Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  To treat the bad energy in the office, the company brought in a spiritual healer. In her hand, she held a string with a crystal hanging from the end and swung it slowly like pendulum. One by one, she passed the desks of the hipsters and the gamers, their computers, their Xbox controllers, and their desk tchotchkes. She stopped at an empty desk, where she felt, as said, “pretty strong readings.” The fact that this incident had been reported by the Wall Street Journal sent a clear message to those worried about the future of Rockstar and their parent company: a new era had begun.

  As if to mark it, the company soon had its biggest blowout yet for Sam's birthday, in honor of his turning thirty-six at a trendy bar down town. Gorgeous Belgian strippers in pigtails and cowgirl outfits poured shots down employees' throats. Out in the back, Rockstars took turns donning giant inflatable sumo wrestling suits and slamming one another gleefully to the ground.

  Yet the real action was inside, where they lined up the tables again and readied the greasy cheese balls. As was the tradition, buckets were strategically positioned for puking. Rockstars reached into their wallets for fat wads of cash to bet. It seemed just like the old days—except, of course, it wasn't. With the other cofounders long gone, there were only the Houser brothers calling the shots, just as they did when they were kids in London. Now Sam and Dan had to prove to everyone that they could rise up and do what they did best: make amazing games. They knew just how to do it, by pouring everything into their fantasies and creating a new reality of their own.

  Sam, dressed in a black T-shirt, and Dan, bald and beefy, dressed in white, loomed at the head of the table as the Rockstars squeezed in around them. Nauseous competitors hunched over their soiled plates at the table. As Sam grinned behind his unruly beard, Dan shouted through his bullhorn at the woozy eaters who were about to compete in the next round. “Let's move on to cheese ball fourteen!” Dan said in his thick British accent. “One minute, one cheese ball! It's easy! You've done it before! Let's go!”

  25

  New York City

  FINALE

  Now you make your final choice, a choice that dramatically affects the overall story and how the game's final three missions unfold. . . . Which outcome will you choose: money or revenge?

  It was late one night in Brighton Beach, the Russian neighborhood near Coney Island in Brooklyn. Inside a gaudy nightclub, a group of young guys took turns at the karaoke machine, downing vodka, and poking at the jellied sturgeon on their plates. Shady mob types lingered cryptically. A security guard who'd been escorting the group said that if they came under fire, he'd be able to rescue only one person. They should decide now.

  The young guys weren't mobsters. They were artists and coders sent over from Scotland to research Rockstar's most ambitious game yet: Grand Theft Auto IV. They had hired a cop to protect them while they roamed the city's edgier streets. In the past, the GTA games had emulated gangster films and lost eras, but not this time. The guys at Rockstar had set their sights on their hometown in all of its current glory: New York, present day.

  Although the Liberty City of earlier GTAs had always been based on the Big Apple, Rockstar had never had the technology or the experience to bring the city in all of its crazy and beautiful detail to life. Now the time had come. “If video games are going to develop into the next stage, then the thing isn't to try and do a loving tribute,” Dan said. “It's to reference the actual place itself. . . . If we can't do that now about New York, then when the fuck could we do it?”

  With their powerful new processors and high-definition graphics, the new generation of consoles—the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360—would let them render more astonishing details than ever before. Dan compared it to the leap from 2D to 3D, but this time they were going from low-definition to high-def. Rockstar enlisted a breakthrough new software engine designed by two graduates of the zoology department at Oxford. Drawing from both human and animal behavior, the engine—called Euphoria—combined a fluid mix of artificial intelligence and biomechanics. Characters could be built around skeletons true to human anatomy, from the way their muscles flexed down to their nervous systems. The moment Sam saw a demo of the engine, his blood raced. “That's my dream—it's happening!” he said. “It's there, let's do it!”

