Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Thompson had written to Clinton soon after her speech, urging her to join his fight. “I am a Republican; you are a Democrat,” he wrote. “As you know, this is not a partisan issue. . . . Senator, I believe the time has come for the United States Congress to prohibit the sale of mature-rated video games to children. I respectfully urge you to author a bill toward that end.” More Columbines, he warned her, were coming.

  Now with Clinton calling for his help, he jumped to duty, schooling her on the scourge of GTA. Emboldened, he fired off an open letter to the members of the Entertainment Software Association, including Take-Two and Sony, lauding her. “Millions of American parents should be thankful to the Senator for striking back against what can be fairly called ‘Grand Theft Innocence' at the expense of our children by only some within your industry,” he wrote.

  Clinton sent a letter apprising the chair of the Federal Trade Commission of the ESRB investigation into Hot Coffee. “Alarmingly, it seems that no one yet knows the source of this content,” she wrote. “We should all be deeply disturbed that a game which now permits the simulation of lewd sexual acts in an interactive format with highly realistic graphics has fallen into the hands of young people across the country.”

  Lieberman called for an independent investigation to look further into the scandal.

  Clinton introduced legislation to ban the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to children—with a $5,000 penalty for retailers who do so. “The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it's making the difficult job of being a parent even harder,” Clinton later said. “I am announcing these measures today because I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.”

  Vance raced to Washington to meet with Clinton and encouraged her to use this moment to educate the public about the ratings system. When Vance arrived, she was told she'd have ten minutes. She earnestly and deftly went through her presentation, handing Clinton brochures on the ratings system, the efforts of the ESRB. Clinton remained silent until the end, when she leaned back and said, “I just want to protect kids.” Then she got up and left. The meeting was over.

  Vance felt stunned. “For her to put up a wall was surprising,” she recalled. “Considering her intellectual abilities, that was disappointing.” Yet Vance felt that the gamers were as much to blame. “Politically, it's such an expedient issue that they don't get negative push-back from constituents,” Vance added and took the gamers to task. “The consumers of video games have not been vocal about these shenanigans,” she said. “They're not calling up senators to say stop with this nonsense.”

  With Clinton's call for legislation, Walsh and Thompson pushed to have Take-Two reveal the truth about Hot Coffee, once and for all. “I challenge Take-Two, just tell us: is it on the disc or not?” Walsh told the press.Within hours, Walsh's phone rang. The caller wouldn't identify himself but said he worked in the game industry and had inside information on Hot Coffee. “Dr. Walsh,” the mysterious person said, “I can guarantee that it is on the disc.”

  Walsh felt as if he were suddenly in a spy movie; his heart pounded long after the mysterious caller hung up. With this tip, he began to scour Minneapolis for a computer expert to crack the code. Finally, he reached a hacker who said he was a concerned parent and willing to help. “This is what you do,” the hacker told him, “reverse-engineer it.”

  “I don't even know what that means!” Walsh said.

  The hacker said he'd do the job for $2,000. Walsh agreed. Two days later, the hacker called back. “It's on the disc,” he said.

  Walsh knew the ESRB was conducting an investigation of its own, and he was eager to get the news out immediately, but his lawyer advised him against it. “Don't do it,” his attorney said. “You're playing with dynamite. You have to be absolutely certain. You can't take the word of an anonymous tipster. You need a second independent verification, then I could advise you to go public.”

  Walsh hung up, flustered. He couldn't afford to pay another hacker, so he thought of a less expensive alternative: the Geek Squad, the tech supporters for hire at Best Buy.

  Walsh figured that Best Buy, one of the major game retailers in the United States, had plenty at stake in the possible rerating of San Andreas. He thought he might get someone there to help him out, gratis. “Here's what I know,” Walsh told the Geek over the phone, filling him in on the scandal. “Are you interested?” The listless Geek said he'd have to get back to Walsh.

  Yet there was no need. Back in New York, Eibeler's phone rang at Take-Two Interactive. It was Vance, who told him the ESRB had finished its investigation. “You should come up,” she said. “We should meet.” When he asked why, she told him they had determined that Hot Coffee, despite Rockstar's denials, was in fact on the disc. Eibeler sounded surprised. Vance thought it must not have been what his people had told him.

  “We have two options,” she explained. “One is to put out a statement to revoke the rating, and basically the retailers would ship the product back, and the product would be off the market. Or we can put out a statement that says we're revoking the rating, and these are the steps that Take-Two is taking.” Vance preferred the second option, which would mean that the publisher, not the retailers, was assuming responsibility.

  Rockstar put up a fight. The ESRB had never rated games based on a modification before, Sam and the others argued, and there was no reason to start now. They refused to accept the rerating of the game from M to AO. “Fine,” Vance told them, “you're leaving us with no option but to put out a press release saying it's revoked, and we don't want to do that.” She couldn't believe “the arrogance” of Rockstar, as she later put it. “They were saying we don't have the right to do it, we were saying we do.”

