Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  What the hell? Khonsari thought. Khonsari's dad was a doctor, and here was this Hollywood tough guy—who was getting paid half what his dad made in a year? And he was copping an attitude? “Look,” Khonsari said, “I don't really give a shit what you do outside this, I mean, I loved you in Goodfellas, but this is a job, and you gotta do this.” Khonsari got him a big cup of Starbucks, and he calmed down and got into the part.

  Before long, a parade of their favorite celebs began pouring in to tape parts in the game: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper. Starring in GTA was a badge of honor for the actors, a sign of hipness. The Rockstars couldn't contain their glee. “I'm sitting next to the Six Million Dollar Man!” King said, as Lee Majors arrived for his part.

  For Vice City's porn star Candy Suxxx, Khonsari suggested adult star Jenna Jameson and offered her $5,000 for the part. It'd be an easy gig for her, something she could do when she was in town for the Howard Stern radio show. Turned out, her boyfriend was a huge GTA III fan—done deal. For Vice City, Khonsari motion-captured a scene of Candy on her back, having implied sex with a fisherman who joked about his twelve-inch fish. “Yeah,” he said, “it's regulation, baby!”

  Still, the guys tittered nervously like school kids when Jameson came to the studio to read her part. Dan took one look at her in her tight blue jeans and black shirt, and began to “feel very English,” as he said, and embarrassed. It didn't help that she showed up at the session with her father. “Look, I have no problem with her father,” Khonsari whispered to Dan, “but I do not feel comfortable making her moan and groan as if she's getting banged.”

  With Jameson's father glowering, the time for the orgasm came in more ways than one. “Oh, hello, Jenna,” Dan said, awkwardly. “So could you sound like you're excited?”

  She eyed him dubiously. “What do you mean?”

  “Sound like you're happy! Like you're having a great time!” He snapped his fingers. “Sound like you're eating a chocolate bar!”

  “So it's supposed to be kind of like sex?” she deadpanned, “or like I'm eating a chocolate bar?”

  “Yes, like you're having sex,” Dan said, “that would be perfect!”

  She obliged.

  Nothing prepared them for their visit with Burt Reynolds, who played Avery Carrington, a real estate mogul in the game. Since the guys had grown up on the actor's campy and macho classics—Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance—they were psyched to work with him. Reynolds showed up ready to work and be treated like a star. Khonsari could see the disdain in his eyes, the attitude so many other actors copped about the medium. “They look at you like ‘Who the fuck are you?'” he recalled, “‘You're game guys.'” Khonsari had no qualms about putting actors in their place. “If you want me to break it down to you,” he'd say, “these games gross over half a billion dollars, more than all of your movies put together!”

  Yet with Reynolds, he lost his nerve. Khonsari recalled how, after Reynolds cut his scene, Dan asked politely for another take. “Hey,” Dan said, “can you say that line again?”

  Reynolds stared him down and muttered, “Say that again?”

  “Can you do the line again?” Dan repeated.

  “You know, you need to give people an ‘atta boy.'”

  “An ‘atta boy'?”

  “Yeah, people do something good, you gotta give them an ‘atta boy.'”

  Khonsari and Dan shifted uncomfortably, having no clue what Reynolds was talking about at first—then realized he wanted a bit of acclaim before he did anything again. He wanted a “that a boy.” They redid the line, but Khonsari thought that Reynolds's attitude only got worse. The studio grew hot, so hot he was sweating through his clothes. Unbeknownst to Reynolds, his manager had gone out to buy him a dry shirt. When the shirt arrived, Dan innocently approached Reynolds. “Oh, your shirt's here,” he said.

  Reynolds didn't know the shirt was coming and must have thought Dan was insulting him for being sopping wet. “There's going to be two hits here,” Reynolds told him, “me hitting you and you hitting the floor!”

  Dan flipped, ready to cut Reynolds out of the game entirely. Khonsari intervened. “We got the performance,” he told Dan. “He's a total cock, but let's move on.”

  “GO GET ME COVERS!” Sam shouted. “I want covers!”

  It was closing in on the release date of Vice City, and Sam wanted his public relations team to deliver not just rave reviews, but magazine covers. It was a song-and-dance that began months before a game's release, because the magazines had to go to press in time to run with the launch. “There'd be lot of pressure on the PR guys to deliver good reviews,” Rockstar senior product marketing manager Corey Wade recalled. This would consist, he said, of “massaging those relationships and doing whatever you have to do to beef up a review.”

  Dan “Shoe” Hsu, the editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a top gaming magazine, described the relationship with Rockstar as “a constant fight” because the company would jockey for sympathetic reviewers. Hsu was still smarting from the Rockstar backlash over the magazine's GTA III review, which, despite raving about the game, suggested it would be highly controversial. He then fielded an angry call from Rockstar. “They were really upset,” Hsu recalled, “and wanted to control the message and control the heat.”

  Press got flown down to Miami to check out Vice City at the Delano Hotel. Rockstar rented a mansion by the water and showed what the guys called a “vibe reel” of eighties TV shows and films. In addition to the usual plans for ads and trailers, Rockstar rolled out a series of fake eighties websites online. No expense was too great. Recently, to promote Midnight Club 2, Rockstar had taken media members drag racing in San Diego.

