Jacked: The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto
David Kushner
Jacked is the story behind the most successful video game franchise in history. Over its numerous sequels and spinoffs, including the long awaited GTA IV, the game has sold over 50 million units and generated over a billion dollars in revenue. Grand Theft Auto lets players live out their fantasies. But few videogame fantasies match the real-life adventures of the GTA creators, Rockstar Games.From the back bedrooms of suburban London to the most powerful offices on Capitol Hill, this story takes the reader on a journey through the pioneering and exciting, yet controversial rise of Rockstar Games and the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Almost a decade ago brothers Sam and Dan Houser and their friend Terry Donvan invaded New York with a then-outrageous dream: to make video-games cool. They would elevate a medium built on Mario and Pokémon into something defiantly grown-up – games that would earn a place on shelves between Scarface and Licensed to Ill. Violent, sexually explicit and held responsible for the corrupting the youth of today, the GTA games are constantly the subject of intense media attention and will continue to make headlines when GTA V is launched in 2011.As well as the rock star lifestyles and unrivalled success, award-winning journalist and author, David Kushner also investigates the darker side of Rock Star Games – the financial irregularities, management shuffles and numerous court cases that have plagued company over the years to paint the most accurate and thrilling picture of the company behind one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the 21st century.
Jacked
The unauthorized
behind-the-scenes story
of Grand Theft Auto
DAVID KUSHNER
Dedication (#uc7c28ef8-7d99-54c6-8283-ad232d9eaeec)
To Andy Kushner
Contents
Title Page (#uc0190d5a-60fa-5ce2-a212-98f75c9bf771)
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue - Players vs. Haters
Chapter 1 - The Outlaws
Chapter 2 - The Warriors
Chapter 3 - Race ‘n’ Chase
Chapter 4 - Gouranga!
Chapter 5 - Eating the Hamster
Chapter 6 - Liberty City
Chapter 7 - Gang Warfare
Chapter 8 - Steal This Game
Chapter 9 - Rockstar Loft
Chapter 10 - The Worst Place in America
Chapter 11 - State of Emergency
Chapter 12 - Crime Pays
Chapter 13 - Vice City
Chapter 14 - Rampages
Chapter 15 - Cashmere Games
Chapter 16 - Grand Death Auto
Chapter 17 - Boyz in the Hood
Chapter 18 - Sex in San Andreas
Chapter 19 - Unlock the Darkness
Chapter 20 - Hot Coffee
Chapter 21 - Adults Only
Chapter 22 - Busted!
Chapter 23 - Bullies
Chapter 24 - Flowers for Jack
Chapter 25 - New York City
Epilogue - Outlaws to the End
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note (#uc7c28ef8-7d99-54c6-8283-ad232d9eaeec)
This book is based on more than ten years of research. I first played Grand Theft Auto in 1997 and began reporting on its creators, Rockstar Games, two years later. As the franchise boomed, I chronicled game culture and industry for publications that included Rolling Stone, Wired, the New York Times, GamePro, and Electronic Gaming Monthly, as well as in my first book, Masters of Doom.
My reporting took me across the country and around the world— from the offices of Rockstar in New York to the streets of Dundee, Scotland, where GTA began. There were long days and endless nights at game conventions and start-ups. I spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours playing games. I played Pong with Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, and, for one particularly awesome afternoon in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, rolled the dice with Gary Gygax, the cocreator of Dungeons & Dragons.
As the industry grew, I saw the controversies rise over violent video games—especially over GTA—and covered both sides of the disputes. I sat with a crying mother in a tiny town in Tennessee, where her sons had just murdered one person and maimed another—and triggered a $259 million lawsuit against Rockstar and others for allegedly inspiring the crime with GTA. I went to Coral Gables, Florida, to visit GTA’s chief opponent, Jack Thompson, at his home.
I spoke with leaders from the Entertainment Software Association in Washington, D.C., and went behind closed doors at the clandestine Entertainment Software Ratings Board in New York to see how games are rated. In Iowa City, I sat in a small stuffy room hooked up to electrodes while I played Grand Theft Auto—and university researchers studied my brain. Yeah, it was strange.
Though all of these adventures don’t appear explicitly in this book, they inform it. This is a work of narrative nonfiction, a recreation of the story of GTA. The scenes and the dialogue are drawn from hundreds of my own interviews and firsthand observations, as well as thousands of articles, court documents, and TV and radio reports. The Rolling Stone reporter who appears in the book is me.
Over the years since I first visited Rockstar Games, I’ve interviewed many people at the company including each of the cofounders. Though the current helm at Rockstar declined to participate in this book, I was able to draw freely from my previous interviews with them and speak extensively with those who have left. A few sources didn’t want to be identified, due to personal or professional concerns. Others were reluctant to talk, then eager, or eager, then reluctant. In the end, the vast majority went on the record. A funny thing happens when you write a book like this. People start to realize and appreciate that they are part of a larger story, not only their own, but everyone’s.
