All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  Sam, Dan, and Rockstar North had approached game making with a granular rock ’n’ roll intensity that has rarely been matched by designers. Their mission was to make movie- and music-inspired games that they were certain would have a great supremacy in the gamer’s mind, games that made action films look puny in comparison. Stating that Dan Houser’s writing is merely influenced by film, especially the gangster genre, is to offer only a couple of scenes from the whole movie. Mentioning that the writing often wins because of its grinding, gnashing satire and searing social commentary gets closer to the point. Dan Houser can occasionally be long-winded. But he is among the better narrative writers in our popular culture today, not only in videogames, but in any medium. He and his team are not writing a linear story. Rather, the narrative is like a 3-D chess game of sorts, often very different from the linear structure of a movie and fairly different from even a narratively experimental book like Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, which frequently moves around in time. So he is a master of popular writing, especially because he is dealing with a genre of games that is open-ended. You can go anywhere, and wherever you go, treading down whatever dark alley you choose, you are eventually funneled through the story to its conclusion. And once you hear the words spoken, watch the action that ensues, and then participate in the story, exploring Liberty City, San Andreas, or Vice City becomes more than a game. The rough, tough Bukowski-esque dialog sticks with you just like opening paragraphs of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where shotgun blasts are heard as “somber explosions.” Therefore, you don’t play the game as much as you get to know a world and its people. And you feel as though you are the first to do so. You live it and you dream it. That’s what makes the game’s endings all the more satisfying and breathtaking. There is a sad joy in the final mission of Grand Theft Auto III. After hearing the venomous invectives of the harpy-voiced Catalina, the game’s antagonist and possibly a cannibal, you speed away and ultimately shoot down her helicopter over the sprawling Cochrane Dam in Cedar Grove, in an explosion one game character calls “better than the fireworks on the Fourth of July.” You know you’ve done what you have to do, but there’s not much joy in it. Even when you get the girl, she talks and talks inanely. As the game ends and the screen becomes black, the crack of a gunshot pierces. Did you kill her? Did she kill you?

  Not everyone saw Grand Theft Auto III as a jewel of popular art. Walmart was so worried that kids would play the game that it began checking the IDs of every buyer. For a while, Australia banned the game due to its violent and sexual content. Politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman railed against it, saying the violence was horrendous and that the Housers “have a responsibility not to do it if we want to raise the next generation of our sons to treat women with respect.” After seeing GTA III, Jack Thompson, a conservative activist lawyer, made it his crusade to ban the spread of violent videogames. The Housers didn’t react publicly, but privately they shook their heads. They had made the game for adults. Through the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, they had labeled it with a Mature rating, hopefully ensuring that no one under seventeen would purchase the game.

  “I don’t get it,” said Dan of the controversy. “This isn’t a toy. It’s expressly not for kids.”

  “It’s clearly for older people,” agreed Sam. “It’s relevant to me. I’m older now. I don’t want to play as penguin. I want to play as a man and do things that a man does.”

  With Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Rockstar added new ingredients to what Sam began to call The Vibe, which, he said was “like injecting blood like Tina Turner did to [The Who’s] Tommy as the Acid Queen. They put Tommy in that weird sarcophagus thing and she starts injecting him, and he comes out happy” as a blissed-out baby for the good part of the drug trip. Then, he goes in again and comes out covered in snakes for the bad portion. So à la Tommy in that film scene, the game would be rife with these supreme emotional highs and lows. Sam, a fan of the 1980s pop culture, suggested that the team create a game that melded the TV show Miami Vice with Scarface with the music of the era. He was greeted with “Everyone’s trying to forget the eighties. This is idiotic.” But he had watched every episode of Miami Vice again and was certain a game that took place in the culturally maligned decade would be perfect. So Rockstar moved into a licensing deal with Epic Records that included a call to Michael Jackson to convince him to add “Billie Jean” to the game and to a separate, seven-disk box set of CDs. Sony’s record chief Tommy Mottola came by Rockstar’s SoHo office to confirm that the eighties still resonated with Americans, and not always in an ironic way. It was as though Sam finally had his record company, except it was tucked neatly within Rockstar Games.

