Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  “Sex shop workers need to have slightly more nipple coverage particularly for the States.

  “Key to her heart spanking date scene needs to be removed, as it constitutes sexualized violence which is a huge problem.

  “Blow job in back room of dealer's house is cool however.

  “I wish we could include all this incredible stuff, but it just isn't feasible to get it out there at the moment. As discussed we are working on a couple different scenarios for a release of a version with this content included.”

  Sam clicked the attachment—four excruciating pages of explication, details, country by country, over just what kind of sexual activity could and could not be shown, given their target rating. All of Sam's ranting about Iraq and hypocrisy splintered into pixels as he read the rules in black and white. This was someone else's game. The list under each country's regulations was beautifully absurd, hilarious and horrific, and inescapably real. It started with the United Kingdom, where the target age rating was eighteen.

  “Male nudity—Full frontal nudity is acceptable as long as the penis is not erect,” Donovan explained.

  “An erect penis should be avoided entirely or we would need it to be pixillated.

  “Female nudity—Full front nudity is acceptable but only at a distance if the full body is to be shown and showing the breasts only is preferable.

  “Masturbation—Can be implied but the penis should not be visible. We would be safer to show a man from the back view doing this, not with the camera angle straight on.

  “Oral sex—Similar to masturbation, the act can be implied but cannot be graphic. Any close-ups would require pixilation and the BBFC might ask us to remove this in order to achieve an 18 rating. Your character should not be able to kill the girlfriend or the hooker after you have sex.” And so on.

  As Sam read the guidelines, he saw how each country had its own seemingly arbitrary definitions of what would nudge a game into the realm of unacceptability. Spain and Italy were fine with nudity (including erections) and “lax,” as Donovan put it, with regard to sexualized violence. France was okay with male nudity (no erections) and female nudity (though, as Donovan explained, “as long as it can be considered ‘erotic' and not pornographic”). While Australia didn't permit male nudity, female breasts and buttocks were fine. Spanking, across the world, was pretty much a no-no, with the exception of Spain and Italy, where it was okay if it was part of the story. Every country was cool with jacking off, as long as no penis appeared. No mentions, though, of female masturbation. Implied oral sex, no problem anywhere.

  Of all of the territories, the United States was by far most restrictive—any male nudity had to be covered in shadows, and although female breasts could be shown, vaginas were off limits, and nipples had to be covered with pasties. And an inexplicit scene of CJ having sex with his girlfriend? Though acceptable across the world, it would surely garner the deathly Adults Only rating in the U.S. Then Donovan dropped the bomb. “The sex scenes that are in San Andreas currently are going to be considered too graphic,” he wrote. They had to go.

  Sam sat at his computer, watching the cursor blink as the hot flush of anger crashed in. “This is WAY, WAY more than I expected,” he wrote to Donovan, pounding his keys. “Not only is it insane to edit comedy like this—look at movies and everything else—to do so is going to be a lot of work and will screw with things (eg: changing the spanking mission, which could not be more harmless/silly). Is this really as far as we can push it? I just cannot believe it.”

  Donovan's reply came seventeen minutes later. “That's not good,” he wrote, with an audible thud. “I thought we were pretty much on the same page.” What was all this, anyway—a game or something else? Some big middle finger to the world? They weren't rebellious kids in prep school anymore. They were high-paid employees of a public company. They couldn't play and control life as if it were a game. They had always fought for the right for games to grow up; maybe it was time for them to grow up instead. Why not just dial back the sex in San Andreas?

  “Spanking is pretty much the worst thing in there,” Donovan explained. “You can see her vagina and asshole or at least where they would be, and the combination with the violence is what gets people most hot under the collar. Every country bar Spain came back to us and stated sexualized violence is a no-go. It is just too easy for people to take that scene out of context and claim the game requires violence to women to complete gameplay objectives.”

  Sam was having none of it. He came to America to find freedom, not give it up. “Wow,” he wrote back to Donovan. “We have too many sales people. We need people to fight for ‘freedom.'” He fired off an e-mail to Les Benzies, producer at Rockstar North, breaking the news.

  “This is a shame,” Benzies wrote back.

  “I know,” Sam replied, “it's a disaster. we should review all our options. it feels wrong to edit our game. we need to PUSH.”

  And so he did, throwing off a Hail Mary appeal to Take-Two's founder, Brant. Brant, however, was desperately fighting battles of his own. Despite having grown his company to more than $1 billion in revenues, with more than $100 million in earnings, Take-Two had been overtaken by scandal. The SEC investigation into Take-Two's accounting practices was still proceeding, and, furthermore, the commission suggested that it would take civil action against Brant and two former Take-Two executives for their involvement. On March 17, 2004, Brant resigned as chair and director of Take-Two. “I believe this is the right time to make a management transition to position Take-Two for the future,” he said in a statement.

  There had always been explicit and implicit tension between Take-Two and Rockstar, with the latter being like the unruly kid who was trying to call the shots. Yet the fact was, Sam, despite his shaggy appearance, was always a dogged leader at heart, running his ship like a CEO. Because Brant remained as vice president of publishing, Sam didn't hesitate to reach out to him.