Prologue Players vs. Haters (#uc7c28ef8-7d99-54c6-8283-ad232d9eaeec)
How far would you go for something you believe in?
One winter day, Sam Houser was going farther than he’d ever imagined or feared—all the way to Capitol Hill to answer to the Feds. The thirty-four-year-old had achieved the universal dream: rising from nowhere to make his fantasies real. Yet now reality was threatening to take it all away.
A scrappy Brit running an empire in New York City, Sam cultivated the image of the player he had become. Scruffy hair. Shaggy beard. Eyes hidden behind aviator shades. Gripping the wheel of his jet-black Porsche. Buildings towering. Taxis honking. Flipping stations on the radio. Pedal to the metal as the world blurred like a scene from the video game that made him so rich and so wanted: Grand Theft Auto.
GTA, the franchise published by Sam’s company, Rockstar Games, was among the most successful and notorious video games of all time. GTA IV alone would smash the Guinness Record to be the most profitable entertainment release in history—leaving every blockbuster superhero movie and even the final Harry Potter book in its pixilated wake. Players bought more than 114 million copies and shelled out over $3 billion on the titles. The juggernaut helped make video games the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business. By 2011, the $60 billion global game industry would dwarf music and film box office sales—combined.
GTA revolutionized an industry, defined one generation, and pissed off another, transforming a medium long thought of as kids’ stuff into something culturally relevant, darkly funny, and wildly free. It cast players at “the center of their own criminal universe,” as Sam once told me. You were a bad guy doing bad things in fictional cities meticulously riffed from real life: Miami, Vegas, New York, and Los Angeles.
For the mad frat of Brits who invented the game, GTA was a love letter from England to America in all of its fantastic excess: the sex and the violence, the money and the crime, the fashion and the drugs. As the game’s phenomenally talented art director Aaron Garbut once told me, the goal was “to make the player feel like he’s starring in his own fucked-up Scorsese-directed cartoon.”
Ostensibly, players had to complete a series of missions for a motley crew of gangster bosses: whacking enemies, jacking cars, dealing drugs. Yet even better, players didn’t have to play by the rules at all. GTA was a brilliantly open world to explore. There was no high score to hit or princess to save. Players could just steal an eighteen-wheeler at gun-point, crank up the radio, and floor the gas, taking out pedestrians and lampposts and anything else dumb enough to get in the way of a good time. The fact that players could also hire hookers and kill cops made it controversial and tantalizing.
More personally, GTA made Sam Houser the rock star of his industry. Sam was passionate, driven, and creative, and Time ranked him among the world’s most influential people, alongside President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Gordon Brown, for “creating tapestries of modern times as detailed as those of Balzac or Dickens.” Variety called GTA “a hit-machine arguably unparalleled in any other part of the media business.” The Wall Street Journal dubbed Sam “one of the leading lights of the video game era. A secretive, demanding workaholic [with] a temperament and a budget befitting a Hollywood mogul.” One analyst compared his company to “the kids on the island in Lord of the Flies.”But the hard work and long hours were all in service of Sam’s ultimate mission: to take this maligned and misunderstood medium, video games, and make it as awesome as it could be. But no one had anticipated that making a game about outlaws could seem so outlaw for real. And that’s what was bringing him to Washington, D.C., on this cold day.
After years of blaming Grand Theft Auto for inspiring murder and mayhem, politicians had what appeared to be a smoking gun: a hidden sex mini-game in the new GTA. The discovery of the scene, dubbed Hot Coffee, exploded into the industry’s biggest scandal ever, the Watergate of video games. Rockstar blamed hackers. Hackers blamed Rock-star. Politicians and parents wanted GTA banned.
Now everyone, it seemed—from the consumers who filed a multi-million-dollar class-action suit over the game to the Federal Trade Commission investigating Rockstar for fraud—wanted the truth. Had Rockstar purposely hidden porn in GTA to cash in? If the company had, its game might be over. As Sam’s rival, moral warrior attorney Jack Thompson, warned, “We are going to destroy Rockstar, you can count on that.”
How did this all happen? The answer is the story of a new generation and the game that defined it. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, “The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.” It’s hard to understand those who came of age at the turn of the millennium without understanding GTA.Grand Theft Auto marked the awkward adolescence of a powerful medium as it struggled to grow up and find its voice. It was an artifact of the George W. Bush era and the fight for civil liberties.