  With Lazlow Jones, a former radio host, Dan created in-game radio stations that featured well-known DJs and commercials brimming with parody. Some programs could be so humorous, you had to pull off to the side of the road during a mission to avoid crashing. Rockstar continued to add celebrity voices to the GTA experience as well, including Dennis Hopper as porn director Steve Scott and Burt Reynolds as the corrupt real estate tycoon Avery Carrington. Dan, a fan of Reynolds since the Smokey and the Bandit movies, went down to the recording session in Tribeca expecting to find a guy so affable, they might raise a glass together. For some reason, Reynolds was uncomfortable with Dan in the studio, and began crying, “Get the limey out of here. I’m not going to work if this limey Brit is in here!” The atmosphere became so tense that Reynolds and Dan were chest to chest and fisticuffs were about to break out. The two had to be separated by the studio’s engineer.

  In all its games, Rockstar continued to enrich a dark but lively underworld with essential humor. That hilarity in the writing was even more a part of The Vibe during the ambitious Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when, on Bounce FM, DJ Funktipus spews the barb, “I’m the Funktipus and I got my tentacles wrapped around your San Andreas. Ain’t my fault.” And you wonder, “Who the hell is this guy? I wanna hang with him, buy him a beer, and get him really loaded so he can spill some tales. Come on, Funkitpus. Tell me about that crazy night with George Clinton. Oh. Wait. You ARE the voice of George Clinton.” Beyond the radio stations and their over-the-top on-air personalities, the adventure within the state of San Andreas was inspired by four real states: California, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon. In a way, San Andreas was the ultimate road trip, one that was menacing and rapturous at the same time.

  It was also a role playing game inspired by the old Tomagotchi toys. Sam once took a friend’s virtual pet and sadistically overfed it until it died. His friend was angered, but Sam never forgot the almost mad scientist feeling of experimentation he got when watching what would happen as he stuffed more food down the little monster’s gullet. Similarly in San Andreas, tough thug CJ’s demeanor and physicality would change if he chowed down too much. Sam saw that one game tester had made CJ become massively fat. Like a character out of Tod Browning’s Freaks, this CJ wore tighty whities, a cape, a bandit’s mask, and an Afro. In a kind of a media bridge of game to old-school fiction, the tester crafted a short story around all the things he was doing with CJ in San Andreas. All this RPG-ness was completely integrated through his actions while playing. It was incredibly subtle game design. There were no on-screen buttons or sliders you could use to change your character’s size. But it was still there. While there was evil and violence everywhere, like Doom gone urban and hyperreal, it was The Sims and SimCity as well. It was life in a blender spawned by game genres in a blender.

  But as the game continued to pile on the sales, and the media attention, life outside the game took a treacherous turn for the brothers. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Take-Two and founder Ryan Brant, the son of billionaire publisher and horse breeder Peter M. Brant, with severe accounting irregularities, pointing to income that had been inflated by $60 million in 2000 and 2001. (A disgraced Brant would eventually resign from Take-Two, purportedly for medical reasons.) Brant’s troubles hit Sam hard, because the executive had believed in him
enough to give him a life-changing break.

  Sam had been living in San Diego and working at the Rockstar division there since May 2005 and was witness to the beginning of a fascinating open world game called Red Dead Redemption. He still was riding high from the success of San Andreas and felt the follow-up to 2004’s Red Dead Revolver, a Western-themed offering about rough-riding cowboys, was something he always was meant to do. Sam immersed himself in work, trying to enjoy the fact that he was creating art with a hardworking team that was taking the sandbox genre to a different time in history.

