Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  As a cone of silence enveloped the company, veterans of the team watched in despair. Dave Jones, still working on his own action game, Crackdown, thought that “to leave [Hot Coffee] in there was risky and they chose to do that.” Former BMG Interactive head Gary Dale, now the managing director of Capcom in Europe, thought that Rockstar's refusal to answer questions only exacerbated the problems. “That just made it worse,” he said. “Someone should have publicly engaged and nipped it in the bud, early. It was allowed to drift and drift.”

  Behind the scenes, some were blaming Brant for not stepping up and, as a result, leaving Rockstar to reel in the chaos. “Sam was extremely frustrated,” Eibeler recalled. “He felt he was being personally called out for things—and that other games were being held to different standards. It was more of a political football.”

  “It definitely had a lot of effect on the company,” King recalled. “Distraction, waste of time, slowed our momentum down, took key resources away.” They weren't so invulnerable after all. “For me, it was an education in American morals, and history,” he said. “Perhaps Hot Coffee symbolized that.”

  Sam had spent decades warding off the culture warriors as he stuck to his mission, but Hot Coffee was slowing eating away at him. On one level, he felt his legacy under siege. “I don't want that game being remembered for Hot Coffee,” he later said, fearing that it “was going to take this really beautiful piece of work and it was just going to be known for something else.”

  For years, it had been easy to shrug off the critics of video games as simply player haters—out-of-touch politicians and parents. It was almost Freudian. The haters represented mom and dad. Something had changed, however, in the wake of Hot Coffee and the pile-up of murders and mayhem and sensational media associated, no matter how wrongly, with GTA. That change became more evident than ever one morning when the Rockstars heard a crowd chanting outside their office on Broadway. “Hey, hey, ho ho,” the protesters yelled, “Rockstar has got to go!”

  As the players looked down from their windows, they didn't see a mass of middle-aged blowhards outside. They saw a sea of fresh young faces—150 children, mainly black, holding handmade signs with slogans such as “Prosecute Rockstar Games. They are felons” and “Put the Cuffs on Rockstar, Not Youth.” The protesters were called the Peaceaholics and had traveled from Washington, D.C., to rally against Rockstar. “These games are training our children to be criminals,” one of the group's advisers told ABC News. “Our children are being trained to be killers, murderers, rapists, drug users, drug dealers.”

  As the crowd swelled, Rockstars who hadn't yet arrived were advised to enter through the back door for safety. Leading the protesters was a familiar gray-haired man. He wore a white button-down shirt and a blue tie and held a bullhorn, chanting as the kids danced behind him: Jack Thompson.

  At the end of many video games there is a Boss Level, when the player faces off against the most imposing foe. Yet when Thompson demanded for someone from Rockstar to come down and meet with them, no one came. To him, they were cowards. He wasn't the hater, he believed; he was fighting for love. Love for the higher power. Love for his son, Johnny. Love for the children surrounding him here. Who was the player now?

  23

  Bullies

  WANTED LEVEL

  I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!!!”

  That's what the e-mail to Jack Thompson said. He had received it from some anonymous gamer on the heels of his victory over Hot Coffee. “I think video games or [sic] freaking awesome, and they are my entire life,” the player wrote, “and for you to insult them, is like telling me my life is totally worthless. For this, sir, I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!!!”

  This wasn't the only death threat in his in-box. “Everyone thinks you are insane,” read another, “hence the name ‘Wacko Jacko', which makes you the equivalent of a molester. Therefore you are gay. I hate you, and the world would be a better place if you were brutally murdered.” And another: “This is not spam, its [sic] my right as a citizen to send you thousands upon thousands of emails saying the same thing until you die painfully from gun shot wounds.”

  Though Thompson considered himself a religious crusader, empowered by a mission from God, he knew he was mortal—and a father to boot. He couldn't take these threats lightly. A few weeks before his protest at Rockstar Games, he sought an unlikely ally for help: the game press. He forwarded the death threats to GameSpot, whose editors weren't taking his word. “Are you crazy?” Thompson fired back. “People are threatening to kill me.”

  Thompson sought an even higher power: Clinton and Lieberman. “I have had a number of video gamers threaten to kill me in the last few days in the aftermath of the success against Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” he wrote to the senators. “The use of death threats in retaliation for my participation in the public square serves to prove, rather convincingly, that the violent video games are having the attitudinal effect that psychologists such as Dr. David Walsh and others who have testified before Congress say they have.”

  Thompson wasn't crying wolf. A sixteen-year-old gamer from Texas was later charged with harassing him. In a mass e-mail about the boy, Thompson called it par for the course in the war between the players and the haters. “‘Shoot the messenger' is the video game industry's strategy,” he wrote. “This time, because of the arrest in Texas, it didn't work. It backfired.”

  Yet that wasn't all. After so many talk shows, so many mass e-mails, so many lawsuits and diatribes against violent games, Thompson found himself battling a new opponent in the culture wars: the players, just as Sam was besieged by the player haters. It had started with flames on forums and message boards with titles such as “Jack the Fucking Video Game Ripper!” and “This man is certifiable!” Then came entire websites and blogs devoted to railing against him—StopJackThompson.com and Hating Jack Thompson Since Before It Was Cool—and the petition Gamers United to Stop Jack Thompson.