  “Hi, Can we confirm that these are the content changes that need to be made?” Sam wrote. “As I mentioned to Terry, I was pretty much shocked by the list. The cuts are everywhere. It doesn't feel like we are pushing any boundaries now. Why bother? I really, really do not want to change this stuff. It feels SO wrong at the behest of psychotic, mormon, capitalist retailers. This is a GAME. It's COMIC. Airplane (the movie) was more offensive. Please can we not forget the edgy-ness that got us here.”

  Poring over Benzies's menu of possible changes—moving the camera on the blowjob scene, removing other scenes entirely, and masking others, such as sex with the girlfriend, with blocky filters—felt bad enough to Sam. Even worse was Benzies's implication that they had given up their fight. “This stuff was so cool,” Benzies wrote to Sam, “we're not really pushing boundaries without it.”

  For Sam, pushing boundaries was his life's mission, from his rebelliousness at St. Paul's through his early days at BMG. He built his career by Captain Kirk-ing beyond where others had gone before. How many people could claim they had really done that—not just in video games, but in anything? How could they stop now?

  Sam had a choice to make: fight or flight. “If you and the crew feel strongly, let's make a stand,” he replied to Benzies. “Let's keep what we want in the game—OUR game. It will half our retail distribution, but who cares? The game will still sell, people will have to go and find it, but it will be the game we want. We may probably sell less this route (who knows—maybe more, in the long run?), but at least we won't have been told what to do by a load of fucking bureaucrats and shop-keepers.”

  Not everyone agreed. Cofounder Gary Foreman characterized the sex in San Andreas as “funny, schoolboy, puerile humor” but thought it had its limits. “There's no way the game's going to be approved with that in it,” he said, “so take it out.” Plus, he thought, what's the loss? “For me, sorry I'm not twelve anymore, it was unnecessary,” he later said. “There were conversations about pushing the barriers of what we could do, but I felt personally it was, at that point, gratuitous.”<
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  When King walked up to Sam one day at Rockstar, however, he could tell that his cofounder wasn't pleased at losing this battle. Though the two had had their skirmishes, he still supported his old friend and thought the sex in the game was funny.

  Rockstar had built an empire on simulated fantasies, but this time reality bore down. The struggle dripped with irony. Sam wanted to make games for adults, but an Adults Only rating would be retail suicide. He personified the awkward and interminable adolescence of his entire industry and, moreover, a generation of players. It wasn't that he didn't want to grow up; he simply wasn't allowed to. He was infantilized. No matter how mature he had become, he still had to answer to his parents at Take-Two.

  There was nothing that he, Brant, or anyone could do. The bureaucrats and the shopkeepers had won. Rockstar would cut back the sex from San Andreas. Some moderate content could remain, such as the two-ended purple dildo hidden in a police bathroom as a weapon, but little more. Instead of seeing CJ have sex with his girlfriend inside her house, players would only make it as far as the front door.

  With the game's deadline just weeks away, the sex scenes had to be removed, and fast. Sometimes instead of deleting code, which can be problematic, game developers essentially hide the content from players so that it won't be seen. It's a common and acceptable process known as “wrapping,” sort of like wrapping an unwanted package in camouflage and burying it in the woods. There was nothing sneaky about it.

  So one quiet day at Rockstar, a programmer tapped a series of buttons on a keyboard and took care of the job. The San Andreas sex scene was wrapped and tucked away into the forest of code. Because the industry didn't require game developers to disclose wrapped content, Rockstar had no reason to mention the sex scene when it submitted the new GTA for its rating.

  This game was done.

  ON SEPTEMBER 12, 2004, the mailman delivered the submission package for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board on Madison Avenue in New York. The nondescript cluster of cubicles was protected like Area 51. “Sorry, you can't go back there,” Patricia Vance, the steely president of the ESRB, would tell a visiting reporter, as he made his way past posters of Tiger Woods and brochures of happy kids, tongues wagging as they played their video games.

  Every day, game publishers sent in their products for voluntary ratings, which included E for Everyone, T for Teen, and M for Mature. Lately, however, they were under fire. Harvard University had issued a study on “Content and Teen-Rated Video Games,” which found that almost half of the games included content that was not listed on the video game box. In Washington State, legislators were trying to ban the sale of M-rated games to anyone under the age of seventeen. The game industry was fighting this on the grounds that such a law would be a violation of free speech.

  Despite GTA's past controversies, the ESRB had no reason to scrutinize it differently from any other title. The process started with the raters: a pool of fifty Americans from all walks of life—teachers, doctors, single moms, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty-five years old. The ESRB placed ads in parenting magazines and received about a thousand applications per year. Game-playing experience was not required.

