Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  Keith Fentonmiller, a senior attorney for the FTC's Division of Advertising Practices, knew it would be a touchy investigation beyond the obvious First Amendment concerns. “What hackers did was technically illegal,” he later recalled, “but when you're encouraging or turning a blind eye to years of them doing this thing, it just doesn't look so good.”

  Sam took his seat with his three lawyers across from a trio of government investigators. The Feds had everything. A towering stack of Rockstar papers. Internal e-mails. Timelines. San Andreas art. Sam's head spun as he listened to their questions: Why have you done this? Why have you done that? Why have you put that word in apostrophes?

  At one point, an e-mail of Sam's surfaced that seemed to cut to the core of his feelings. “Why are they so concerned about what we're doing in the game when we're bombing the hell out of people in Operation Enduring Freedom trying to keep our freedom,” he had written, “and we're back here trying to curb the freedom that we're paying the taxes to fight for.”

  The clock ticked endlessly. One hour. Two hours. Four. Seven. The questioning lasted for nine hours. “It's a heavy one, right?” Sam later recalled. “It's not many game designers that have been in that position that I know of . . . which goes back to the point about having the fire for this game.”

  He returned to New York to a piece of the past that was, literally, in ashes. A five-alarm fire had raged through their historic old digs at 575 Broadway, which still housed Rockstar's corporate sibling, 2K Games, along with Brant Publications, Ryan's father's company. The spring collection at the $40 million, Rem Koolhaas–designed Prada store went up in flames, along with a wallpaper mural titled Guilt Incorporated. When word leaked that the storage closet fire was deemed suspicious, one gamer posted the absurd joke that “Jack Thompson got caught smoking a little too close to the building.”

  It wasn't only 575 feeling the heat. In a public relations industry's annual list of top ten PR blunders, Hot Coffee made the cut and was ranked by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the dumbest moments in business of the year. The business site MarketWatch anointed Eibeler the Worst CEO of the Year, citing that “so far this year it has sliced earnings guidance by more than 60% to a range of 53 cents to 56 cents a share . . . . Congratulations, Paul! (To shareholders: condolences.)”

  In a feature story in Fortune called “Sex, Lies, and Videogames,” journalist Bethany McLean detailed the financial scandals that plagued the company around the time when Hot Coffee was discovered. This included the chief financial officer's sales of more than $5 million in shares and the chief operating officer's exercising of 20,000 in options. Brant, then Take-Two's publishing director, had reportedly taken home more than $4 million.

  Take-Two's corporate drama grew with the resignation of Barbara Kaczynski—a board member and the former CFO of the National Football League, who had been brought in to chair the audit committee after the SEC investigations began. According to her attorney, “her concerns have risen significantly because of what she views as an increasingly unhealthy relationship between senior management and the board of directors.”

  In the aftermath of Hot Coffee, GTA had come to represent, for some, a broader coarsening of the culture. This went beyond games into a burgeoning and graphic genre of blockbuster horror films, such as Saw and Hostel, nicknamed “torture porn,” as well as torture-happy TV shows such as 24. The fact was, perfectly sane players did like kicking pedestrians into bloody pulps in GTA—and, in fact, traded clips on YouTube of killing sprees in the game.

  In April 2006, the New York attorney general and leading candidate for governor, Eliot Spitzer, joined the high-profile fight against the violence and sex of video games. “Nothing under New York State law prohibits a fourteen-year old from walking into a video store and buying a game labeled ‘Adult Only'—a game like Grand Theft Auto,” he said, “which rewards a player for stealing cars and beating people up. Children can even simulate having sex with a prostitute.” If elected, no one was going to simulate sex with a hooker under his watch.

  On June 2, Take-Two and Rockstar entered a consent order with the FTC, without admitting wrongdoing. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to disclose all relevant content for ratings in future games and establish a system for making sure nothing like Hot Coffee ever got buried on a disc again.

  For months, Sam had been fighting to keep the voices of the haters out of his mind, but the pressure was growing too great. He later spoke to journalist Harold Goldberg of panic attacks and wanting to flee the United States for good. A doctor compared his trauma to that of a car crash victim. Sam tried to lose himself in his games, flying to Edinburgh to work with Rockstar North. During a train ride back to his old home of London, however, he answered his cell phone, and the world emptied out below him. The Manhattan district attorney, he learned, was issuing a grand jury subpoena into Hot Coffee. The battle wasn't over at all.

  Sam wanted out, away from the industry and the world. It was like some weird mission from Liberty City brought to life. New York City, their haven, their inspiration, had just boosted their wanted level to a maximum six stars. In GTA, there was always an easy fix. No matter how many cops were on your tail, you could drive into a body shop, get a fresh coat of paint for your car, and your wanted level would drop to zero. It wasn't that easy in real life.

  WHERE'S JAMIE? The question made its rounds at Rockstar. Jamie King—Rockstar cofounder—was gone, and no one seemed to know why. He had simply left the office at the end of one day in January 2006 and not returned. With a number of games in production at the various Rockstar studios, it wasn't uncommon for King to be on the road, dispatching orders from New York. “Maybe he's traveling,” some said.