  The heightened realism would enliven everything from the handling of the vehicles to the waves lapping up on a beach. Sophisticated physics enabled more believable reactions, such as pedestrians whose rag-doll bodies tumbled and twirled through the air when struck by a car. Enhanced animation allowed for more cinematic close-ups, so vivid that when, say, a mobster gets a bad call, his eyes narrow believably in frustration. Supple lights and shadows would bathe Liberty City, from the giant neon credit card billboard ads to the blood-orange sunsets over the skyline.

  Such innovations weren't only eye candy. The new palette enabled a more sophisticated level of storytelling and design. Dan's six-page treatment told the story of Niko Bellic, a Serbian national who came to Liberty City after a wartime betrayal left his closest friends dead. Yet like many immigrants, Bellic came to find that the American Dream was more like a nightmare. His cousin Roman, a drunken loudmouth cabbie, needed Bellic to help him with petty missions to resolve some gambling debts. As in the other GTAs, the ensuing missions unlocked a series of lowlifes and gangsters, each with his or her own battles and plans. The deeper Bellic went, the more tangled he became in balancing his deep sense of loyalty with his need for money and revenge.

  Sam and Dan, immigrants themselves, were drawn to the struggles of Niko's fish-out-of-water story. After seeing (and making) so many portrayals of Italian American mobsters, the Housers found the character of a Eastern European especially fascinating. “On one hand, he's an innocent,” Dan recalled. “On the other hand, he's battle-hardened and world weary. A modern ‘arriving in America' story felt very interesting to us.” Sam said, “These new guys off the boat, they're coming with something to prove, and they mean business. They are fucking fearless.”

  To best immerse players in Bellic's world, Sam wanted to focus on packing as much dense detail as they could into their fictional New York. The task was insanely ambitious—not only to make the gangster movie they had always dreamed of, but capture the Big Apple in all of its madness. “What epitomizes New York?” Dan asked.

  To find the answer, the coders and the artists from Rockstar North arrived with cameras and notebooks in hand. It remained one of GTA's great and largely unappreciated ironies—that a bunch of Scots were creating the most influential simulation of America ever made. More than fifty of them scoured the neighborhoods, taking thousands of photos of the people and the places to get the right feel. Sam began to take weekly treks to Brighton Beach.

  Geeks trolled the karaoke bars and the nightclubs, the restaurants and the clothing stores. They even studied the public bathrooms in Brighton Beach, watching in awe as old Russian men shaved their armpits over the sinks. On more than one occasion, they got threatened for taking photos of passersby. Some guy in Harlem warned that he'd shoot them if they didn't put their cameras away.

  No detail proved too arcane or obsessive. They hung plasma TVs over the developers' desks in Edinburgh and fed them with nonstop footage of New York. They studied a library of books on the city, from the architecture to the sewage system. They pored over census data to ascertain the appropriate ethnic makeup of each neighborhood. Researchers grilled the Taxi and Limousine Commission to find the precise ratio of cabs to other cars in NYC.

  They set up a time-lapse video camera aimed at the sky over the city, just to see how it changed throughout the day. They watched hours of DVDs of traffic patterns from New York, simply to get the flow of taxis and cars right. To ensure the accuracy of the types of cars in the streets, they researched auto sales reports. The audio engineers spent hours getting just the right sounds for the amount of coins in a character's pockets.

  With more than 150 artists and programmers working on the game, GTA IV came to life. Within six months, they
had built out a detailed map of Liberty City. The action would unfold over five boroughs based on the real NYC: from Algonquin (Manhattan) to Broker (Brooklyn). Each borough would feature a meticulous reconstruction of real NYC locales, the iconic Statue of Happiness, the flashing lights of the Times Square–style Star Junction, the Brooklyn/Broker Bridge, the JFKish Francis International Airport in Dukes (Queens). Though the Rockstars insisted that their pixilated city was a dream-version of reality, GTA IV was one of the most passionate love letters to New York City ever written.