The fact that it hit during one of the most volatile chapters in the history of media was no accident. It symbolized the freedoms and fears of the strange new universe dawning on the other side of the screens. GTA seemed to split the world into players and haters. Either you played, or you didn’t. For the players, jacking a car in the game was like saying, This is our ride now. This is our time behind the wheel. For the haters, it was something foreboding.
As Sam sat before the FTC investigators, the moment brought to mind an e-mail he had sent to a colleague when faced with compromising GTA. “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,” he wrote, “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.”
Chapter 1 The Outlaws (#uc7c28ef8-7d99-54c6-8283-ad232d9eaeec)
Grim city. Aerial view. A man in black runs along a river as a red sports car chases after him. Suddenly, a white convertible peels up in his path. “Over here, Jack!” shouts a beautiful young British woman behind the wheel. Jack leaps into her car, and she floors it. She has long auburn hair and stylish silver-framed shades. “You didn’t know you had a fairy godmother, did you?” she asks, coyly.
“So where are we going, Princess?” Jack asks.
“To the demon king’s castle, of course.” She shifts into high gear, speeding through a parking garage to safety.
In 1971, there was no cooler getaway driver than Geraldine Moffat, the actress in this scene from Get Carter, a British crime film released that year. Critics dismissed it, saying, “One would rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it.” Yet as is often the case with anything new and controversial, the fans won out in the end.
The scene of Moffat lounging nude in bed with Michael Caine—a Rolling Stones album propped on the nightstand beside them—epitomized how hip movies could be. Get Carter became a cult classic, and Moffat, one of London’s most fashionable stars. She married Walter Houser, a musician who ran the hottest jazz club in England, Ronnie Scott’s.
Shortly after Get Carter’s release, Moffat and Houser welcomed their first child, Sam. The boy’s brown eyes sparkled with possibility. Every kid determines to be cooler than his parents, but when your mom’s in gangster flicks and your dad’s hanging with Roy Ayers, that’s no easy game. Sam found inspiration in movies like his mom’s. He became fascinated by gangs, the grittier the better. He’d trudge down to the local library, checking out videotapes of crime films: The Getaway, The French Connection, The Wild Bunch, The Warriors.
One day at Ronnie Scott’s, the great jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie asked young Sam what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy resembled his mother—the heart-shaped face, the wide flat bushy black eyebrows. “A bank robber,” Sam replied.
WAVES CRASHED the sands of Brighton, the beach town south of London, but Sam wasn’t interested in the shore. His parents had taken him and his stocky brother Dan, two years younger, here to play outside, breathe the fresh air, and listen to the gulls. Instead, Moffat found Sam banging at a tall, psychedelically illustrated cabinet. Sam had discovered video games.
At this time in the early 1980s, games were in their family-friendly golden age. Innovations in technology and design brought a hypnotic new breed of machines into arcades and corner shops, from SpaceInvaders to Asteroids. The graphics were simple and blocky, the themes (zap the aliens, gobble the dots), hokey. One of Sam’s favorites was Mr. Do! a surreal game in which he played a circus clown, burrowing underground for magic cherries as he was being chased by monsters. The news shop near his house had a Mr. Do! and Sam would eagerly fetch cigarettes there for his mom just so he could play.
Sam’s parents bought him every new game machine for home, from the Atari to the Omega and the Spectrum ZX, a popular computer coming out of Dundee, Scotland. Dan, more interested in literary things, didn’t take to games, but Sam always shoved a controller into his hands anyway. “I don’t know the buttons!” Dan would protest.
“It doesn’t matter!” Sam replied, “You have to play!”
When Dan didn’t comply, he suffered big brother’s wrath. Sam later joked of having once fed Dan poison berries, sending him to the hospital. The terror subsided when Dan outgrew him. Dan proved his power by leaping onto Sam below from a balcony of their house, which resulted in a fistfight—and Sam’s broken hand. One of Sam’s favorite games didn’t require an opponent at all. It was a single-player game called Elite, and it was his world alone to explore. Elite cast the player as the commander of a spaceship. The goal was to trick out your ship however you could—mining asteroids or looting. Sam reveled in the pixilated rebellion, being what he called a “space mugger.” Video games, perhaps because they were still so new, had long been seen as second-class medium, and gamers, as a result, felt a bit like outlaws, too. Now Elite was letting them live out their bad boy dreams, if only on screen.
The game wasn’t the prettiest or most realistic, but it offered something tantalizing: freedom. At the time, most titles kept players in a box—sort of like moving through a scripted shooting gallery—but Elite felt radically open. Players could chose from an array of galaxies, each with its own planets, to explore. It had become a phenomenon around England, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and earning its collegiate creators a following. Elite was so immersive, so transporting, it epitomized the essence of what a game, for Sam, could do: transport you to another world.