  Gary Foreman suspected that something more ominous might be in play. In the aftermath of Hot Coffee, Foreman had noticed that King seemed sullen and withdrawn. Though the two were close, they didn't discuss it, sinking back into the shells they had built to survive the chaos of the recent years. Foreman, however, became suspicious when, seemingly apropos of nothing, a Take-Two executive told him, “You know, the senior management are really big fans of yours, we're going to take care of you.” Foreman eyed him dubiously. “It was surreal,” he later recalled. “It was like, yeah, I've been here a long time, I built this business up, I hope you would value me.”

  Foreman wasn't the only one feeling adrift. On the morning of May 6 in Austria, the one hundred employees of Rockstar Vienna, the acclaimed studio that worked on games such as Max Payne and Vice City, had arrived to find security guards turning them away at the front door. Producer Jurie Hornemann quickly broke the news online. “This morning, as I came into work, I was greeted by security guards,” he blogged. “It turned out Take-Two has closed their Rockstar Vienna office, effective immediately, ‘due to the challenging environment facing the video game business and our Company during this platform transition.'”

  With no warning, Rockstar Vienna had been closed. Even in the game industry, known for its volatility, the abruptness was unusual. As word spread in the blogosphere, gamers—including anonymous Rockstar employees—blamed Hot Coffee, in part, for the mess. “The Hot Coffee brouhaha, ridiculous as it was in many respects, did nothing to increase the popularity of Rockstar Games both inside and outside of the industry,” Hornemann blogged. “Whichever way you look at it, game development has become a bit harder for everyone because of that incident.”

  Commentators on the blog, many claiming to be ex-Rockstars, vented angrily. “Rockstar is NOT cool after all, the employees who worked for this hypocritical company WERE! good luck to all of us!!!” one wrote. “If this is what you do to hard working employees, who the hell would or want to work for you Rockstar?” posted another. This couldn't be dismissed as sour grapes of anonymous exes. Even Scott Miller, the veteran publisher of games such as Duke Nukem, who had worked on the Max Payne blockbuster with Rockstar, chimed in.

  “Other than GTA, a brand Rockstar did not invent themselves (they bought the
IP from DMA), what have they created that's truly a hit?” he posted. “Manhunt? Nope. Warriors? Nope . . . not a huge hit, and not their home grown brand. Max Payne? Nope . . . Rockstar so far is no different than [Tomb Raider publisher] Eidos, in that they've had one success and everything else is on par with the same-old-same-old the rest of the industry puts out.”

  The downward spiral continued. In May, Rockstar released a table tennis game (inspired by their legendary matches at the Chateau Marmont) that, while technically impressive, bombed. Amid the mounting lawsuits over Hot Coffee, Take-Two stock plummeted—soon down by 13%. Then came word on King: he wasn't coming back. No one knew why, and it wasn't the only defection. GameDaily ran a story on the exodus at Rockstar. “When Jamie King (a Rockstar co-founder), two different directors of marketing, and others all leave within the same period that the parent company's stock is in a freefall, it smells fishy,” wrote the site.

  Fed up, Foreman marched into Donovan's office. “Look, you know what?” he told Donovan. “I need to make some changes here in the processes and end all this constant crunch mode.” He mapped out his vision of how to impart a structure to the process, allocating more people to the teams when GTA titles ramped up. “These are things I want to do,” he said, “but I'm really frustrated after all this time, of this thing we built. I want to make it better. I want to take it to the next level, and I don't have the ability to do that.”

  As foreman recalled, Donovan sat there nodding, staring at the floor, but he had nothing to say. Though open communication had never been a strength at Rockstar, Foreman found Donovan's behavior particularly odd. Foreman wondered whether maybe Donovan was simply thinking through the impact of what he was suggesting or how life at Rockstar might be without him. “I need to change things here,” Foreman continued, “and if you're telling me I can't do it, then this isn't the place for me anymore.”

  Finally, Donovan broke his silence. “Things work as they are,” he said, “we're doing okay.”

  Foreman felt as if he were living in some kind of alternate reality, a reality that, he realized in that moment, he couldn't deny anymore. “This isn't going to work,” he said. He quit. As he was gathering his stuff in his office, however, Kolbe came in. “Sam and Terry have asked me to come in here and ask you to change your mind,” she said.

  “Wow,” Foreman said.

  “What do you mean ‘wow'?”

  “As much as we've been friends for a long time, wow on two things. One, I almost can't believe they sent you here to deliver their message, and it's really cheap, but, yeah, I can understand that they have. But also if either of them truly meant that, one or both of them would be here having this conversation with me.”

  Foreman was gone—and he immediately knew who he wanted to track down, once and for all: King. Reaching out through a mutual acquaintance, he asked the friend to have King call him. King replied, and the two met at a restaurant in Chelsea. “You know I left?” Foreman told him.

  “No, you didn't,” King said.