  As word spread among gamers, demand began to reach a fever pitch. At Multimedia 1.0, a video-game store on St. Mark's Place in the East Village of New York, gamers were calling nonstop for Vice City. People were coming in and buying anything with a Rockstar logo—games, shirts, stickers. There was a police precinct near the shop, and officers kept coming in and asking for the title. They told the owner they loved to shoot the cops. When he saw a police van outside with the Rockstar logo, he didn't know if a cop had put it on there or someone from Rockstar had.

  Yet the hype and the marketing also jacked up the pressure around the office. Random outbursts became commonplace. One day, Foreman read on some online gamer discussion board how they said the trees in GTA III looked terrible. He saw Sam's face redden in anger and went over to console him. “Look at these people,” Foreman said, “if they're sitting around looking at the trees, think about how much they're actually missing. It's just not relevant. It's easy to take something in isolation and get beaten up about it. But the reality is that GTA is not about the trees. It's everything in there. Not one thing in there is that great. You have to take it as a whole.”

  Little garnered as much attention as the screenshots. Unlike the film or TV industry, which can rely fairly heavily on trailers and buzz, game makers rely hugely on still images sent out in advance of a game. Magazines would jockey just to be the first to feature new images from a game. One screenshot could become the basis of a marketing campaign. They'd pore over a good five hundred stills simply to choose one to send out to the press. “We have to do it better or have to do it different,” Donovan insisted.

  The closer the launch of Vice City loomed, the more obsessed the team in New York became. Hours shifted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., to

  11 a.m. to 3 a.m. The developers in Edinburgh shared the intensity and the stress. “Luckily, we have a healthy supply of Grand Theft Auto III promotional baseball bats that we can use to hit things when the going gets tough,” joked Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut. Pope recalled the time one executive take a whack at another's desk. “It's led to quite a few embarrassing and possibly worrying incidents with our cleaners,” Garbut said. Employees reported seeing others roaming the loft with (unloaded) rifles and shotguns, weapons used for art in the game—but good props when they wanted to storm into someone's o
ffice and make a point. “It was comedy,” Foreman recalled, “it was rock and roll.”

  Perhaps no one at Rockstar had to let off as much steam as the game testers. The dozen or so players occupied a front part of the loft. A foosball machine and a vintage Asteroids Deluxe arcade game awaited play. Packages of Throat Coat and other cold and flu remedies lined the shelves. Bikini centerfolds smiled seductively from the walls. The testers needed all the encouragement they could get.

  For a typical game, they spent about thirty thousand cumulative hours playing through the action and checking for bugs. The process could start months before a game's release. The game testers took out their stress by inventing demonic ways to test the PS2 hardware. Once, they chucked the console out their third-floor window. Another time, they blasted it for hours with a hair dryer. Then they hurled it into a freezer ,where it iced over for a weekend. Such lengths were necessary, given the increased demands—and creativity—of players. “The gamers today are highly intelligent and are absolutely going to take your game apart,” King told a reporter one day, “and they will savage you. That makes our job harder.”

  Around the office, the violence, or threats of violence, had become a running joke. When asked to describe his ultimate video game, Sam quipped, “It'd be a fully networked online world, so that I could drive over to Terry's house and smash the shit out of it and get out of there!”

  Even celebrities would not be spared Rockstar's wrath. After word circulated that Liotta was bitching about being underpaid for the game, Sam bristled. “It's like, be cool,” he later told a reporter from Edge magazine. “You know? I hate that—it's so cheesy. Like he's saying, ‘Next time I'm really going to pin it to them.' Well, how about we just killed off your character? So he doesn't exist—there is no next time. That's how we handle that.”

  14

  Rampages

  RAMPAGE #28

  Palm trees, blue skies, golf courses. Jack Thompson had every reason to feel sunny as he drove his son to school one morning in October 2002. Yet as he pulled up to his boy's school and watched him run into the building, he felt his stomach twist. Images flashed through his mind. Kids with guns. Blood. Tiny bodies. Paducah. Columbine. And now the Beltway sniper.

  During the last few weeks, an unknown sniper had randomly shot ten people dead in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The country roiled in fear and horror as reports played out on national TV and the Internet. Everyone was looking for a reason behind this most unreasonable act of violence. Once again, Thompson had his reason ready to serve: video games.

  Stern and narrow-eyed, he had grown more and more adept at evangelizing the gospel against violent games. While the snipers rampaged, Thompson made the rounds of the biggest shows on TV. On October 11, he appeared again with Matt Lauer on the Today Show, positing his theory that the sniper had been trained on video games. “The one-shot methodology is indicative of a video game,” he said. Three days later he was on CNN, arguing that investigators who had been seeking leads in the military community should instead be looking at gamers. “The haystack that this twisted needle might be in may indeed be the video game community,” he warned.

  On October 22, he found a captive audience in Phil Donahue. “So you've really become an expert on video games, haven't you?” Donahue asked.

