Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  For Fernandez, Sam was more bark without bite. He told Pope how much Sam's passion inspired him, how Sam gave him this feeling he could do anything. To Fernandez, the rampages were part of Sam's

  overarching obsession with quality. “That's the only reason the games are so good,” he once said. Anyone who got on Sam's case for his outbursts was missing the point. “Make great games, forget about the bullshit, and we'll triumph, that's his philosophy,” Fernandez said. “It's the ideal way any company should be run.”

  Pope wouldn't listen. “When the novelty of working for a cool company in SoHo in a loft wears off, then it's all downhill from there,” he said. “And then they keep you around with money or little trinkets.” What was happening? he wondered. To their games? To Sam? Massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft were all the rage, and Pope was among those at the office who wanted Rockstar to take a shot at the genre. Yet whenever Pope brought it up, he just heard Sam mutter derisively about orcs and elves.

  Pope had had enough. One day he stormed into Sam's office. His boss had taken up yoga, and Pope had sometimes seen him doing handstands in the back. Maybe Pope was overreacting. “I'm not happy here,” Pope said.

  “Why?” he recalled Sam replying.

  “There's too much being asked of us. We were never given a break. It was one thing to go right into Vice City, but then we went straight into San Andreas.”

  “It's hard. We have to keep grinding. We're going to lose our edge if we don't keep this up.”

  “You've kind of already lost touch.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You're not playing games anymore. You're off in your office making decisions.”

  “I'm still involved! Who are you to tell me?”

  “I'm not the only one who feels this way.”

  SAM SAW a rubber band on the floor. Alone. Discarded. Coiled. And he just had to stop everything to pick it up. Shove it in his pocket like Mario collecting brightly colored coins. It was a habit that Fernandez had been observing for a while: Sam randomly picking up rubber bands. When Fernandez asked him about this, Sam told him it was just a good luck superstition. Fernandez took it as something else, an example of how granularly aware Sam was of the details around him—even if that obsession with detail had sometimes been lost on others.

  But the passion was clearly paying off. Now thirty-two, he was living his Rockstar dreams. His games were bringing pleasure to millions of people around the world. Take-Two had $1 billion in revenues after Vice City, and they were only set for more.

  He was proving the old skeptics wrong. “You go out here, and people were like ‘What are you talking about? How can you say games are cool?'” Sam recalled. “That whole sort of teenager in the bedroom with the bottle-top specs, that hung around the game industry neck like a fucking albatross.” Yet now, thanks in large part to Rockstar, games were growing up, along with their fans. “People now accept it is a new medium,” he said. “It's something that can be appreciated. It's not just something reserved for weirdos.”

  It was all the more reason, then, that he seemed shocked to hear a rumor that Pope was quitting. Sam approached him and said, “I'm hearing you're going to leave.”

  “Yeah, I'm really unhappy,” Pope said. But Pope wasn't going alone. He and Fernandez had decided to start their own company, along with some other employees on staff. They even had their own idea for a title, inspired by their time at Rockstar. Players would have to battle a cult leader similar to David Koresh. “Instead of carjacking,” Pope said, “it'll be mind jacking!” Their working title, Whacko. And the name of their start-up would be the biggest fuck-you of all to Rockstar: Cashmere Games.

  Despite Fernandez's deep admiration for Sam, he felt bullish enough to think he and Pope could replicate Rockstar's success on their own. Leaving the mentor and friend who inspired him so much wouldn't be easy. As Pope said, “They don't take you leaving kindly, they treat it like the mob, like you abandoned the family.” Fernandez felt his heart sink, his stomach twist, knowing there was no turning back. “My biggest regret is that Sam's such an influential guy,” Fernandez later said. “It's the worst part of leaving Rockstar. Maybe that's the decision you have to make.”

  Sam seemed devastated by the news, so much so that he went to Fernandez's apartment to plead with him to stay. “I'm asking you one more time,” Sam told him, “are you leaving or staying?”

  “I'm leaving,” Fernandez said.

  Sam took one last look at him, then turned and walked away.

  This game was over.

  16

  Grand Death Auto

  WANTED LEVEL

  The bullets came from nowhere, and there was plenty of nowhere in Newport, Tennessee. An hour east of Knoxville, the country town of 7,200 was little more than a pit stop on the way to nearby attractions such as Dolly Parton's Dollywood theme park and the Life of Christ Experience in 3-D. Like most people who make it to these parts, Aaron Hamel and his cousin Denise “Dee Dee” Deneau were just passing through. Quickly.

  It was around 8 p.m. on June 25, 2003, and the sun was still shining at the end of what Hamel called “a perfect day.” The two were driving back to Knoxville in his red Toyota truck after hiking in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Hamel, a forty-five-year-old registered nurse and nature lover, had recently relocated from Ontario, dreaming of buying a log cabin in the woods. The previous day, he had gotten a callback from a juvenile detention facility where he hoped to work. “I think I could make a difference and help these kids,” he told his cousin during their hike.

