Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

The pixilated wall between gamers and the rest of the world was fading. In the decade since the first GTA was released, the sheer complexity of video game controllers—all of those intimidating buttons and sticks—had alienated two generations of potential players: little kids and boomers. The average person needed only eyes and/or ears to consume every book, TV show, song, or movie ever made, but when it came to consuming games, most people were all thumbs. Or, rather, they were dumb thumbs; they were Thumbies—lacking the requisite hand-eye coordination to survive the virtual worlds.

  The impact was profound, both economically and culturally. In addition to missing out on legions of customers, the Great Thumbie Divide had spawned a sociopolitical backlash that went all the way to Capitol Hill. Unable to play games, politicians and pundits instead relied on watching short and often sensational video clips—which is as unlike playing a game as watching porn is unlike having sex. Games are, fundamentally and essentially, an experiential medium. It's easy to hate the players when the haters can't play—and vice versa.

  Change had come, though. It started in late 2006 with the recent release of the Nintendo Wii, a new console with motion-sensitive controllers. Instead of tapping an elaborate combo of buttons, people could play Wii Tennis simply by gripping the Wii Remote and swinging their arms as if they were holding racquets for real.

  With more than six million units sold in its first four months, the Wii quickly became the fastest-selling console in the world, from the United States to the United Kingdom, and catapulted Nintendo back to the top of the industry. This despite the fact that the Wii lacked the high-definition graphics and the photorealism of its competitors. In the first six months of its release, the Wii would outsell Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 combined.

  At the same time, the blockbuster franchise Guitar Hero, played with guitar-shaped controllers, took the medium even wider. The spin-off game Rock Band would earn more than $1 billion. With more and more people playing casual games online and on Facebook and the recently released iPhone, the plight of the Thumbies seemed to be ending for good.

  Yet it wasn't only the end of this era at D.I.C.E. It was the end of Doug Lowenstein, the president of the Entertainment Software Association, who had been the face of the industry during its awkward adolescence. Since taking his post in 1994, the year of the Mortal Kombat hearings, and defending it through Columbine and Hot Coffee, Lowenstein was moving on to launch a private equity trade group. Yet the game makers and the media people who crammed into the auditorium to hear his farewell speech discovered he had to settle one last score.

  “The publishers and developers who make controversial content and then cut and run when it comes time to defending their creative decisions, nothing annoys me more,” Lowenstein said. “If you want the right to make what you want, if you want to push the envelope, I'm out there defending your right to do it. But, damn it, get out there and support the creative decisions you make.” People in the room wondered. “If you want to be controversial, that's great,” Lowenstein continued, “but then don't duck and cover when the shit hits the fan. Stand up and defend what you make.”

  Lowenstein wasn't gunning only for Rockstar, however. He chastised the game industry for staying silent and politically inactive. When he asked how many in the room had joined the Video Game Voters Network, an activist group, and saw few hands, he snapped, “That's pathetic! . . . no matter how good we are, and we're good, we can't win the war without an army. And you're the army. And most of the people in this room who have the most at stake are too lazy to join this army.”

  Furthermore, he lambasted the game press for granting the most notorious culture warrior such a wide platform. “You know who gives Jack Thompson more attention than anyone else? The games press!” Lowenstein fumed. “The games press legitimizes Jack Thompson. Everyone gets so upset that Jack Thompson has so much ability. I just think it's nuts.”

  AS MUCH AS the gamers thought they knew Thompson, in many ways, they didn't know Jack at all. Yes, there were tiny crucifixes on his hand towels and a Bush magnet on his fridge, but there were also signs of the other version of the man. Not Jack the Ripper, but Jack the Dude.

  After he spent so many years fighting against the scourge of pop culture, something surprising had happened: Thompson had become kind of hip—not hip as in cool, but hip as in aware. His pop savvy was the unlikely by-product of his obsessive immersion in his cause, surfing the channels and the video games and the radio stations for hours on end. An outsider himself, he gravitated toward black comedy. His favorite shows were Ali G and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which filled his DVR and he could quote from memory. He still had a soft spot for Frank Zappa. “I think Zappa was prescient,” he said, “and I love his live album at the Fillmore East.”