  As the story got outlined and the city mapped, artists created the characters: Bellic, with his broad forehead and bent nose, his Serbian swagger; Michelle, the vaguely ethnic girl in the fashionable pea coat, whom he dates; Little Jacob, the Jamaican smuggler, with his dreads and drugs; Trey “Playboy X” Stewart, the crack king in the rainbow hoodie. To capture the spontaneity of street interactions, they created a range of oddball passersby—crackheads and cougars, hipsters and hot dog vendors. They labored to get every detail right, from the dialogue to the fashion. To make sure the peds were dressed properly, they even hired NYC stylists to design their virtual clothes.

  Dan and his team broke the narrative into cut-scenes and missions. At the core, GTA IV was still essentially a racing-and-shooting game, but the missions were designed to tour the player throughout the rich and wonderful Liberty City world. To whack one foe, the player needed to climb a series of ladders to the roof of a construction site, then leap over buildings as the sun set gorgeously on the town. In another mission, the player would wipe out a series of dockside Russians, chasing down coke dealers in a speedboat around the city. Along the way, the player would be given moral choices—such as revenge or deal?—that would affect the direction of the game. If you stood up Roman for a guys' night out, his respect would go down accordingly.

  The action sequences were broken up by naturalistic diversions. While San Andreas had introduced role-playing game elements to the story, GTA IV expanded the richness of the open world by bringing interiors to life. A trip to a nightclub to see a review of cheesy jugglers and torch singers. A date to a bowling alley, complete with a ten pin mini-game. Owing something to the real-world scenes innovated in Bully, GTA IV's everyday moments were sublimely banal. A player would take a long ride on a quiet subway through Liberty City at night or sit in a car wash, as the sudsy foam bathed Bellic's stolen ride.

  With the expanded online capabilities of the new consoles, Rockstar had new ways to enhance its virtual world. Missions wouldn't end with the original disc. Microsoft paid about $50 million to Rockstar to distribute two additional episodes of the game exclusively over the Xbox 360 (this along with, for the first time, having a same-day release as the PS3 version of the game). GTA IV would feature a multiplayer online version, too.

  In the past, GTA players ran between phone booths and received pages, but now GTA IV was catching up to contemporary communications. The game included a mobile phone for placing and receiving calls and even sending text messages to crime lords and girls. There'd be an in-game Internet with more than a hundred fake websites (craplist.com, for classifieds; friendswithoutfaces.com, for social networking). Maybe best of all, they put a television set in Bellic's apartment, complete with three channels of programming that players could sit and watch (from a PBS-style “History of Liberty City” to stand-up performances by comedians Ricky Gervais and Katt Williams, appearing in pixilated versions of themselves).

  As the game's work progressed, so did its size. The budget neared $100 million, the most ever spent on a game, and the development time soon spilled over three years. The environment grew to four times the size of other GTA games and included three cities, twelve towns, and surrounding woods equivalent to seventeen square miles. There'd be a record-breaking eighteen radio stations (such as Tuff Gong for reggae and Vladivostok FM for Russian dance tunes). In total, there were 218 licensed tracks and plans for a deal with Amazon.com to let players download in-game music directly from the site. Rockstar hired a private eye just to track down the rights to the 1979 song “Walk the Night.”

  They hired New York news radio personality John Montone to do the voice for a similar station in the game. In honor of the Housers' dad, Sam said, “Let's do jazz properly” in the game, too. Walter Houser suggested tracks from Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker. When eighty-three-year-old jazz legend Roy Haynes heard he'd have a song in GTA IV, he was happy that “the youngsters are going to check that out in the game, you know, and that'll be cool.” Sam and Dan even included a version of their dad playing saxophone in the game.

  Rockstar hired a cast of 861 voice actors to play the parts of mobsters and pedestrians and waitresses. In all, they'd have more than eighty thousand lines of dialogue, in languages that included Chinese, Spanish, and Russian. And, yes, they'd have hookers, too, with HD-quality implied oral sex in dark alleys—though nothing that went beyond the M-rated line and there were no hidden scenes.

