Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

by David Kushner

  This feeling of connection extended to relationships with other players in the game. Befriend one, and he brings you a helicopter; earn the trust of another, and he introduces you to an important contact. In a scene that Sam found particularly moving, Niko had to save Roman from a mob of fifteen angry Albanians. As Sam urgently worked his buttons while his cousin screamed for help, he felt awed by the emotions swirling inside him. “The idea of having feelings for a bunch of polygons is very profound,” he later recalled.

  Sam realized the implications of this one morning back in New York as he was driving over the Brooklyn Bridge. In the distance, the skyscrapers rose above the South Street Seaport, where he had lived with the others in the Commune so many years ago. They had come to America to live out their fantasies, to make the games they wanted to play, and, in turn, to make games urgent for a new generation. They had fought for this dream, from the streets of SoHo to the halls of Capitol Hill. They had been celebrated and vilified, rewarded and fined, had survived murders and marriages, suicides and births. They had even seen the tallest buildings in town crumble and fall.

  Yet through it all, this amazing city remained. New York. The place he'd dreamed of as a kid sitting in his bedroom listening to Slayer. Now the city was his to share. Decoded. Replicated. Simulated. A living, breathing world on a disc that anyone could play. For weeks, he had been in Edinburgh, immersed in Liberty City, but now, as New York City towered above him, something shifted inside him. Why doesn't this feel different? he wondered. Then it hit him. It didn't feel different because the simulated world had come so vividly to life. “I didn't feel like I'd left,” he realized, “because I'd been here the whole time.”

  THE STOCK MARKET crash of 2008 didn't stop gamers from buying GTA IV. When the game was released on April 29, 2008, it broke the Guinness World Record to become the most successful entertainment product launch of all time—bigger than any game, movie, or album.

  Taking in more than $310 million on its first day alone, it eclipsed the box office champ Spider-Man 3 and even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series. Not even The Dark Knight, which GTA IV outsold five-to-one, came close. By the end of its first week, the game had sold more than six million copies for more than half a billion dollars. Electronic Arts attempted a hostile bid to buy Take-Two for a reported $2 billion but didn't succeed.

  According to MetaCritic, which aggregated reviews, GTA IV became the best-reviewed game in history. GameSpot called it “the series' best by far.” Game Informer effused that “it completely changes the landscape of gaming.” GameSpy deemed it “an instant classic, a game unlike any we've played before. As is the case with many great books and movies, you'll want to know what happens to the characters after the game ends, and one can't help hoping that all of their American Dreams comes true.” The game took nearly every major game industry award.

  In the past, controversy had dogged every new GTA, but now (with the exception of the Chicago Transit Authority pulling GTA IV ads from buses for fear of inciting violence) something had changed. The mainstream press was focusing on the one thing Sam had championed all along, the game. The Sunday Times in London said GTA IV “embodies the future of entertainment” and called it “the pinnacle of a British-created phenomenon.”

  “The real star of the game is the city itself,” effused Seth Schiesel in the New York Times. “It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.” A blogger for New York magazine wrote, “It will finally allow us to do all the things we fantasize about doing whenever our urban surroundings impede on our ability to not be completely annoyed . . . head-butt that guy who made us miss a 6 train this morning or drive a tank through the living room of our jerk next-door neighbor with the surround sound.”

  Not everyone was so keen. Back in Dundee, some of the original GTA team thought the series had been losing its sense of humor since Vice City. “GTA IV is so dour,” lamented Gary Penn. “It's become a very serious franchise,” said Brian Baglow. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Diaz admitted to be a longtime fan of the series but thought that GTA IV failed to rise to true art. “Successful art tears away the veil and allows you to see the world with lapidary clarity; successful art pulls you apart and puts you back together again, often against your will, and in the process reminds you in a visceral way of your limitations, your vulnerabilities, makes you in effect more human,” he wrote. “Does GTA IV do that? Not for me it doesn't, and heck, I love this damn game.”

  Yet ultimately, being a damn good game was enough. With GTA IV, Rockstar finally had achieved its lifelong goals—to break the wall between reality and fantasy and have its medium respected as mainstream entertainment. “There was a sense that in some way movies were a higher art form and video games could aspire to be like them,” Dan said. “I think now, because we and a few other companies are making products, that this isn't the case. They're just different and video games are capable of things that movies aren't.”

  In the United Kingdom, the first battleground over the games, GTA IV wasn't merely celebrated, it was fueling one of the country's most esteemed institutions: Oxford. Because the university retained a share of the company that created the GTA IV engine, Oxford would be making money from the game. A university spokesperson called it “a huge success.”

  After a decade of fights and betrayals, dreams and nightmares, the players had done it. Video games didn't seem so outlaw anymore—and neither did the industry's most influential player, Sam. The thirty-six-year-old was now living in a tony brownstone on a leafy street in Brooklyn with his wife and kids. He had even gone through the long naturalization process to become a United States citizen. After making such iconically American games, he was now an American too.