  Driving among the semis on Interstate 40, Hamel admired the rolling hillside. “Oh, Dee Dee,” he said, “look at the beautiful flowers—” As Deneau would later recall, Hamel didn't have time to finish the word before the window shattered. Blood and broken glass sprayed Deneau's lap. With blood pouring from Hamel's head, their truck sped out of control over the median into oncoming traffic and smashed into a guardrail.

  Coming up behind them in a white Mazda west on I-40, a tourist from Roanoke, Virginia, nineteen-year-old Kim Bede, and her boyfriend Marc Hickman heard the crash. They assumed someone had blown out a tire. Another bullet proved them wrong. It pierced the passenger side of their car, shattering Bede's hip. Then the shots stopped, and Newport fell quiet again.

  When the cops arrived, Hamel was dead. Bede was gushing blood, fragments of bullets in her spine. The woods under the faded billboards along the highway were shrouded in darkness. As word spread around the small town, investigators scoured the brush with spotlights and heat-seeking equipment, looking for a trace of what they feared might be a replay of the Beltway snipers. “We don't know if it was road rage, a sniper, or what,” a deputy told reporters that night.

  It didn't take long to find the answer. Lurking anxiously in the bushes was a lanky, quiet fifteen-year-old named William Buckner, with his short, hyperactive thirteen-year-old stepbrother, Josh. The two had been stepbrothers for only a brief while but had instantly bonded after growing up in unstable families. They had no prior records, had clean slates at school, and seemingly had no reason to have fired the deadly shots. Yet after breaking down in tears and confessing to the crime, the boys volunteered a reason of their own: Grand Theft Auto III.

  During Will's deposition, he revealed that he had been playing the game at home. When asked whether he thought the game “had some impact on you related to this shooting,” Will said, “in some way, yes.”

  “How so?”

  “I think it gave us the idea in a way.”

  After word of the GTA connection hit the press, the phone in the Buckner home rang. Donna, Will's mother, answered. “My name's Jack Thompson,” the caller said, “and there might be an explanation for why your boys did this.”

  NEWS OF THE Buckner shootings had come at a busy time for Thompson. After filming his son on a sting buying Vice City, his obsession with GTA rivaled Sam's. Since launching his campaign against the game industry, Thompson had made
more than fifty television appearances on all of the biggest shows, including seven visits to the Today Show alone.

  As well as Sam played to the gamers, Thompson played to the emotions of the general public. No matter how much people believed in protecting the First Amendment, something inside them couldn't rule out the possibility that violent games might be harming their kids. Despite scientists and researchers debating what, if any, impact games had on aggression, Thompson cited studies that effectively stoked fears. “There has been a wealth of research to show that children's brains process these video games in a different way from adults',” he said. “They cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality, so they play these games and then think if they do the same thing in reality, it's okay, there will be no consequences.”

  His campaign was working. Across the world, GTA was being linked with more crimes. In Oakland, a gang called the Nut Cases made waves for allegedly emulating the game. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, “They got high and played video games during the day, the young men later told police. Their favorite was one called Grand Theft Auto III, in which players win points for committing violent crimes. When darkness fell, they told investigators, they did it for real on the streets of Oakland.”

  Thompson cited the recent case of Dustin Lynch, a fifteen-year-old boy from his home state of Ohio who had stabbed and bludgeoned a girl to death just weeks after Vice City's release. Thompson learned that Lynch had been playing GTA prior to the killings, and he convinced the girl's father to sue Rockstar. “We're not arguing the game was the sole cause of [the] murder,” Thompson said. “The game had something to do with it.”

  Though the threat of a lawsuit fizzled, Thompson spread his gospel from newspapers to an appearance on Good Morning America. It was an effective strategy: filing a suit was enough to get him press—perhaps his most effective weapon at shaping the public's perception of video games. Whether he won or lost a case or saw it dismissed didn't matter. With Rockstar and the game industry all but silent, he waged his war virtually unopposed.

  “I'm a father and a Christian and a lawyer, and I love the kind of world I grew up in during the fifties, where we shot baskets, not people,” Thompson told Philadelphia Weekly. “But I'm not trying to take away the constitutional right of adults to view or consume this material no matter how objectionable I might find it personally. I'm trying to stop them from marketing this filth to minors.”

  The more Thompson battled, the more difficult the struggle became for Lowenstein, the game industry's spokesperson. Despite GTA's “M For Mature” rating, a recent survey by the Gallup Organization of 517 teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, found that 60 percent had played a GTA game. Still reeling from the debate over Columbine and the threat of federal legislation over the marketing of violent games, Lowenstein tried to steer away from Thompson's rhetoric. “I have no doubt that Mr. Thompson is quite passionate and committed to his cause,” he said. “We're just as committed to ours.”

  In addition to standing by the industry's rating system, he cited a recent FTC study that found that parents were the ones purchasing games, including M-rated ones, for kids more than 80 percent of the time. Lowenstein urged parents to pay more attention to what they were giving their kids. “If a twelve-year-old has Grand Theft Auto,” he said, “chances are he got it from Mom and Dad.”