  For GTA IV, Rockstar changed its once mod-friendly end user license agreement to prohibit reverse engineering and copyright protection circumvention. As longtime Rockstar Jeronimo Barrera told MTV News, “Are we going to have a ‘Hot Coffee' situation? Absolutely not.”

  OLD CITY. Aerial view. A car cut through the city of Edinburgh. Sam had come to check on the development of GTA IV. It had been a decade now since the first GTA game, and so much had changed. This wasn't a ragtag group of nerds working in a frat over a pub in Dundee. Sam pulled up to a sleek modern building and strode into a lobby marked only by the R* logo—and blocked by security. Upstairs, he found dozens of workers laboring in a neat, orderly office, distinguished only by a couple of arcade games—Super Off Road and Super Street Fighter II Turbo.

  On one floor, three round-the-clock shifts of game testers—known in the industry as quality assurance, or QAs—filled cubicles, playing through every moment of the game, looking for inconsistencies, glitches, and programming bugs. Unlike many games that allowed players to choose difficulty levels, GTA didn't offer such customizations. Instead, the team would play and play and play the game, until the challenges hit the sweet spot: so that an average player could finish a mission in fewer than three tries. Too many cars in a chase scene? Remove them. Too much space to jump over between buildings? Narrow them down.

  Yet Sam had his own ritualistic way of checking out the game—by immersing himself inside it. Sitting in front of a screen, he grabbed a controller and began to walk Niko down the virtual streets. He passed the storefronts under the overhead train track. He passed decrepit gray buildings, tall bleak apartment complexes. Yellow cabs streamed by. The flutter of newspapers kicking up in the breeze. The vendor pulling hot dogs from the steaming cart.

  Sam could feel it. The weight of reality. The simulated world suspending his disbelief in ways he only dreamed of. This was it. He went to jack a car, but the driver wasn't having it and started to chase him down the street. Sam stopped dead in his tracks. “I'm not running from you any more,” he thought. “I'm going to fucking have it with you now, mate.”

  As he stood there, ready to slug the guy, a car suddenly careened past and—bam!—sent the dude flying like a pathetic ragdoll through the air. The collision was just another random event driven by the artificial intelligence of the game. The living, breathing world Sam had long craved came alive before his eyes. “This is how we always wanted GTA to be,” he later recalled, “but it simply wasn't possible until now.”

  Climbing into his car, Sam knew just where he'd like to go: the Steinway Beer Garden, a pub where Niko could swill pints of stout and, according to a commercial, “watch drunk fat old men throw sharp instruments around a crowded room.” In real life, Sam sucked at darts, but the mini-game of darts was one of Sam's favorite and most accomplished pastimes in GTA IV—and something he could actually win.

  Sam pulled up to the walled garden of Steinway's and walked in under the orange arch. He stepped into the outdoor patio, then walked along a lin
e of trees with red autumn leaves. Drinkers socialized at white plastic tables under red-white-and-blue umbrellas that had plastic flags strung between them. Through the front door he went, into the pub with the lute music playing. A bartender stood behind the taps in a long walnut-colored bar on the right, rows of booths to the left along green-paneled walls. Down to the right in front of the bar, he saw the tattered red, black, green, and white dart board. It was time to play.

  With his left thumb over the left controller stick he aimed his dart, and with a tap of a button, he let it fly. As the Irish music played, he heard a satisfying thwack as the tip of the dart logged into the board. With each dart, Sam felt a bit of his real self dematerialize, cells replaced by pixels, blood by electricity, a gamer immersed in a game, until he wasn't Sam anymore. He was Niko.

  Sam had always had relationships with his game alter egos before, but there was usually some impediment to his suspension of disbelief: the top-down view of GTA and GTA2; the silent protagonist of GTA III; Liotta's voice in Vice City. Yet this felt different. The technology and the design of GTA IV had conspired to create something magic. “Niko is a real person to me now,” Sam thought.