  One hot morning in the spring of 2006, Thompson looked like a weathered fifty-five-year-old fraternity adviser. Dressed in khaki cargo shorts and a faded white polo shirt, he was unshaven with a beard grown into a Fu Manchu. He kicked back on a cushy recliner near a percolating aquarium. He had taken to saying “dude” a lot. When someone e-mailed him good news, he replied with phrases such as “way freaking kewl” typed in cherry red 36-point font.

  It wasn't just the culture war keeping him young, it was his son. Johnny was going on fourteen now, an athletic kid with whom he regularly shot baskets out back by their pool. For old times' sake, Johnny still helped his dad out on his cause now and then. On the heels of The Warriors video game release, Johnny dutifully headed into a Best Buy on a sting to see whether the clerk would sell him the M-rated game—while his dad videotaped the transaction from outside.

  Yet Johnny had become something of a gamer, too. He begged his parents to get a Sony PSP handheld game device, along with an Xbox. One morning before he headed off to lacrosse camp, he mustered up his nerve to stake out his ground with his father. “Dad,” he said, “if you don't mind, I don't think I'll tell anyone that I'm your son.”

  When Thompson recalled this tale a few days later, his face slackened, his eyes blinked, and his words, often gushing, halted to a stop. The fish tank burbled. For an awkward moment, he wasn't the big bad culture warrior anymore. He was just a father dealing with the bittersweet reality of a child growing up. When asked how he responded to his son, Thompson straightened his back and narrowed his eyes. “I tell him I'm sorry that he goes through that,” he said, “but I'm not sorry for what I've done.”

  In fact, bolstered by Hot Coffee, Thompson's fight against the gamers was going strong. A group of players raised money from around the world to send a bouquet of flowers in tongue-in-cheek reconciliation to Thompson, whom the campaign organizer characterized as “a shining example of the hysterical anti-youth bias in American government and media.”

  Their campaign, which they called “Flowers for Jack,” went viral, bringing in news and money from around the world. Thompson received the bouquet, then forwarded it to Take-Two, as he wrote in an accompanying note, “in the memory of all of the people who now lie in the ground because of your reckless design, marketing, and sale of mature-rated murder simulators to children.”

  Yet this wasn't just a war of roses. Thompson's battle against Bully was reaching a feverish and effective pitch. He spammed the Net with a screenshot of brawling kids from the game, which, he promised, “will allow teens to practice beating up their virtual classmates.” To the surprise of gamers worldwide, he successfully convinced his local Miami-Dade School District, the fourth largest in the country, to unanimously issue a resolution asking Take-Two not to release Bully and urging parents not to buy it—despite the fact that no one had seen the unreleased game.

  He wasn't stopping there. In June 2006, the Louisiana legislature passed a bill Thompson coauthored, banning the sales of violent video games to minors. Then in September, Thompson spearheaded a $600 million wrongful death lawsuit against Rockstar, Take-Two, and the Sony Corporation of America. The suit claimed that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City inspired a teenager named Cody Posy t
o kill three people one day in 2004 on the New Mexico ranch of television anchorman Sam Donaldson.

  With Bully slated to come out at the end of October, Thompson filed a petition to prevent Wal-Mart and other major retailers from selling it on grounds that the game violated Florida's public nuisance laws. In what the Washington Post called a “major coup” for Thompson, Take-Two was ordered to give a judge a preview of Bully to see whether in fact it violated such a law. After viewing the game, however, a Miami-Dade County circuit court judge ruled against banning the sale of the games to minors, as Thompson had hoped. The game ultimately earned a Teen rating, suggested for anyone thirteen and up.

  Thompson argued that the judge had erred by allowing a Rockstar employee to show him the game and thus could have navigated away from the more violent encounters. A video clip of Bully leaked online showing boy-on-boy kissing. “You did not see the game,” Thompson told the judge. “You don't even know what it was you saw.” Thompson then sent an open letter to the judge, saying, “You have consigned innumerable children to skull fractures, eye injuries from slingshots, and beatings with baseball bats.”