  Then, lightning struck a second time. When an incident that occurred in June became public in early July, those who disdained Rockstar for its game content found more reason to become unhinged. A Dutch techie named Patrick Wildenborg had used some self-created code to open up the PC version of San Andreas. Inside, he discovered a locked portion of the game that featured the gangster character CJ having what amounted to R-rated sex in various positions with a girlfriend. (Without Wildenborg’s software key, all you heard were the sounds of passion.) Soon, the modder’s program was all over the Web. It went viral and thousands upon thousands were playing the sexual mini-game called Hot Coffee.*

  In San Diego, Sam had been thinking what a good life he was living. His son had just been born. He had just bought a country house with his brother. Maybe now he could relax a bit. And so could all of Rockstar. Then he read about Hot Coffee on a message board. Immediately he had a sinking feeling. Everything moved in slow motion. Hot Coffee tore away the short-lived feelings of peace and accomplishment. He called up the New York office of Rockstar. Was this true? How could it be? How could this have happened? Sam remembered that a level designer had proposed the addition of the mini-game in question. But when the content was seen, the code had been nixed by all involved in making decisions, especially those at Rockstar North in Edinburgh. The snippet shouldn’t have remained on the disk—no way, no how. But there it was, and critics were coming out of the woodwork to lambast Rockstar. Sam called Dan. “They’re acting like this was meant to be in the game. It’s unfinished. Not meant to be in the game!”

  Dan said, “You can see the usual quality isn’t there. Everyone should see that this wasn’t intentional.”

  Sam continued, “This not how CJ would be with a girl. This was a very crude initial implementation. Had we completed it, it would have been more stylish, dare I say it, more romantic, more chic, a little bit more Barry White. But what’s there—it’s crude and embarrassing and childish, not what we as a company are about.” Indeed, CJ was a well-rounded character whose sad backstory included the murder of both his mother and his brother. He was also being blackmailed; in essence, CJ was trapped in a gang world he never made. It makes sense that a finished Hot Coffee would have shown CJ’s softer side.

  The Housers and Rockstar were trapped, and the nightmare had only begun. Take-Two asked to see all pertinent Rockstar e-mails—including all of Sam’s missives—as they searched for a smoking gun that might prove the Housers had intentionally added the mini-game to spark controversy. They found none. By mid-July, New York senator Hillary Clinton had called for the Federal Trade Commission to look into the genesis of the game material and how it got on the game disk. She assured her constituents that she was calling for a full and complete investigation in order to keep “inappropriate videogame content out of the hands of young people.” Politicians around the country condemned the game, including New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who, while campaigning for governor, called the release of the game “irresponsible behavior” from which our nation’s children needed protection. The Los Angeles district attorney called to obtain the Rockstar e-mails. The scandal was feeding upon itself. Powerful conservatives throughout the country feared that the game’s content could cause irreparable damage to kids.

  Sam told Dan, “These guys are out to get us. They’ll garrotte us whatever we do. They don’t give a shit. This is crazy. They’re throwing serrated-edged boomerangs like the little kid in Mad Max 2.”

  Sam had always been a little neurotic; he would probably agree with former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s famous motto, “Only the paranoid survive.” Worry was an essential part of his personality because it helped him to get things done, a quality that allowed him to drive the various divisions within the company forward to complete deadlines. But when the FTC hauled nine Rockstar employees, including Sam and Benzies, down to Washington, DC, for their investigation, it changed Sam forever.

  Like a character in his own game, Sam had become Public Enemy Number One—except in real life it wasn’t nearly so much fun. In January 2006, Sam sat down in an uncomfortable chair in a small-ish room at FTC headquarters. Behind him was his cadre of three lawyers. In front of him were three agents of the commission. To his left in front of the agents was a two-foot-high stack of paper, including thousands of his e-mails to employees during the making of San Andreas. The fussy FTC agents went through the highlighted portions of each page, grilling him for nine hours. When they saw certain words he used in his correspondence, they would raise their eyebrows and ask, “What do you mean by this language?”