  This was why: when a game company sent in a game to be rated, it was not actually sending in playable demos; the company only sent in video footage. Publishers were required to send in what Vance called “the most extreme footage” of a game, usually two or three months prior to a game's release. The footage could last anywhere from twenty minutes to a few hours. As each of the two or three raters watched the footage, a frame count rattled off onscreen. The raters had a guide to determine which content should be flagged: from gambling and sexuality to violence and destruction. Still, gore was in the eye of the beholder. “There's no formula,” Vance said. “We want raters to use their own judgment.”

  Once a game was reviewed by the raters, the team looked to see whether there was consensus on the evaluation—Vance said there almost always was—and the game got rated accordingly. For games sold in 2003, 54 percent were rated Everyone (E); 30.5 percent were rated Teen (T); and only 11.9 percent were rated Mature (M). Despite the debate over violent games, 70 percent of the top twenty best-selling console games were rated E or T. Vance said the ultimate responsibility resided with consumers. “If a rating doesn't give you pause, at a certain point, that's not our problem,” said Vance. “We can't dictate morals or ethics. People make up their own minds.”

  Vance thought Rockstar had always been good about disclosing the content of its games and had no reason to think otherwise with San Andreas. Each rater sat in a cubicle watching footage of CJ joyriding and fighting his or her way through San Andreas as the hip-hop music pulsed. The raters scribbled in their notepads, forbidden from talking to one another about their points of view. Finally, they convened to discuss their ratings, with a foreman presiding, but there wouldn't be any debate. GTA: San Andreas was rated M for Mature. Its future would be in the gamers' hands now.

  19

  Unlock the Darkness

  RANDOM CHARACTER UNLOCKED: PATRICK WILDENBORG

  Follow the “P” icon to Deventer, Holland. Approach while Patrick's family is sleeping. Patrick will be on the couch, laptop open.

  Patrick Wildenborg took his coffee black and plenty of it. As a diehard programmer in Deventer, a small town in eastern Netherlands, Wildenborg needed all the fuel he could get.

  By day, he did computer consulting, making real-time embedded systems for traffic management and military applications. Later he'd come home to his wife and two kids, a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. A burly six-foot-two-inch thirty-five-year-old with small glasses and receding brown hair, Wildenborg would stoop down to the floor to play with his kids. After dinner and when the children were asleep, he'd pour himself a hot coffee, slip out his laptop on the couch, and get his game on while his wife channel-surfed the TV.

  Wildenborg's favorite way to unwind was with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. An avid gamer since he'd played on the Commodore 64 computer as a kid, he had fallen hard for Rockstar's epic. He loved the kitschy eighties American atmosphere, the synth pop, the Miami Vice vibe that reminded him wistfully of his own awkward youth. But mainly he liked the freedom. “The freedom,” as he put it, “to do whatever you have to do.” He considered the elusive creators at Rockstar to be heroes.

  Like a lot of avid players, Wildenborg quickly tore through the entire Vice City game, finishing it up during late nights after work in a little more than a month. Yet the moment he completed the game, he felt the sad sick itch of loss, like the afterglow of the most awesome vacation ever. He didn't want it to end. Then he found a way to make the game live on—by hacking it.

  Computer game hacking wasn't new. Players had been altering the code of their favorite titles for decades. The resulting modifications, or mods, ranged from the simple and goofy (such as putting Barney in the first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3-D) to the wildly complex (such as transforming the sci-fi title Half-Life into a team-based counterterrorist game, Counter-Strike).

  Mod makers collaborated online, often without ever meeting in person, and freely distributed their programs across the Net. They did it for love and ego but seldom for money. A few mods, including Counter-Strike, garnered such a cult following that game companies struck deals to publish the titles themselves. As John Carmack, the programmer of mod-friendly franchises such as Doom and Quake, once put it, mods became the default résumés for aspiring game developers.

  Although allowing consumers to alter a product seemed like an anathema to many, forward-thinking game makers embraced the mod community for one smart reason: mods sold games. In order to play a mod, gamers still needed to own the original CD, which meant a longer shelf life. Plus, mod makers served as the best source of viral marketing around. As a franchise's most early-adopting, impassioned fans, mod makers played a crucial role in spreading the word about new games online.

  For this reason, the savv
iest companies not only embraced mod makers, they cultivated them—seeding, essentially, their own hardcore fans. As Wildenborg swiftly discovered online, few were as mod-friendly as Rockstar. The strategy fit perfectly with Rockstar's DIY style. Despite the fact that creating mods violated the end user license agreement of Take-Two's games, Rockstar had been building relationships with the mod makers since its earliest titles.

  Fan sites such as Gouranga.com were among the first to receive regular visits and updates directly from the Housers. By the time GTA III came out, Rockstar had cherry-picked its own coterie of fan sites, which the company promoted on its own page. For Vice City, Rockstar created a homepage for what the company described online as its “international friends.” As Rockstar's welcome paragraph on the site read, these were the places “to go for all those unofficial mods.”

  Modders knew the relationship was mutually beneficial. As one GTA modder put it, “The modding scene for the GTA franchise has generated revenue at little to no cost for the producers or publishers. We know for a fact that there is a significant percentage of GTA fans who only buy the game for the PC because of the open-ended modification possibilities.”