  Lowenstein felt bolstered by a recent ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against St. Louis County's attempt to ban violent game sales to kids. “If the First Amendment is versatile enough to shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll,” the court ruled, “. . . we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories and narrative present in video games are not entitled to similar protection.”

  Yet this wasn't swaying the skeptics. In April 2003, the governor of Washington proposed to ban the sale of violent games to minors. Lowenstein felt increasingly frustrated with his meetings on the Hill and how routinely politicians would sacrifice the First Amendment in the name of protecting children. “I know this is a bad bill,” he recalled being told by one governor, “but I have to sign it.”

  Where were the game developers to fight back? “Rockstar and all the other ones had their heads in the sand,” Lowenstein said. The developers suffered from a “victim mentality for being singled out,” he went on. “The problem was the industry wasn't willing to understand the fundamental instincts of parents to care about their children.”

  While many gamers shrugged Thompson off as a clown, they failed to realize the extent to which he was influencing the public conversation on video games. “He used media effectively, locally and nationally, and inspired politicians to take up his cause and push legislative remedies that we're fighting,” Lowenstein later said. “To give the devil his due, if there was no Jack Thompson, there would have been far fewer bills we'd be dealing with.”

  Thompson had just begun. On October 20, 2003, he filed a $246 million lawsuit on behalf of the Buckners' victims against Sony Computer Entertainment America, for marketing GTA III; Wal-Mart, for selling it; and Rockstar, for creating and publishing it. “If they're going to continue to market adult-rated games to children with these horrific consequences,” Thompson told the press, “then we're going to take their blood money from them and send a message to their boards that they have to stop this practice or there will be other suits on behalf of other people killed by these games.”

  “I DIDN'T REALIZE the highway was this close,” said Wayne Buckner, Josh's father and Will's stepfather, as he walked to the spot on the hill where his boys had shot at the cars that night. He was surrounded by trees and tall brush as the cars and the trucks sped by on I-40 below. Wayne was a tall, gray-haired fifty-six-year-old in a golf-course vest, blue jeans, and a baseball cap. “I saw this area in the police diagram,” he said, making his way tentatively around the brush, “but this is the first time I've come here. My wife doesn't want to know where this spot is.”

  In his mind's eye, Wayne had pictured the boys standing much farther away from the road, so far that their bullets would not have easily hit the cars. As we looked down at the highway, though, we were close enough to make out the passengers behind the windows. Wayne's eyes welled up. “It's pretty sad,” he said. The path in the weeds that Will and Josh cut with machetes was still discernible. A deflated inner tube they once used to ride down the nearby creek rested against a tree. Pigeons roosted in a rickety liquor billboard a dozen feet away.

  It was the birds that first took the blame after the boys were caught that night. Josh told Wayne that they had been shooting at the pigeons and must have accidentally hit the cars in the process. “He said the birds always fly off this billboard toward the interstate,” recalled Wayne. When the birds suddenly abandoned their roost above us, however, not a single one flew toward the road. “I really wanted to believe him,” Wayne said.

  The Buckners lived in a split-level brick house on the side of a golf course. The golf cart Will and Josh used to ride sat near the garage, where a basketball net hung. In the backyard, the yapping dogs now had free rein in the impressive treehouse Wayne had built for the kids. Inside the living room, Wayne's wife, Donna, lit a cigarette. A petite and pretty thirty-seven-year-old in a powder-blue sweater, she had dropped to a painfully thin eighty-five pounds since the incident. “I just can't get my appetite back,” she said. Wayne excused himself to hit the greens. “He plays too much golf,” Donna grumbled quietly.

  Since the shooting, Wayne and Donna had struggled to survive and make sense of this most senseless of acts. Though their sons were found to be reckless, not murderous, that hadn't made their soul-searching any easier. Ultimately, that search led them to one answer: Grand Theft Auto III. “Will and Josh wouldn't have done this if they hadn't been playing that game,” Donna said, as she showed a visitor family photos. “They aren't serial killers. They're good boys.”

&nbs
p; Though taken during better times, the shots didn't exactly convey adolescent bliss. In one, Josh and Will sat expressionlessly on either end of a black futon facing a giant television screen. Josh, a small, wiry kid with uneven sandy blond bangs and a spotty complexion, leaned against an 8-ball pillow in a yellow Fort Lauderdale Surf Sport T-shirt. The stoic look on Will—who was wearing baggy tan shorts, a yellow Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned over a black Nike tee, a dog-tag necklace, and a half-dozen bracelets on his arm—revealed, if anything, a desire for his mother to hurry up and shoot already.

  In a picture taken on a family trip to the beach, Will stood awkwardly in a blue T-shirt and long blue shorts, bony white arms crossed around his chest, next to Josh in a bright red shirt, arms stiffly down, staring forward; Wayne and Donna were clear across the frame. No one was touching. “I don't see how we could ever be a family again after this,” Donna said, as she sparked another cigarette. When asked how much they felt like a family before the shooting, she exhaled and said, “Somewhat.”