  When Take-Two sought to have Thompson declared in contempt of court, Thompson fired off another open letter in response. “You want to play hardball?” he wrote. “You want to try to throw me in jail? You have no idea what you are unleashing in doing this. You're at the brink.”

  On October 25 at 4 p.m. Thompson sat in a Miami courtroom for his contempt hearing. A reporter for a game site called Destructoid recorded the proceedings on a shaky camera and posted it online as a short film titled Jack (written in the same font as the Bully logo). The footage of Thompson—sitting in his suit, clutching a poster board on which he had printed the definition of contempt, and getting scolded by the judge—delighted gamers as his final comeuppance. When the judge revealed that he was personally filing a complaint to the bar against Thompson, it seemed to mark the beginning of the end.

  With the specter of disbarment looming, Thompson sent another open letter to the judge, chastising him again for “the game that you unleashed on . . . kids.” He wrote: “You don't care because you don't have a teen in a school as I do.” Thompson refused to back down, but after threatening to sue to block the release of Manhunt 2 and the next GTA game, he claimed he got a call from Take-Two to come to meet its executives in New York, once and for all.

  Thompson said he flew to New York and convened with an intermediary for Take-Two's new CEO, Straus Zelnick, in what he later called “a double secret probation meeting on Central Park West.” Thompson told the intermediary, “Look, I'm here to tell you to stop selling your Grand Theft Autos and other mature-rated games to kids, and if you do that, and tell your retailers to stop, I will call a press conference and tell them Take-Two is the most responsible bunch of people I ever met.”

  They weren't having it, however. “We are in a war with you, Mr. Thompson,” Thompson later claimed he was told, “and we will do whatever it takes to defeat and destroy you.” In March 2007, Take-Two petitioned the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida for relief. “Thompson has a history of making multiple threats of legal action, whether substantiated or not, both against (Take-Two) as well as the retailers who purchase the video games and offer them for sale to the public,” the complaint read.

  After all of the years of fighting against GTA, Thompson was up against a wall. The efforts to ban violent games were failing, including his Louisiana law, which was ultimately declared unconstitutional. He faced charges of contempt and disbarment, and now, he was looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, including fees that Take-Two wanted to collect for the cases against him, if he didn't settle with the company. “I looked at it and said, this is not working,” he later recalled, “so I agreed.”

  In a settlement reached on April 17, 2007, Thompson agreed not to sue or threaten to sue Take-Two or to direct any future communications to them through their attorneys. In short, his public war with Rockstar would cease. Boss Level complete. Game over.

  IT WAS 11 A.M. at Rockstar, but what still felt like the middle of the night to Will Rompf. As one of the company's most devoted foot soldiers and heads of quality assurance, Sam's preppy acolyte was starting another sixteen-hour day testing Manhunt 2—the ultraviolent sequel to their controversial 2003 thriller. Yet it wasn't only the endless nights of bloody decapitations and nut-busting groin kicks that were getting to him.

  For Rompf, the electric thrill of working at Rockstar had begun to fizzle dark. It started, he felt, not long after Jamie King (“Kinger,” as Rompf called him affectionately) left the company. Though Rompf hadn't fully appreciated it at the time, he thought now what a buffer King had been for him—such as encouraging him to go home after a long day's work. “Things changed massively when Jamie left,” Rompf recalled.

  His crunch time at the office now raged unabated. Rompf was losing touch with his family, his friends, and his girlfriend. To survive, he was self-medicating. It started with late-night bong hits, then he'd down four Tylenols and a shot of bourbon to fall asleep after arriving home at 9 a.m. following a graveyard shift, only to return hours later with the help of amphetamines.

  Rompf, a diehard Marxist, never failed to put his heart and soul into his work and, even in his bleakest hours, pledged himself completely to the company. To the consternation of his friends, he had even branded himself with his devotion—getting a Rockstar logo tattooed on his wrist. But his body and mind were losing the fight.

