Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Lowenstein greeted the demo of San Andreas with a certain detachment. This was never his cup of tea, as he put it, but it didn't matter. He knew the guys were pushing the medium and deserved his protection and defense. Onscreen, he watched as the nimble young black man in jeans pulled a helpless driver from a car and hurled her to the ground. As CJ sped off past the dilapidated crack houses and bodegas of this fictional Los Angeles, Lowenstein didn't think there was anything unique or newly concerning about the violence. Yet he had a whole new worry in mind.

  He feared the potential impact of San Andreas, especially after the protest over the Haitians in Vice City. Rockstar, he thought, might be opening up new lines of political attacks by, as he put it, “profiling minorities in the worst possible light by focusing on gang warfare in Los Angeles.” He felt particularly concerned about the possible response of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members he had watched take a strong First Amendment defense when white politicians were attacking gangster rap. “This is the last thing we need,” he thought.

  Lowenstein resented what he thought was Rockstar's tendency to cut and run whenever the shit hit the fan—and then leave him there to clean it up for the industry. This time, they owed him, he figured. “I like to think that after I took a lot of hits and bullets on GTA III, they saw I wasn't throwing them overboard,” Lowenstein later said. “I hoped they felt I was on their side and felt I was not trying to do anything to compromise their artistic freedom.”

  He told them his opinion. “Listen, you guys gotta get out in front of this,” he said. “This is going to be very controversial, and it makes our job that much more difficult if we don't have the company making the game trying to defuse the controversy.” Lowenstein suggested that before the game's release, they take the time to prepare key leaders in the Congressional Black Caucus.

  To his relief, Rockstar and Take-Two were receptive. They brought in consultants to, as a Rockstar publicist later put it, “mature our understanding of the controversy issue,” so that they would “know how to respond when the heat came.” As Sam returned to the production of San Andreas, he had something hotter than ever in mind for the world's most notorious video game: sex.

  18

  Sex in San Andreas

  THE DATE

  On a good date, you earn 5% Girlfriend Progress. Add Flowers and a kiss to bump that figure up two percentage points. You can kiss and give gifts as much as you like on a single date, but they won't help beyond the first attempt. Girlfriend Progress (displayed in percentages) can be viewed in the “Achievements” option under “stats” in the Pause Menu.

  It's always weird going back to the old neighborhood, but it sure feels strange the morning of Carl Johnson's return.

  Under a blue sky, he pedals his yellow BMX bike down the familiar city streets, past the Ideal Homies Store with its guns and jeans, past the yellow cabs and the vintage vans, past the brothers on the corner in their baggy pants, over the narrow bridge and around the bend by the tall chick in the thigh-high stockings and the halter top, down Grove Street along the small rundown houses behind chain-link fences, garbage outside and muscle cars in the driveway, until he comes to a stop outside a brown dilapidated home with palmettos shooting through the broken slats of a wooden fence outside. “Home,” CJ says to himself, “or at least it was before I fucked everything up.”

  The moment he opens the paint-chipped front door and steps inside, he feels off-balance. He eyes the empty living room with fading blue wallpaper. The stairs leading up to his old bedroom. Worse, the home has been vandalized. Precious mementos scattered. He staggers dizzily, mouth agape, as he reaches for the framed photo of his dead mother on the floor. He props the photo gently up on a table, then pulls up a chair and stares at her face, head in hands.

  This is the opening mission of GTA: San Andreas, and the gamers at Rockstar were watching CJ arrive at his home in Los Santos. With the staff growing, they had moved to a bigger office at 622 Broadway with foosball tables and arcade machines, but there was little time to play. By the middle of 2004, they were busy testing San Andreas, scouring for bugs in the software, then fixing the art and the code. As the cinematic sequence played, they found something new in the pixilated world—emotion. It was a feeling, something real and strange and evocative of the films they'd loved, something few would associate with GTA or video games at all: tenderness.

  As Khonsari, the director of this and other cut-scenes in the game, watched CJ mourn, he felt particularly moved. For years, he had been making films in which he tried to evoke emotions from viewers, and now they were bringing this power to video games. He realized that video games might go even further than films, because of how they cast and immersed the player in the action firsthand.

  Sam couldn't agree more. For San Andreas, he wanted to immerse players in their characters more than ever before. Rockstar achieved this in a most unexpected way—by transforming GTA into a kind of role-playing game, the genre Sam had disparaged for so long. RPGs, which dated back to Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper games, were built on personalization. Players chose their own characters at the onset—say, wizards or warriors—and assigned levels of intelligence and strength that could be augmented throughout the game experience. Although most common in fantasy RPGs, customization had become more fashionable in the industry, with even sports titles hyping their ability to let players create their own likenesses in the game.