  Sam, fearing that his use of the “F” word would make the FTC believe he’d surely done something wrong, explained that he used salty language in an effort to get the job done during crunch time. Then the agents came across a more recent e-mail that read, “Why are they so concerned about what we’re doing in the game when we’re bombing the hell out of people in Operation Enduring Freedom trying to keep our freedom, and they’re back here trying to curb the freedom that we’re paying the taxes to fight for?” Sam stood by his statement, saying he wasn’t particularly political. “But if you’re blasting people over there in the name of freedom, why are you clipping our freedom of speech over here? Those things seem to me to be at odds with each other.” The FTC eventually found nothing out of order with the e-mails and no grand conspiracy to pervert the youth of America with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

  Even after it was over, Sam was powerfully affected by the ordeal. For some time, he had spells during which he felt terrified. He wanted to leave the country. Some of his friends, who’d been with him since the beginning, began to bail on the company. Terry Donovan left his CEO position because of the emotional tumult the investigation had caused in him. While in the UK on business, Sam had an episode on a train from Scotland to London while heading over to visit his parents. After he heard via his cell phone that the New York City district attorney was thinking about investigating Rockstar, he felt a desperate need to drop out. In what he dubbed his Black Dog period, he literally wanted to give everything up, leave Rockstar, leave his brother and his family to go live in isolation in a cave, well, somewhere. Back in New York City, his doctor said the Hot Coffee incident had left Sam badly injured, like a victim in an emotional car crash. In the end, it was the making of GTA IV that fueled Sam’s recovery. Sure, he and the others at Rockstar were outsiders again, maybe even more so than before. Sure, they were reviled. But Rockstar would come back because they had a point to make. Rockstar did not let Hot Coffee chill their speech. They would pull no punches with GTA IV, which would be hailed as the most grittily brave game they had ever created. It would sell 3.6 million copies on its first day and earn $500 million in its first week. The success showed throughout popular culture. Coke riffed on the Grand Theft Auto theme, except the grungy lead in the extravagantly animated commercial gave back an old lady’s stolen purse, put out a fire, and gave away the soft drink as the motley cast of characters broke out into the “Give a Little Love” jingle. Comedian Dave Chappelle parodied the series with spot-on humor (and an Uzi). And in the off-Broadway play The Common Air, a loquacious DJ tried to be hip by talking to a kid in an airport terminal about GTA III.

  Rockstar had sped through the blackness to continually make the finest games for adults on the planet. With their dangerously anarchic edge, cynical humor, and hip-hop swagger, Rockstar’s creations resonate with legions
of the disaffected across the world to an extent that no games before them have achieved. And if Rockstar bottles the spirit of rebellion for the young and old-ish who feel browbeaten, subjugated, and downtrodden, well, that’s fitting enough—for that’s what the Housers feel they still are and always will be, no matter how much money they make. Because they had almost lost it all, Sam and Dan will always have that haunted edge, that gnawing suspicion and lingering fear that combined with their innate creativity to stimulate greatness. Just as a Jedi can always count on the Force, The Vibe will always be with Rockstar.

  * It was hardly the first time that explicit sex had been seen in a game. Multimedia companies had made far more explicit games with full-motion video. In 1994, Virtual Vixens from Pixis Interactive had you satisfying various women in a sci-fi setting. If your rhythm was off, you’d be verbally dissed by your companion.

  THE POPCAP GUYS AND THE FAMILY JEWELS

  It was hated. It was disdained by the gamers who loved Grand Theft Auto and, really, by anyone who called himself a hard-core gamer. Those hard-core gamers said the new genre of casual games was generic, repetitive, and thoroughly unexciting.

  In 1999, much of Sony Online Entertainment’s early work was with casual games. The seasoned gamers on the team hated them too. In addition, the editorial staff initially abhorred what it saw as a lowest common denominator audience. Sony’s PlayStation 2, which played games and DVDs, had been released that past March to great acclaim; it was this console that almost everyone cared most about, and the online videogame space where people played bridge or bingo inside their Web browsers was anathema to the serious gamer’s sense of what was paramount in games: to find and seek out the new. But Sony’s market research was showing that the people who flocked to games such as online poker and Jeopardy! were non-gamers—middle-aged women, busy housewives, or single mothers who had a few minutes here and there to play games that were not terribly involved as far as game play was concerned. And Sony had found that these middle-American gamers were loyal and hard-core in their own way. Women were the driving force behind Sony’s huge, caring community, and they comprised the majority of the eight million registered members for the company’s gaming portal, The Station. When The Station held contests, the floodgates opened and thousands of entries were received.*