.

  Yet what was clear to Rockstar and its fans was lost in the ratings war of the evening news. “Why is Rockstar Games, the maker of ‘Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,' using the killing of Haitians as entertainment?” Diaz asked his viewers. “The company is based right here in New York City. Its president, Sam Houser, is ranked as one of the entertainment industry's most powerful people. But he's hiding, refusing to speak with us at all, refusing to even acknowledge the community's concerns about the game. . . . So into the CBS 2 ‘Hall of Shame' we induct Rockstar Games and its president, Sam Houser, for cashing in on racism and violence.”

  Within days, the Haitian Centers Council and Haitian Americans for Human Rights put out a press release saying that Rockstar and Take-Two “advocate the killing of Haitians as entertainment. . . . Players are instructed to kill all Haitians, who, in the video game, are stereotyped as thugs, thieves and drug dealers.” Politicians warned of people emula
ting the game's violence in real life. On November 25, 2003, Haitian American protesters stormed City Hall. “We believe that it was the purposeful intent of Rockstar Games Inc. to create a product that was controversial in order to increase sales,” said the group's leader, who called for an international boycott of the game.

  Powerful people were listening. Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was reported to have been talking with U.S. authorities about the matter because, as his government spokesperson said, “This racist game is psychologically extremely dangerous and is an incitement to genocide.”

  Once again, this game that had intended to satirize America instead struck a nerve. It didn't matter what was or wasn't in the game because the controversies weren't really about the game at all. They were about the fears—first violence and now racism—that the games unleashed, and Rockstar had no choice but to respond.

  “We empathize with the concerns of the Haitian community, and we are giving serious consideration to them,” a Take-Two spokesperson said in a statement. “There was no intention to offend any ethnic group.” He compared the rivalries in Vice City to West Side Story, but the press wasn't buying it. As the Haitian storm grew, it only swept more of Rockstar's battles into the public eye, including Thompson's $246 million suit from the Tennessee shootings. U.S. senator Carl Andrews, a New York Democrat, proposed a bill banning the game. From Boston to Florida, more rallies waged.

  During a December visit to a Haitian church in East Flatbush, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told the crowd that he'd sent a letter to Rockstar condemning the game. “It's disgraceful, it's vulgar, it's offensive,” Bloomberg said of Vice City. He promised “to do everything we possibly can” to have the “kill the Haitians” line removed. “This type of hate has no place in our city, and as a mayor I will not tolerate it.”

  Bloomberg delivered. Two days later, Rockstar put out an apology to the Haitian groups. “It was not our intention to target or offend any group or persons or to incite hatred or violence against such groups or persons,” the statement read. For a secretive company that rarely, if ever, spoke out about its own controversies, the statement was revealing and significant. In rather patronizing tones, it showed how desperately the cofounders wanted to school the haters. It also demonstrated their fondness for blaming the media for their problems.

  “Contrary to what some may believe,” the statement read, “it must be recognized that videogames have evolved as an adult medium, not unlike literature, movies and music. The fact that the game is popular does not mean that it will encourage players to act out hatred or violence against any group or persons in the ‘real world.'. . . We believe that recent media coverage has taken certain statements made in the game out of context, and has blown it out of proportion by mischaracterizing the nature of the game play, as well as the actual portrayal of persons and groups in the game.

  “As with literature, movies, music and other forms of entertainment, we have strived to create a videogame experience with a certain degree of realism, which we believe is our right. Nevertheless, we are aware of the hurt and anger in the Haitian community and have listened to the community's objections to certain statements made in the game.”

  Rockstar promised to remove the controversial kill-the-Haitians line from all future versions of the game, but protesters said they wouldn't rest until all 10.5 million copies of the game had been pulled from the shelves. To show their resolve, they rallied outside Blockbuster and Wal-Mart stores around the country. On December 15 at 10 a.m., a hundred of them gathered outside the offices of Rockstar Games, chanting, “They say kill us! We say fight back. Rockstar, racist!” When a reporter asked a protester why she would come here on such a wintry day, she said, “I'm outraged against Rockstar for stepping over Haitians to make money. I don't feel the cold.”

  WHILE THE HAITIAN controversy raged, little did the outside world know that Rockstar was already probing deeper into America's racial tensions with the next GTA, San Andreas. The plan had been hatched late one night early in the brainstorming sessions as Sam and King talked in the game-testing area. They were making a game about California in the nineties, about gangs, so casting the main character seemed like a no-brainer. “We should have a black lead,” King said. “That would be cool.”