  It was undeniably ironic. For years, Sam had tried to make his games more adult. Now he was getting his wish, but not in the way he intended. On July 20, less than a day after a media watchdog group called the Parents Television Council demanded a recall of San Andreas, the ESRB announced its findings.

  “After a thorough investigation,” Vance said, “we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs of all three platform versions of the game (i.e., PC CD-ROM, Xbox, and PS2). However, the material was programmed by Rockstar to be inaccessible to the player and they have stated that it was never intended to be made accessible. The material can only be accessed by downloading a software patch, created by an independent third party without Rockstar's permission, which is now freely available on the Internet and through console accessories. Considering the existence of the undisclosed and highly pertinent content on the final discs, compounded by the broad distribution of the third party modification, the credibility and utility of the initial ESRB rating has been seriously undermined.”

  And so it was done. In an unprecedented move, the ESRB mandated that Rockstar tell retailers to cease all sales of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The game had a new rating now: Adults Only.

  22

  Busted!

  ANSWERS.YAHOO.COM > GAMES & RECREATION > VIDEO & ONLINE GAMES

  QUESTION:

  I JUST started playing GTA: San Andreas on PS2 (I know I am behind the times). . . . What are you supposed to do after being wasted/busted? Run somewhere? Thanks in advance.

  BEST ANSWER:

  When you are wasted/busted: Time advances by 6 hrs. You lose all your weapons and $100, unless you have relationships with cops and nurse girlfriends. When you are wasted your max health is somewhat reduced, say about 0.1%. When you are busted your respect increases, again about the same trifle. If you are wasted/busted while doing a mission, you fail that mission and you have to do that mission again.

  As the sun beat down during the summer of 2005, Sam knew just where he wanted to go to escape the heat: Gander Mountain. Gander Mountain was a sprawli
ng, log cabin–shaped store in upstate New York, not far from where he and Dan had bought a rural vacation home.

  Though it had been nearly seven years since they moved to the United States, Sam still marveled at the wonderful excess of this country, and nothing was quite as wonderfully excessive as this outdoors store. It looked like a prop shop from Deliverance: camouflaged paintball face masks, fold-to-go toilets, battery-powered, rabbit-shaped Quiver Critter Decoys. Toward the back, something caught Sam's eye: an M16 rifle. “Wait a minute,” he later recalled, “Wal-Mart is going to pull our game, but you can go in there and buy a pump-action or a Glock or whatever? I don't get it.”

  No matter. The awful wake of Hot Coffee had begun. In response to the ESRB's rerating of San Andreas to Adults Only, Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and Circuit City stores pulled the game from their shelves. “We hope we're sending a statement to manufacturers that they need to cooperate with the ESRB,” said a Best Buy spokesperson. Rockstar would now have to remove the sex scene from the game and re-release the discs in order to receive the M-rating again—a process that would take at least until the fall. Wal-Mart alone accounted for 20 percent of game sales, a huge loss in the meantime. In total, Take-Two would spend a reported $25 million to fix, recall, and rerate the games.

  Take-Two tried to save face. “We are deeply concerned that the publicity surrounding these unauthorized modifications has caused the game to be misrepresented to the public and has detracted from the creative merits of this award-winning product,” Eibeler said. Yet there was no more avoiding the fact that Rockstar had been busted for the oldest trick in the book: a hidden fuck.

  In July, the board of the ESRB—consisting of representatives from Sony, Nintendo, and other major publishers—met to discuss the fallout. Vance found a room full of angry faces, people angry at Rockstar because they had to, as she later put it, “clean up their mess.” Hot Coffee mucked up years of lobbying and public education efforts. Vance pleaded for more power to enforce her ratings system, but the political backlash grew.

  “It looks like Take-Two Interactive purposefully conned the video game industry rating board and parents across the country,” Washington State representative Mary Lou Dickerson told the Los Angeles Times. “San Andreas, as a top-selling game in the country, now is in the hands of thousands of children who can practice interactive pornography. There should be legal consequences . . . so [the company doesn't] laugh all the way to the bank.”

  On July 26, Take-Two dropped another bomb: it was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission. The House voted 355–21 to pass a resolution asking the FTC to see whether Rockstar had committed fraud by intentionally duping the ratings board to avoid an Adults Only label. Threatening fines, the director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection called this “a matter of serious concern.”

  The feds weren't the only ones pursuing Rockstar. On July 27, an eighty-five-year-old grandmother from the Bronx, New York, named Florence Cohen filed a civil suit against the company. Cohen said she had bought the game for her fourteen-year-old grandson and wanted her money back (along with unspecified damages for the false advertising and consumer deception) after learning of the hidden sex scene.