  This morning, as he slashed through Manhunt 2, he could feel himself begin to snap. It happened when an irritating colleague kept obnoxiously looming over his computer. “Dude, just get the fuck away from my desk,” Rompf said. “I'm stressed, I'm tired, I'm working all the time.”

  “No way,” the guy replied.

  “Get the fuck away, dude,” he said, gripping a pen, “or I'm going to stab you.”

  The words sounded alien coming from the mouth of a former volunteer for Tibet, who had once been personally honored by the Dalai Lama, but he couldn't help himself. Rompf saw the guy approaching in the reflection of his computer monitor and thrust back his hand, meaning to warn him. He realized how badly he'd misjudged the distance when he heard the guy scream and saw the tip of his pen broken off in the guy's hand. “Will just stabbed me!” the guy yelled, running off to the hospital. Though spooked by his outburst, Will stayed behind, completing his task at hand.

  He wasn't the only one reeling. The climax of departures and dramas in the previous year had become almost operatic. There was the exodus of Brant, Eibeler, Foreman, King, and Donovan. The shareholder revolt. The FTC hearing. The mounting class-action suits over Hot Coffee. The games were suffering, too. Despite the brilliance of Bully, sales of the game fell flat. Rockstar's adaptation of The Warriors met a similar fate.

  Now, even the reliable GTA cash cow was ailing. GTA: Vice City Stories, a spin-off for the Sony PSP handheld released in October and ported to PS2 in March, was the worst-selling game in the history of the franchise. Manhunt 2 received an Adults Only rating by the ESRB in the United States and was refused classification in the United Kingdom. Though Rockstar begrudgingly dialed back the violence in the game to earn an M-rating, sales disappointed. For Rockstar publicist, Zuniga, the crash seemed like post-Coffee karma. “Hot Coffee pretty much did fuck Rockstar and did bring the company down in a way,” he later said. “They were the bully of the industry, and they got punched in the face.”

  Former Rockstar producer Jeff Williams posted a lengthy blog called Life during Wartime, in which he exposed life inside the company. In addition to claiming that he was among those who knew about the presence of the Hot Coffee scene, he railed against the working conditions. “Every Rockstar project turned into a huge clusterfuck,” he wrote. “I mainly blame this on a horrendously inefficient company structure, combined with a few individuals who thought they were hot shit but really didn't know anything about either video games or mar
keting. . . . Rockstar was arrogant to the point of absurdity.” Later, the blog came down.

  Of course, many people still worked at Rockstar and surely had differing opinions of day-to-day life there. Presumably, there were those who were quite happy and nonplussed by the drama. Maybe Rockstar was just, like many ambitious companies, a hard-crunching, late night culture. But beacause the majority of current employees at Rockstar were seldom, if at all, heard form publicly, the comments online gained a great deal of attention among the game press. As more and more ex-employees began sounding off across the Net, game industry observers smelled blood. “If you look at the content of what these guys have distributed, it's so offensive and inappropriate,” said James Steyer, the CEO and founder of the San Francisco–based multimedia ratings group Common Sense Media. “It's not surprising to learn they had committed massive acts of fraud at the board and CEO level. The chickens have come home to roost for this company—and I say good riddance to these guys.” Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner summarized it: “You have backdated options, hidden porn, accounting issues, and mismanagement. You have management that was at best incompetent and at worst dishonest.”

  Such jibes were hurtful enough to Rockstar, but most devastating of all was the shocking death of Jeremy Blake, the designer who'd come up with the iconic Rockstar logo. On July 10, Blake had found his girlfriend, video game designer Theresa Duncan, dead from suicide in her apartment. One week later, he left the offices of Rockstar and took the subway to Rockaway Beach in Queens, where he was last seen wading naked into the water. His body washed up near the shore of Sea Girt, New Jersey. A second suicide at Rockstar within weeks of Blake's only exacerbated the sense of despair in the company—how could such a beloved long-time employee with a family take his own life?