  Gamers spent hours a day fighting villains, and Thompson—with his gray hair and schoolmarm ways—was a hybrid of Darth Vader, the Teacher from The Wall, and Mr. Hand from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. One gamer made and sold Jack Thompson Toilet Paper emblazoned with his name, available for $5.95. “Wiping my butt with him may be better than he deserves,” the seller wrote. One made an online comic about Thompson. “Rockstar are CRIMINALS!” spewed a manic Thompson in the strip. “They should be sent to prison, raped, then SHOT.” An anonymous word balloon responded, “Er . . . for making video games?”

  The salvo from gamers only made Thompson more defiant. “The amount of energy put into trying to destroy me tells me they know this is about something worthwhile,” he said. Thompson made his e-mail, home address, and phone number (which, to gamers' delight, contained the prefix 666), readily available online and became famous for replying to those who contacted him. The dialogues would eventually end up online. When one game reporter e-mailed to ask for an interview, Thompson replied, “Kiss the game industry good-bye.”

  Thompson had a new game to kiss off, Bully. With little to go on other than the title, he exploited the frothing eagerness of the press by painting a foreboding version of the unreleased game. CNN was quick to give him his airtime. “Tonight, another disturbing example of our culture in decline,” bellowed host Lou Dobbs. “A new video game to be released this fall encourages children who have been bullied to become bullies themselves.”

  “What you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by,” Thompson warned. “And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate Bully.”

  In response, Thompson penned an open letter to Doug Lowenstein and the press called “A Modest Video Game Proposal.” He promised to write a $10,000 check to Eibeler's favorite charity “if any video game company will create, manufacture, distribute, and sell a video game in 2006 like the following . . .”

  Thompson described a game that would follow Osaki Kim or O.K.
, the bereaved and vengeful father of a boy who'd been bludgeoned to death by a violent gamer. Equipped with a choice of machetes and baseball bats, Kim, Thompson wrote, “hops a plane from LAX to New York to reach the Long Island home of the CEO of the company (Take This) that made the murder simulator on which his son's killer trained. O.K. gets ‘justice' by taking out this female CEO, whose name is Paula Eibel, along with her husband and kids. ‘An eye for an eye,' says O.K., as he urinates onto the severed brain stems of the Eibel family victims, just as you do on the decapitated cops in the real video game Postal2.”

  After taking out video game lawyers, arcades, and retailers, the player then maneuvers O.K. to his final mission, the 2006 E3 convention in Los Angeles, as Thompson wrote, “to massacre all the video game industry execs with one final, monstrously delicious rampage.” He concluded, “How about it, video game industry? I've got the check and you've got the tech. It's all a fantasy, right? No harm can come from such a game, right? Go ahead, video game moguls. Target yourselves as you target others. I dare you.”

  The moguls didn't pick up the gauntlet, but the players did. One team of modders released a free game called Defamation of Character: A Jack Thompson Murder Simulator. Built as a modification of GTA: San Andreas, the game cast players both as Thompson and as Thompson's fictional alter ego, Banman. The ripped-from-the-headlines missions included stopping a truck full of Bully games from reaching a store and busting Lowenstein from putting secret sex scenes in a game. Players could even hold a press conference in the game, calling up a menu of Thompson's real quotes. Another mod team made a game more explicitly based on his proposal.

  Thompson wasn't buying it. “I'm not interested and won't be commenting on the mod,” he told the site GamePolitics in an e-mail. He added that his proposal “was intended to highlight the patent hypocrisy and recklessness exhibited by the video game industry's willingness to target cops, women, homosexuals, and other groups with some of their violent games. To be fair, though, you can't expect a bunch of gamers to understand the satire if they think that Jonathan Swift, the author of ‘A Modest Proposal,' is the name of a new Nike running shoe.”

  Over in their self-described “fortified bunker in Seattle,” Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, the cocreators of the popular video game web comic Penny Arcade, had had enough. On October 17, they posted a response. “You know what, Jack? We're going to be the men you're not,” they wrote. “You said that your insulting, illusory ten thousand dollars would go to the charity of Paul Eibeler's choice. We've got a good guess that he'd direct your nonexistant [sic] largesse toward The Entertainment Software Association Foundation, a body that has raised over six point seven million dollars over the last eight years. We've just made the donation you never would, and never meant to. Ten thousand dollars' worth. And we made it in your name.”

  Thompson wasn't amused. He faxed a letter to the Seattle police chief, urging him to “shut this little extortion factory down and/or arrest some of its employees.” Krahulik and Holkins never heard from the local officers. “We should thank our stars that we have someone as impotent as [Thompson] is in his role,” Holkins said after the fracas. “Our fear is that someone intelligent and charismatic should take over.”

  Thompson's “Modest Proposal” turned into a major backlash. In an open letter distributed widely online, David Walsh of the National Institute of Media and Family, the organization Thompson had long cited in his tirades, cut Thompson off for good. “Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect,” Walsh wrote in a public letter.