  Though Hot Coffee skirted much controversy in the United Kingdom and other countries, the ratings board of Australia declared San Andreas illegal to sell, advertise, or distribute after revoking its rating. States that included California, Michigan, and Illinois heightened their fight to ban the sale of M-rated games to minors. “That's what tipped it for the whole industry,” Yee said of Rockstar. “They lied to us.” Fifty-six-year-old Yee called himself a First Amendment defender but drew the line at video games—even though he didn't know Pac-Man from table tennis. “When I was in grad school, computers still had lightbulbs,” he said. “I used to play Ping-Pong, you know, that game with the guy eating up balls.”

  On October 9, flanked by Girl Scouts and seated behind a table of outdated video games such as Postal and Manhunt, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (the star of his own violent Terminator video games) enacted AB 1179: a bill that banned the sale of violent video games to anyone under eighteen. Under the new legislation, retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart would be subject to a $1,000 fine for each violation.

  The controversy once again underscored the bias against the medium of gaming. While politicians fretted about children confusing games with reality, they seemed to have a harder time distinguishing between the two worlds than the players did. They spoke of the games as if players were committing the crimes in real life. “You're the one who rapes someone,” James Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media, the San Francisco–based nonprofit that provided the legal underpinnings of the bill. “You're the person who is serviced by a prostitute in the back of a car.”

  The next month, Clinton and Lieberman introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would, among other things, ban the sale of M-rated games to children and allow for government audits of both the game industry's rating system and retailers' enforcement policies.

  As the backlash grew, acclaimed game designer Warren Spector took the stage at the Montreal Game Developers Conference and did something few in the industry had before—hit back against Rockstar and GTA. “GTA is the ultimate urban thuggery simulation, and you can't take a step back from that,” he said. “But I sure wish they would apply the same level of design genius to something we really could show enriches the culture instead of debases it . . . . We are dead square in the cultural crosshairs right now.”

  An editorial in GameDaily, the industry trade, echoed the sentiment. “The video game industry is well along the road to losing the culture war in the United States,” it warned. “That this could be happening at a point in which games enjoy unprecedented commercial popularity is simply mind boggling.”

  Yet the momentum against the players couldn't be stopped. Even the city of Los Angeles filed a suit against Take-Two, alleging that the company had violated the state's business code through deceptive marketing and unfair competition. “Greed and deception are part of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas story,” said the L.A. city attorney, “and in that respect, its publishers are not much different from the characters in their story.”

  DARKNESS COVERED New York City, as the neon-pink Ferris wheel spun over Coney Island. A subway car slowly snaked into the station near where a gang had gathered. It looked just like the opening scene from The Warriors, but not exactly. It was a lovingly rendered, shot-for-shot recreation created by Rockstar for a video game version of Sam's favorite childhood film. The game, due in October 2005, cast the player as a new member of the Warriors gang, working his way up through the ranks as he battled off rival squads in scenes and settings straight from the film.

  A team of fifty artists and programmers at the company's Canadian studio, Rockstar Toronto, had been laboring for four long years on the title. For Sam and Dan, it felt like coming full circle, taking the fantasy world of their childhood dreams and making it real. Sam retreated gladly into the virtual world of his games. Anything was better than dealing with the feeling of being ganged up against in real life. People were drowning in New Orleans while President Bush flew overhead, and the Feds were coming for them? “These guys are out to get us,” Sam told Dan one day. “They'll garrote us whatever we do. They don't give a shit. This is crazy. They're throwing the serrated-edge boomerangs like the little kid in Mad Max 2.”

  Sam was also overseeing his most autobiographical game yet, Bully. Developed by Rockstar Vancouver, the game followed the adventures of James “Jimmy” Hopkins, a troubled, bald, chubby new kid on a mission to survive a boarding school called Bullworth Academy. With his monogrammed school sweater and battles with teachers and preppies, Jimmy could have come straight out of St. Paul's. Jimmy wasn't the Bully of the title; he was an underdog warding off the bullies with a cheeky arsenal of stink bombs and potato guns. The game mashed up tropes from sources such as The Outsiders, The Catcher in the Rye, and Si
xteen Candles to create an archetypal high school setting. Just as GTA players had to ingratiate themselves with the mob, the yakuza, and the triads to advance, players of Bully had to win over the geeks, the jocks, and the preps.

  Within Rockstar, however, the gang of developers weren't feeling so chummy anymore. After years as the self-proclaimed rebels of the industry, being treated like real outlaws didn't feel so hip. Employees hunched quietly at their desks in the office, tapping at their keys. The foosball table and the arcade games collected dust. Members of the public relations team were still twiddling their thumbs because Rockstar refused to discuss the scandal in detail with the press.

  To promote The Warriors, Dan agreed to talk with the New York Times but would not address Hot Coffee. “Certainly, it's frustrating when people don't wish to understand what you do and don't wish to learn,” Dan said. “Anyone who plays any of our games and wishes to criticize it, having played it, experienced it, and thought about it, they are, of course, welcome to do that. But when large numbers of people criticize something and haven't even done it, it's very frustrating. There's a large amount of the population that lives in relative ignorance and only hears scary stories about what we do.”