  When Sam reflected on the adversity he'd overcome, it was as if he spoke for the entire generation who had grown up on his games. “It's made our resolve that much stronger,” he told a reporter one day, “and in some ways I feel that some of the negative stuff had to happen to keep everybody's feet on the ground, and to keep everybody hungry and motivated. . . . the fact that, after all this time, we can still be this hungry and ambitious and driven and crazy—that's got to be a good sign. Because if they can't shake us now, then what can they do to us?”

  This game was over; this mission, complete. It was time for another to begin. “What have I got left to achieve?” Sam asked. “Everything.”

  Epilogue

  Outlaws to the End

  FREE ROAM

  You can choose people to enter your posse by hitting back and separately inviting each of the players. If you receive a posse invite, tap back and accept the invitation.

  Perhaps more than any other entertainment product of its time, Grand Theft Auto defined a decade. “It was a defining creative work that represented the coming of age of a breakout industry,” as Lowenstein said. Yet that decade—spanning the inception of the franchise through its crowning achievement, GTA IV—marked more than the awkward adolescence of the industry. It signified one of the most disruptive chapters in the history of media.

  When players weren't exploring Liberty City, they were toying with powerful new tools from YouTube to Facebook, from texting to Twitter. A new world emerged on the other side of our TV and telephone and computer screens. We started the millennium thinking that tweeting was for birds. By the end of the decade, we couldn't go long without peering through the looking glass into the wonderland online. Whether you thought technology brought out the best or the worst in humanity or maybe a little of both, life would never be the same.

  Neither would video games. Sam Houser's dream of seeing games get taken as seriously as films had been fulfilled. GTA made it possible to have the game industry's equivalent of Scorsese films: arty, funny, dark, violent, and authentic. Franchises from BioShock, a sort of retro futuristic thriller, to the military shooters,
such as Call of Duty, represented, along with GTA, a new wave of cinematic storytelling—just made for participants with controllers in hand.

  In addition to maturing as a storytelling medium, games had become a huge business. By 2010, the $60 billion global game industry was expected to hit more than $90 billion within the next five years. The stereotype of the pimply teenage boy gaming in his basement was finally fading away. A new generation of online games—nicknamed social or casual games—had become the craze. Often free to download and play, the games were cheeky and accessible, such as the biggest hit on Facebook, a farm simulator called FarmVille. Every day, 62 million people were harvesting virtual corn.

  Mobile gaming, once a pipe dream, had millions of fingers twitching and swiping their screens. Cheap to make and easy to produce, these games spawned a new golden age of start-up development. While GTA IV had a team of 150 and a budget of $100 million, a mobile game hit could be made by one intrepid coder with a laptop and a dream. That was pretty much the case with Angry Birds, a Finnish physics game that despite its surreal premise (slingshot birds at kidnapping pigs?) became the Pac-Man of the iPhone generation.

  With casual games seducing moms (and grandmas), consoles broadened their audience as well. Riding on the success of the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft and Sony introduced their own motion-sensing controllers—the Kinect and Move. Players didn't need thumbs that danced like Michael Jackson anymore. They could simply wave their arms—or jump or shout—to play.

  Despite whispers at game conventions that the age of the blockbuster might be over, the big-budget epics that GTA pioneered kept coming. In fact, it didn't take long for GTA IV's blockbuster sales record to be broken. The latest champ was the military shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops, which brought in more than $650 million in its first week alone. The game industry remained the testing ground for technological innovations, such as 3-D television, and a new wave of blockbusters was always around the corner.

  As a broader range of games served a wider demographic, another seismic shift occurred in the wake of the GTA Decade: the sociopolitical battle subsided. Some took it as a sign that the Bush era was over, and the Obama one had begun. “It feels at last like we're moving on from that debate,” Dan said. “The audience is getting past thirty so it all becomes a bit silly.”1

  Hot Coffee, despite all of the headaches, was credited with making the game industry stronger. It pushed the ESRB to refine its submission process, ensuring that such a costly scandal would likely never happen again. “It forced us to address issues we hadn't addressed before,” said Vance, who noted that stores now card 80 percent of minors buying M-rated games, as opposed to 20 percent at the beginning of the decade. Hot Coffee “gave us an opportunity to show to critics that we're not in the tank,” Lowenstein said.

  At the same time, the suppositions about the effects of video game violence wore thin. In a meta-analytic study called “Evidence for Publication Bias in Video Game Violence Effects Literature,” Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson of Texas A&M International University's Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice found what he called “a systematic bias for hot-button issues” that resulted in overstatements and misleading findings.