  In the game industry, however, this wasn't cool yet at all. Other than sports titles, games were still like music videos in the early eighties, bereft of African American leads. Sam saw the chance to innovate once again by breaking down the color barrier, too. “It was something of a risk,” Sam later recalled. “It was certainly left field for the industry at that time, but, you know, I'm proud to do things like that, and anyone who has a problem with that, we don't want you buying the game anyway, mate, quite frankly.”

  San Andreas would follow the story of Carl “CJ” Johnson, a gang kid who fled Los Santos, their fictional Los Angeles, after the drugs and the shootings became too much for him. Yet as with the other GTAs, fate would draw him back. When CJ learns that his beloved mother has died as an innocent victim of gang warfare, he comes back to his old neighborhood for her funeral and for vengeance. CJ's odyssey will ultimately lead him around the state of San Andreas, taking on the gangs.

  Compared to the more raucous thrills of the earlier GTAs, CJ's conflicts and struggles would bring a new depth and complexity to the franchise and the game industry. San Andreas would still be satiric, but Sam, Dan, and the rest were dead serious about the awful world of gang consequences they were portraying. For added authenticity, they continued the street research that Fernandez had begun in L.A. before he quit. Khonsari flew out to L.A. to hook back up with Mr. Cartoon and Esteban and start casting the game. He cruised South Central, snapping photos of barbershops, houses, and hangouts to use in-game.

  One day, he set himself in the Second Hand studio owned by Dr. Dre to begin casting the game. Because of their success, Rockstar was more interested in discovering new talent than on relying on celebrity voice-overs. Gang members and amateur rappers streamed in, begging to be in GTA. “Anything you can do to get me a role,” one told Khonsari. “I don't care if it's a big role, I just want to be in it!” As one of the applicants brazenly puffed on a joint, a grin spread across Khonsari's face. GTA had always been about authenticity, but it had never felt as real as this.

  Despite their efforts, though, the fact that San Andreas represented a white British take on L.A. gang culture seeped through. Khonsari sat at his desk in L.A., as a gang member got stuck on a word in Dan's script. “‘Rubbish?'” The extra said, “What the fuck is this? I'd never say ‘rubbish!'” To de-Brit the script, Rockstar hired DJ Pooh, the screenwriter of the Ice Cube film Friday, as cowriter.

  As work proceeded, however, one Rockstar wasn't taking too kindly to the game. He'd been at the company since 1999, an original 575er, and had seen the changes and stresses bearing down on the team. Compared to the humor of GTA2, GTA III, and Vice City, he thought Rockstar had entered a gloomer era. He'd grown tired of what he felt were Rockstar's “exploitative” games—none more so than Manhunt. “There's a difference between violence and gratuitous violence,” he said.

  He also had an objection that was even more personal: the African American protagonist and tone of San Andreas. He had grown up a white guy listening to rap, as Sam had. Yet now he had a black wife and was living in a black part of New York where people were shooting one another in the streets. “I have a problem with the portrayal of African Americans in the game,” he later said. So he quit.

  He wasn't the only one at the company with such concerns. Though Eibeler was impressed by the scope of the game, he worried that the black lead could be problematic, and he didn't want a repeat of the Vice City furor over the Haitians. To avoid problems, he suggested that they bring Lowenstein up to get an early peek at the game.

  It wasn't common for the head of the Entertainment Software Association (renamed recently from the IDSA) to check up on every new video game, but with the controversy surrou
nding the franchise, he wasn't taking any chances on the new GTA. On one hand, the games had brought in money and acclaim for the industry, but at the cost of fueling the culture war over the medium. Lately, Lowenstein felt that he was making progress on the strength of the ESRB, the industry's voluntary rating board. He had met with Hillary Clinton, who seemed open to self-regulation. He didn't want the next GTA to put that to waste.

  Despite all of the public and private jockeying over Rockstar's games, however, Lowenstein had virtually no relationship with the Housers. Instead, he dealt with Eibeler at Take-Two. Rockstar, even for him, remained an enigma. As he saw it, their attitude was “We are on our own and do what we want and everyone has to suck it up.”

  Rockstar had its own floor in the Take-Two building, and getting there was a game unto itself. Lowenstein watched as a Take-Two executive called someone at the desk for permission to visit. “We'd like to come down,” the executive asked. Then he and Lowenstein had to wait, humiliatingly, for Rockstar security to escort them. “I couldn't believe this,” Lowenstein recalled. “Literally, the head of Take-Two couldn't wander down there.” As Lowenstein sat in a conference room watching San Andreas, he sensed tension between Rockstar and Take-Two—Sam's parent in the most literal sense.