  Thompson dismissed Walsh as “an idiot,” and Walsh, in a subsequent interview, distanced himself from Thompson even more. “We're coming from a scientific and public safety perspective,” he said, “not a religious one.” When pressed, however, Walsh admitted that hard evidence linking violent games with violent behavior was lacking. “None of these studies are definitive,” he said. “I would never say that playing a violent video game is going to make a kid act violently. What I would say is as kids have risk factors, if you add violent video games into the mix, you're increasing the chances.”

  Though Lowenstein had always done his best to avoid speaking directly about Thompson, he publicly refused to engage him anymore. “My comment for the record is we have no comment on the work of Jack Thompson,” Lowenstein said. “By 2010, the digital generation will be in the seats of power, they'll be in editorial meetings and they will be making news decisions and what people in government and the cultural elite regard now as dangerous will be seen merely as rock and roll.”

  With Thompson vulnerable, Rockstar moved in against him, too. The guys' first missive came, fittingly, in a game. On October 25, the company released Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, a game for the PSP that became the top-selling title on that platform. Thompson surfed over to Rockstar's website promoting the game and found a surprise. Players could click on a fictional e-mail from someone named JT with a group called Citizens United Negating Technology For Life And People's Safety—or C.U.N.T.F.L.A.P.S. for short.

  “The internet is unambiguous evil,” read the fictional e-mail. “The only things worse than the internet are computer games and liberals. . . . Only last week, I was using the internet to look up some information for my 15 year old niece, who is a keen water skier and state wide sailor. Trust me when I say this—searching under the subject matter ‘Teenage girls water sports' is not for the faint hearted.”

  Outraged, Thompson spammed the Net about the attack, accusing Rockstar and Take-Two of “furthering the notion that its most abiding and most effective critic, Jack Thompson, is himself a sexual pervert.” Thompson added that he “can assure the world that the only thing to which he is ‘addicted' is eating entertainment industry scofflaws for breakfast—and golf.”

  Yet his battle with Rockstar was no laughing matter anymore. In November, Thompson went to Fayette, Alabama, to face off with Rockstar in person again. The occasion was a hearing over the $600 million civil lawsuit he filed on behalf of relatives of Devin Moore's victims against Take-Two, Rockstar, Sony Corporation of America, Wal-Mart, and GameStop, where Moore purchased GTA: Vice City. Moore had been recently convicted of the murders and sentenced to death, but Thompson wanted the game companies to pay.

  On November 3, 2005, he and Rockstar's lawyers faced off in a Fayette courtroom. “These Grand Theft Auto games are unique,” Thompson argued. “They are murder simulators. The only thought they convey is how to murder people and how to enjoy killing.” Rockstar's team wasn't having any of it, though, and filed a motion to have Thompson removed from the case. “This isn't a street fight,” said one of Rockstar's attorneys. “He's going to turn the courtroom into a circus and we can't have it.”

  Thompson lashed out, accusing Rockstar of labeling him a “bisexual and a pedophile,” as he told the judge. Exasperated, the judge pulled out a stack of the e-mails and press releases that Thompson had been spewing across the Net.

  “Why did you do this?” the judge asked Thompson.

  “You said after the criminal trial to ‘have at it,'” Thompson replied.

  “Your idea of ‘have at it' and my ‘have at it' are not the same.”

  Days later, the judge issued an order preventing Thompson from participating in the case. “Most of these communications contained long and angry speeches by Mr. Thompson that can only be described by the court as bizarre and childish,” the judge said. “If Mr. Thompson continues to inundate the court with prohibited and irrelevant communications, this court shall use its contempt power for relief.”

  Thompson came home to Coral Gables to find a pile of mail at his door. Among the envelopes was a package and a note: “Enclosed please find the sample you requested.” Thompson removed the wrapping to find a small bottle of Astroglide Silken Secret, a “vaginal moisturizer to help relieve the discomfort associated with vaginal dryness.”

  The gamers!
Thompson thought. He marched over to his computer, his mission command, and his fingers hit the keys. “Dear Judge,” he began. Though he was off the Alabama case, he wanted the judge in the case to know that Rockstar and its fans were still “targeting me.” They were the bullies, not him. “Is there any connection,” Thompson wrote, “between [Rockstar] stating to its video gamer minions that I head an organization whose name refers to vaginal folds and the sending of me and my wife a vaginal moisturizer? A good question and a fair question, don't you think, Judge.”

  FIRST PERSON point of view. Wintry day. January 2006. Capital City. Sam stood at the steps of the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, D.C. He was here voluntarily to answer questions for the FTC's investigation into whether Rockstar had purposely deceived the ESRB to avoid an Adult Only rating for San Andreas.

  So it had come to this. Ten years, ago he was just a bloke in England who dreamed of invading the United States of Def Jam. Now here he was in the nation's capital, the seat of power, a stone's throw from George W. Bush himself. And for what? There was Bush and the lies and the wars and the madness, and now the United States was spending taxpayer money to investigate a game? If gamers were outlaws in the eyes of the public, they had never seemed as outlaw as this before. “I felt those people were out to crush us,” Sam later recalled, “and if they could have crushed us, they absolutely would have.”