  Once again, Rockstar's innovation was to bring such features into an open and contemporarily realistic world. In San Andreas, players could buy a choice of tattoos and haircuts (afros and Jheri curls). They could change their bodies, eating pizza and burgers to get fat or salads to stay lean. They could go to the gym and pump iron to get ripped. The more they drove their vehicles, the higher their stats and skills would soar. San Andreas even included dating, letting the player win the hearts of girlfriends with flowers and kisses. Sam thought the leisure time activities were a way to further connect a player with the game and personalize the experience, but he worried that the role-playing

  elements might prove too geeky for GTA's hardcore fans. “What are we doing here?” he wondered. “We've made GTA uber-nerdy in a way with this stuff—will people get it?”

  Gamers had better. With more than 32 million GTAs already sold, the shareholders of Take-Two wanted another hit. As Sam said in the press release announcing the game in March 2004, “We have put an enormous amount of pressure on ourselves to ensure we do everything possible to exceed people's expectations.”

  They decided on one more powerful way to blow gamers away: with sex. Although violence had long been an acceptable, if not controversial, part of games, sex remained taboo. Early computer games such as Custer's Revenge and Leisure Suit Larry toyed with bawdy (and dumb) soft porn, like bad jokes from episodes of Benny Hill. Later, hits such as the cheeky shooter Duke Nukem and even Rockstar's own Vice City put strippers in the action.

  Because games were still thought of as a children's toy, however, M-rated games couldn't get away with the kind of content one would see in an R-rated film. Nudity would likely earn a game the Adults Only rating, banning it from mainstream retail—and costing millions in losses. This infuriated Rockstar, but Sam wasn't going to sit idle anymore.

  Early Wednesday morning, July 14, 2004, he fired off an e-mail to Jennifer Kolbe, the director of operations for Rockstar, copying Donovan and Dan:

  [J]ennifer, how are we going to handle the approval of certain bits of content in sa [San Andreas], we are keen to include new functionality and interaction in line with the ‘vibe' of the game. to this end, in addition to the violence and bad language, we want to include sexual content, which I understand is questionable to certain people, but pretty natural (more than violence), when you think about it and consider the fact that the game is intended for adults. Here are some examples of content that will be displayed graphically:

  blowjobs

  full sex (multiple positions)

  dildo se
x (including being able to kills [sic] someone with a dildo)

  whipping (being whipped)

  masturbation (one of the characters is compulsive; this MUST be kept)

  all of these items are displayed both through cutsecnes [sic] and in-game. I know this is a tricky area but I want to find a way for this work; the concept of a glorified shop (walmart) telling us what we can/can't put in our game is just unacceptable on so many levels. All of this material is perfectly reasonable for an adult (of course it is!), so we need to push to continue to have our medium accepted and respected as a mainstream entertainment platform, we have always been about pushing the boundaries; we cannot stop here. . . . how do we proceed with this? we really don't want to cut these areas. please advise.

  Kolbe wasn't encouraging. “There are clearly two issues I need to deal with,” she replied. “1. The ESRB and how far we can push the content envelope before the game turns from a Mature to an AO, which would traditionally eliminate us from about 80% of our distribution channels (in all likelihood, the fact that we are talking San Andreas would probably reduce the number to about 60%). What I know for certain is that any type of sexualized violence immediately brings a game over from a M to an AO and based on this, out of all the content you have listed below the only one that would seem likely to fall into this category would be killing someone with a dildo, as ridiculous as that sounds. I will do some checking and find out how this line has been drawn historically and where we can push it.”

  That wasn't all. “Second issue,” she wrote, “is with retail and how to raise the level of content and still stay within the boundaries, both vague and clear, that have been set by the more conservative retailers, within the m category, there is a line we can cross that will preclude us from being carried in places like wal-mart and best buy; both have gone on the record to say that a game featuring full frontal nudity is a no-go but as we with Vice City and the candy suxxx scenes, there is a level of content that is allowable depending on its context and depiction within the game. as with everything in the Grand Theft Auto series, we have always argued that everything is done within the context of the storyline and I think the same has to be said here.

  “In short order, I need to do A LOT of research on the games that currently exist in the AO category so that I can put together a cohesive list of boundary crossing content as a reference for the existing content in San Andreas. If the AO games are as hardcore and gratuitous as I have heard they are, then a strong case can be made for the fact that we are still within Mature territory because while the sexual content in San Andreas is part of the storyline, it certainly isn't the whole game.”

  Sam's eyes ran over her last sentence, the requisite throwing of the bone. Yes, she heard him. “The directive here is very clear,” she had written, “we need to push the boundaries as hard as we can so that the integrity of the game is not compromised but still maintain our level of distribution so that sales are not affected.” Sometimes the hypocrisy of Sam's adopted homeland was mind-numbing. Sam would marvel at states such as Utah and the reign of the Mormons. Had the game industry come to this? Were they living in a virtual Utah?

  “We need to move VERY fast,” Sam replied to Kolbe. “There is nothing planned than an adult (M-rated) can't handle. Even if it is an AO (which it shouldn't be), why should this reduce our distribution so much. We have to have retail tell us what games to make? That's nonsense. Sim-Moorman (sp?) is our new idea. Freedom of speech? Isn't that how the country is justifying the invasion of Iraq and other places? We must expose such flagrant hypocrisy. Boundaries need to be stretched. This is key. Ultimately it looks nothing like the real world, so if movies do it, which are obviously more realistic, it just doesn't make sense if we can't.”