  “Well, I'm afraid I have,” Thompson replied stoically. “And I'm a father of a ten-year-old. Every day I drop him off, I know there's a possibility that there might be some sociopath who has trained on these games.”

  After the snipers were caught, news broke that the fifteen-year-old shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had in fact, according to one witness, trained on video games such as Halo. “Malvo liked playing in the sniper mode, and John Muhammad would coach Malvo on how to shoot in the sniper mode,” the witness said. He added, “Malvo was really into the game and would often get angry while playing it.”

  Back at his home, Thompson quickly fired off a press release. “It is time for this greedy industry to pay for its mayhem,” he wrote. Thompson's battle was all the easier to wage because he lacked one obvious opponent: the game makers. Back in Washington, Doug Lowenstein of the Interactive Digital Software Association watched Thompson's campaign in horror but rarely went on the air to respond. “I got criticism for not going on every show Jack Thompson was on,” Lowenstein later said. Secretly, however, he was playing a meta-game against Thompson on his own. “I was always managing a calculus,” he recalled.

  The stakes of this culture war, he knew, were rising, despite the dismissal of Thompson's Paducah suit and the death of Senator Baca's “Protect Children from Video Game Sex and Violence Act.” In St. Louis, an ordinance to ban the sale of violent games to anyone under eighteen succeeded in withstanding the industry's argument that it defied the First Amendment. Senior U.S. district judge Stephen Limbaugh ruled that games did not constitute speech and therefore didn't deserve such protection.

  Lowenstein feared that engaging Thompson would only make things worse and would give him the ammo he was seeking for future legal actions. “I knew what he wanted me to do was be in a forum where he could have me say something and slap a lawsuit,” Lowenstein said. So Lowenstein chose to sit back and watch. He wasn't the only game executive who remained silent. “No one in the industry wanted to be a point person or target,” Lowenstein said.

  As a result, Thompson was left to speak out, unopposed, and had a profound impact on shaping popular opinion about video games. Elevated by the press and bolstered by his predictions, Thompson quickly found a new target of his own: Grand Theft Auto. It happened during a packed press conference in Washington. David Walsh, the head of the National Institute on Media and the Family, was joined by senators Lieberman and Kohl to present the annual Video Game Report Card. This had not been a good year for the industry, they said—and cut to a tape. On the screen, footage of a game appeared: a car bobbing up and down. A prostitute walking out of the vehicle, only to get beaten to death with a bat and left in a bloody pile. Vice City.

  “Women are the new target of choice in the most violent video games,” Lieberman said. “This relatively small but highly popular minority [of games] is not pushing the envelope, they are shooting, torturing and napalming it beyond all recognition and beyond all decency.”

  “These games are phenomenally popular with kids,” added Walsh. “Anyone who says that the only people playing these kinds of games are adults are not talking with kids. By and large, parents are very uninformed. . . . What do we think Grand Theft Auto: Vice City teaches our fourteen-year-olds?”

  GTA enraged Thompson. The sex. The violence. And being set in a fictional Miami, his hometown, no less. How dare they peddle this filth to children? He knew just how he would fire back with the help of his own son. One day, he went up to his son, Johnny, and asked him for a favor. He had a suspicion that the Best Buy chain, among others, was selling this game to kids despite the M-rating, and he wanted to prove it. “It would be useful at this point, Johnny,” he said, “to be able to say whether or not Best Buy, which claims to be the most reasonable on this issue, is selling it.”

  Thompson drove to the Best Buy parking lot and handed Johnny $60 to buy the game. He gripped his video camera and told his son he'd be waiting outside. Thompson watched Johnny head into the store as he positioned himself outside the glass door. He palmed his camera and stared through the viewfinder, thumb hovering over the record button. He waited, watching the people come and go by the registers, checking out in the lines to head back into the Miami heat. Waited until he saw his little boy walk up to the clerk with the black plastic case in hand.

  Thompson hit record, zoomed in, and could see it: the lower case Grand Theft Auto logo and the pink neon subtitle, Vice City. He crouched lower, just at the right angle to film the transaction. He could feel his throat constrict and heart race as his son handed over the game. The clerk eyed the boy. Then he took his money and sold him the game. Busted! “Everyone knows what's in this game, and it's the sexual conte
nt that gets them in trouble,” Thompson told Johnny.

  Using this evidence, he could go after the retailers for illegally selling sexual content to minors. He could use the tape to prove their negligence. Thompson examined the video game box in his hand. The cover was broken into frames like a comic book—flaming cars, a girl in a pink bikini, a black guy with a big gold chain and a gun. He eyed the tiny little logo in the bottom-right corner, the yellow square with the letter R and the star. Rockstar Games? Get ready to be Jacked.

  CHEESE BALL! Cheese ball! Cheese ball!

  Another year, another cheese ball–eating contest at Radio Mexico for the players at Rockstar Games. Tequila poured. Bets flew. Vomit buckets spilled. In what was also now an annual tradition, valued employees received a new company jacket. This time it was a military green bomber jacket, stitched with the word Rockstar on the front and the company's crest (including the logo and a set of brass knuckles) on the back. Surrounding the crest was the phrase, in Latin, “to pulverize our enemies.”