  “Yeah, I did,” Foreman said and filled King in on his final days. As Foreman and everyone else had known for years, King had been strained and unhappy. King had been burning candles at both ends for so long, he was out of wax. Like Foreman, he felt that Hot Coffee had been, as he called it, “a horrible episode for Rockstar.” The years of drama had finally become too much.

  “I was like, fuck it, I'd rather be broke,” King later explained. King wanted to move on, and Foreman and he talked about starting their own company, one built on new franchises and new ideals—without repeating the mistakes epitomized by Hot Coffee. “What I learned from that is to be very, very upfront about what we're doing,” King said.

  With Foreman and King gone, it was just the beginning of the end of an era for Rockstar. One day in September 2006, Donovan walked out the door—and didn't come back. Employees were cryptically told that he was taking a leave of absence. The next month, Brant resigned from the company—followed soon by an announcement from Take-Two that the company would be restating its financial results from 1997 to April 30, 2006. Brant pled guilty to backdating stock options, paid an additional $7.3 million in penalties, and accepted a lifetime ban on serving in a management position of a public company. By the end of the year, Take-Two had lost $184.9 million.

  Sam tried his best to maintain a sense of normality for his staff—in his own inimitable way. For the holiday party in December 2006, they filled a nightclub with strippers in Santa outfits and red hot pants. Festive young employees took turns swallowing shots from a giant ice luge. This was one of the great truisms of Rockstar—and the game industry as a whole. That no matter how tough things got or how many people quit, no matter how great the stress or long the hours, no matter how much they were exploited and unorganized, there was always a new generation of developers eager and willing to sign up for the promise of fun.

  As Sam looked across the crowded party, no one at Rockstar personified this dedication and the promise of the future more than William Rompf. Preppy and blond in his ever-present pullover sweater and tie, Rompf was almost like a long-lost American cousin of the Houser brothers. He had been refined in boarding school, then in the prestigious business program at NYU, and said his goal in life was to become “landed British gentry.”

  Yet like the Housers, he got the bug for games, transforming a time-biding postcollege job at Rockstar into a full-blown obsession. Able to find hundreds of computer bugs during sixteen-hour workdays, Rompf quickly earned his stripes, rising to the top of the quality assurance team. He earned and wore every new Rockstar monogrammed jacket with pride, happily working through the night as he heard Heart's song “Barracuda” blasting from Sam's office down the hall. Rompf would forward his boss articles from the Economist and anticipate the next mission. “I believed in everything,” Rompf later said.

  Though Rompf knew about all of the recent departures, his devotion hadn't been swayed. Fueled on shots from the ice luge, he stumbled up to Sam to pledge his support. “Dude, I fucking love you,” he shouted over the music, “and I love this place.”

  “No,” Sam replied, “I fucking love you. Don't ever leave this place. Don't ever fucking leave me.”

  “I'm here forever,” Rompf vowed.

  But the others weren't sticking around. A few weeks later, on January 12, 2007, Donovan's fate became official. He wasn't coming back. Sam later said that the emotional trauma since Hot Coffee had been too much for him. “It was very important to them that the public persona of Rockstar was one big happy family, and I think cracks started to show,” Foreman later said. This seemed to clarify why Donovan was acting so oddly when Foreman had come to him that day. “It explained his behavior,” Foreman said. “He was already gone.”

  In March 2007, shareholders themselves were done with all of the games. An investor group that included several prominent hedge funds voted to replace Eibeler and most of Take-Two's board at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Rumors began to circulate that the company might be sold. (Tellingly, the stock jumped on initial reports of both of these developments.) Many noted that potential purchasers had to balance the upside of Rockstar's immensely profitable GTA franchise against the downside of the many lingering SEC investigations and class actions.

  Rockstar announced that Gary Dale, the former head of BMG Interactive, was returning as chief operating officer. “Rockstar is a very robust organization and has tremendous depth,” a company representative said. “It has over 600 artists and developers, marketing people. . . . Sam and Dan is the leadership now, along with Gary Dale. The roles have been filled.”

  24

  Flowers for Jack

  FLOWERS

  Flowers are an item found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that are classified as weapons within the game. Flowers are placed in Slot 11 in the weapons inventory. The flowers can be used as a weapon by Carl Johnson, inflicting slightly more damage than regular fist fighting.

  It was a bright blue Februar
y day in Las Vegas, as the highest rollers of the game industry milled about the glittery, palm-lined Green Valley Ranch Resort. Thin and patchy Will Wright, the cerebral creator of the best-selling computer game franchise of all time, The Sims, puffed on a cigarette. Spiky-haired Cliffy B, the bratty genius of the brawny shoot 'em up Gears of War, chatted with Microsoft execs. Lanky Phil Harrison, the PlayStation guru, schmoozed nearby.

  They had come for the 2007 D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit, the industry's most exclusive event of the year. A welcome reprieve from the circus of E3, this fancier and more intimate affair was when the leaders of the industry could hang out and play Hold 'Em in peace. The highlight was the annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the Oscars of the business. This year, the list of nominees signified something radical: the end of an era.