  Donovan spent weeks researching Sam's requests, going over the sex scenes in the game, and scouring the rules around the world for just what could and couldn't make it in. Sam tried his best to reassure the developers in Scotland. “As you know, sex is more of an issue than murder [in the United States],” he wrote in an e-mail to Rockstar North, “. . . so we're going to have to be as smart as possible. We're definitely going to have to do a separate version for Wal-Mart. Therefore whatever content we do agree on needs to be easily removable. . . . We'll do whatever we can to keep this stuff in. It's going to be tough but we love a good battle.”

  PHIL HARRISON cut through London one summer morning on his way to work. Now senior vice president of product development at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, he had become one of the most iconic stars on the PlayStation team. Tall, bald, and incisive, he was the kind of game executive whom gamers readily called one of their own. Like Sam, he shared the passion to make games mass market. With the success of GTA, he was now on a new mission—to make games not only for adults, but for the entire family, too.

  The answer was the EyeToy, a motion-sensing camera that would let players interact with games without the use of a controller. All they had to do was wave their hands. In one game, bubbles appeared to line the TV screen, and kids competed to wipe them off simply by waving their hands in the air. “It was something the whole family could play,” Harrison said. “We got quickly into the idea of removing the game controller from the equation. It was a huge boost to people. If you hand a controller to a nongamer, it's like you've handed them a live grenade.”

  Released a year earlier, in the summer of 2003, the EyeToy sold more than 2.5 million copies by year's end. Other family-friendly games such as SingStar (a karaoke game) helped expand the market even more. For Harrison, it represented a triumph—proof that between GTA and the EyeToy, there would be games for everyone. When his sister phoned him on the way to work, she could have been doing it to congratulate him, but she wasn't. “Have you read the Daily Mail this morning?” she asked.

  “I don't read the fucking Daily Mail,” he quipped.

  “I think you ought to read it. Go buy a copy.”

  Harrison saw the headline: “Murder By PlayStation.” Oh shit, he thought. The story concerned a seventeen-year-old boy, Warren Leblanc, who had recently confessed to murdering his fourteen-year-old friend, Stefan Pakeerah, with a claw hammer and a knife. Now Pakeerah's mother was speaking out. She had heard through the boys' friends that the two were obsessed with playing a video game, Manhunt, and now she blamed it for the crime. “This game should be banned,” she told the Daily Mail. “It promotes violence for violence's sake and corrupts young minds. . . . We owe it to Stefan's memory to take on those people who have succeeded in getting this game marketed.”

  Since its release in November 2003, Manhunt had already created a storm in the game press over its chilling but impeccably rendered violence. A barbed-wire garrote was sent out to reviewers of the game. Yet reading this story made Harrison stop in his tracks. He had seen the hamster of video game violence run through the press for years, but this story marked a new era in England. This wasn't a Max Clifford ploy. This was a real mother of a real dead boy. Harrison felt terrible for the family but furious that games were blamed. “There was a segment of the potential audience for games who would believe this headline,” he later said.

  The Manhunt controversy only exploded from there, as the story spread around the world. The game—already banned in New Zealand—got pulled from stores of the United Kingdom's largest retailer, Dixons. Before long, the United Kingdom's own answer to Jack Thompson, Leicester East member of Parliament Keith Vaz, took action. During a question session with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Vaz called for protective measures—despite the fact that Manhunt had been already rated for eighteen-year-olds and over. “This is not about adult censorship,” he said, “it is the protection of young children and young people.”

  Amid all the debate, however, there was one group conspicuously missing—Rockstar. Instead of speaking out, Donovan worked behind the scenes with Simon Harvey, a spokesperson for the British game industry, to provide any response. Harvey said in his statement, “Simply being in someone's possession does not a
nd should not lead to the conclusion that a game is responsible for these tragic events.”

  Harrison struggled to move forward with his plan to bring games to families in the face of this controversy. Like Lowenstein in the United States, he couldn't help feeling that when the shit hit the fan, the bad boys of gaming lacked the courage to take a stand. “I was frustrated that nobody from Rockstar ever went on the record,” he recalled. “They just went radio silent.”

  WHILE THE CONTROVERSY over Manhunt grew back in their home country, Sam and the guys at Rockstar were more concerned with San Andreas—and the results of Donovan's research into how far they could push the sexual content in the game. The findings weren't encouraging.

  “Unfortunately, here is the situation,” Donovan wrote in an e-mail to Sam on August 16, 2004, and proceeded to list the necessary changes.

  “Hooker in car blow job—we need to show much less of the critical mouth to penis area.

  “Hooker Stand Up Blow Job—this needs to be removed or implied.

  “Sex with girlfriend—essentially this is all beyond the bounds of M and 18 ratings, and needs to be removed or implied.