  “No one has shown a causal link between violent games and real world violent behavior,” said Dr. Cheryl Olson, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School's Center for Mental Health and Media. “As with the entertainment of earlier generations,” she said, “we may look back on some of today's games with nostalgia, and our grandchildren may wonder what the fuss was about.”

  In November 2010, the debate reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which held a hearing on the controversial California law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. Protesters—including one dressed in a fake mustache and a red hat like Nintendo's ubiquitous hero, Mario—took to the steps, calling for justice. During the hearing, the California Attorney General argued that the “deviant level of violence that is presented in a certain category of video games” necessitated the law.

  Conservative justice Antonin Scalia questioned whether such restrictions should apply to violent stories such as Grimm's fairy tales as well. “Are you going to ban them, too?” Scalia asked. The following June, the high court voted to throw out California's violent game ban entirely. “Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player's interaction with the virtual world),” Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

  The hypocrisy of the war against games was not lost on many—especially when, not long before, New York governor Spitzer, who campaigned against the virtual prostitution of GTA, got busted for the real thing. One familiar player, however, was absent from the debate: Jack Thompson, who had come to an unexpected conclusion of his own. At first, after settling with Take-Two and agreeing not to sue or correspond directly with them again, Thompson continued to speak out. He called GTA IV “the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio” and, legally bound from contacting Take-Two directly, wrote an open letter to Take-Two chair Strauss Zelnick's mother instead. “Your son, this very moment, is doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be ‘a Boy Scout,'” Thompson wrote. “More like the Hitler Youth, I would say.”

  Yet his legal battles were soon done. On September 25, 2008, the Florida bar voted to permanently disbar Thompson because of “the extensive misconduct of respondent and his complete lack of remorse.” The U.S. District Court ruled that Thompson's numerous lawsuits were “abusive and vexatious.” For gamers, it was like the melting of the Wicked Witch of the West, and they flooded the Net with YouTube videos and online comics rejoicing.

  Thompson soon found a higher calling than GTA, however. In January 2011, he revealed that he was enrolled in the online Reformed Theological Ministry to join the clergy. “As a virtual minister, Thompson will be able to seek the absolute and eternal justice he was denied over and over again,” reported the Miami New Times. “Thirty-one years fighting with the bar and the entertainment industry is a pretty good run,” Thompson said. “I'm surprised that I lasted that long.”

  While the conflicts of the GTA Decade came to a close, one question remained: the legacy and the future of Rockstar Games. Despite the success of GTA IV, the company could not completely escape its past. In September 2009, Take-Two announced that it would be paying $20 million to settle the class-action lawsuits from Hot Coffee—in addition to the estimated $25 million already spent to recall the AO version of the game.

  Three months later, Rockstar's wall of silence shattered like never before. It happened when the self-described “Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees” wrote a public blog alleging dismal working conditions for the studio working on Midnight Club: Los Angeles and Red Dead Redemption. They complained of twelve-hour-a-day, six-day work weeks that “turned [employees] into machines as they are slowly robbed of their humanity.”

  The wives said that “the current Rockstar management has grown a thirst for power,” while failing to adequately compensate employees. “The last Grand Theft Auto game made over a billion dollars of revenue,” the wives concluded, “so where is the recognition and appreciation to those of whom, without them, such success would not have been made?” They vowed legal action, seeking compensation “for health, mental, financial, and damages done to families of employees.”2

  The blog triggered similar allegations by people claiming to be ex-employees of Rockstar. One compared the company to the Eye of Sauron, the fire-rimmed, all-seeing eye of the dark lord in The Lord of the Rings. Rockstar NYC wouldn't comment—directly, at least. Shortly after the Eye of Sauron comment, the company posted a series of psychedelic wallpaper imag
es on its website titled “The Eye Is Watching.” In one, a giant eye clutched a lightning bolt as it stared down on an exploding R* icon. The wives weren't laughing and pursued their class-action case with more than a hundred employees from Rockstar San Diego. The blog doystig reported that in April 2009, Rockstar settled out of court with the group for $2.75 million.

  The next year, similar allegations about working conditions surfaced following the release of L.A. Noire, a critically acclaimed detective thriller published by Rockstar and developed by Australian game makers Team Bondi—prompting an investigation by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). “Certainly, reports of twelve-hour a day, lengthy crunch time, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and harmful to the individuals involved, the final product, and the industry as a whole,” said IGDA chair Brian Robbins. Some felt it was time to unionize the game business—like other parts of entertainment industry—once and for all.

  Even the Rockstar who most exemplified the selfless devotion to the company, Will Rompf, Sam's acolyte, left broken in the end. After five long years of work, he was finally crushed by the crunch time. It happened just three weeks before the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. One day he looked up at his friend from his desk and said he couldn't endure the stress anymore and needed to take the rest of the week off. Within hours of his leaving, he said his Rockstar e-mail had been shut off—but an uncommon practice when an employee leaves a company, lot one that seemed abrupt.