ONE BY ONE, the boys inched uniformly down the line—taking their plates of, say, shepherd’s pie, or steamed jam sponge and custard. They looked as neat and orderly as their trays. The dark blazers with the badges. The crisp white button-down shirts and dark ties. The charcoal pants and dark socks. The black leather dress shoes. All of the boys identical, almost, except the one seen around school with the Doc Martens boots poking out from under his slacks: Sam.
If Sam wanted to escape the real world, he would have to start here at St. Paul’s, the storied prep school on the River Thames. Since the 1500s, St. Paul’s had weaned some of the brightest young minds in the country, from Milton to Samuel Johnson. Now Sam and Dan, like many of the privileged young sons of London, had come to learn the finer things across forty-five leafy acres in Hammersmith: playing cricket on the lawns, studying Russian history, listening to the orchestra perform.
Yet as Sam’s unconventional choice of footwear proved, he had little interest in playing by the rules. Brash and iconoclastic, he was already living the rock-star lifestyle. He wore his hair long, let his shoes scuff, and was occasionally seen leaving school in a Rolls-Royce. By their teens, he and his brother dispensed of their dad’s music for something more vital: hip-hop.
Specifically, they dug Def Jam Recordings, an American music label already become legendary among hip kids in the know. Founded by a punk rocker named Rick Rubin in his New York University dorm room, the company had become the coolest and shrewdest start-up for the burgeoning East Coast rap scene. Rubin, along with his partner, club promoter Russell Simmons, began putting out singles from the freshest acts in the five boroughs. As a white Jewish kid from Long Island and a black guy from Queens, they were a unique and potent mix. They fused their love of rap and rock into acts with a decidedly mainstream flair, from a cocky kid named LL Cool J to a trio of bratty white rappers, the Beastie Boys.
They had more than great taste, though. Def Jam pioneered a new generation of guerrilla marketing. Simmons and Rubin had come from the urban underworld of street promotions—do-it-yourself campaigns used in both punk rock and rap to create word-of-mouth buzz. Simmons called it “running the track,” promoting each artist in as many ways as possible. They slapped stickers—bearing the iconic Def Jam logo, with its big letters D and J—on lampposts and buildings. They threw parties around New York, producing elaborate concerts with over-the-top props—such as the huge inflatable penises at the Beasties show.
Devout fans like Sam consumed not only Def Jam records, but the lifestyle. When Rubin’s single “Reign in Blood,” for the heavy metal band Slayer, came out, Sam hungrily bought it—slipping out the Def Jam patch that he wore like a badge of honor. Sam had taken on a way of ranting about his fixations. His mouth would motor, words firing like Missile Command bullets, hands gesturing, head swaying, as though he couldn’t contain the sheer awesomeness of his pop culture love.
“For me, a guy like Rick Rubin is such a fucking hero,” started one of his breathless rants, “to go from pioneering in that world to doing hip-hop and to doing the Cult. When he did that album Electric! When you can hear Rick Rubin and his sharp hip-hop street production coming out of these rockers from Newcastle! For me, seeing someone like him suddenly being in rock and the hardest form of rock—Slayer!—I was, like, ‘These guys don’t get any better, it doesn’t get cooler than that.’ And he kept on delivering . . . People like that inspire me so massively.”
Even better, Def Jam hailed from New York. Sam deeply admired the city, the fashion and culture and music. By day, he wore the stiff uniform of St. Paul’s, by night he fashioned the uniform of NYC. He sat in his room, piled with vinyl records and videotapes, weaving chunky shoelaces as the rappers in New York did. It wasn’t just a superficial love of fashion, it was about underdogs on the fringes who revolutionized a culture.
For Sam’s eighteenth birthday, his dad took him to New York. On arrival, Sam bought a leather jacket and Air Jordan Mach 4 sneakers, as he’d seen on MTV. He roamed the open world downtown, soaking in the sights and the sounds. The yellow taxis. The rising buildings. The surly pedestrians. The hookers in Times Square. “From that point I was chronically in love with the place,” he later recalled.
For lunch one afternoon, Sam’s dad took him out with his friend Heinz Henn, a marketing executive for BMG, the music label for the German company Bertelsmann. BMG, Henn explained, was struggling to cash in on youth culture. As Sam sat there listening, he couldn’t contain himself for long. “Why is everyone in the record business so old?” he asked, “Why don’t you have young people working in this business?”
Henn eyeballed this rich white kid dressed like Run DMC, then spoke to Sam’s dad. Who was this hot-tempered but very self-assured boy? “Your son is an utter lunatic,” Heinz told him, “but he has some good ideas.”
Sam had just scored himself a job.
Chapter 2 The Warriors (#uc7c28ef8-7d99-54c6-8283-ad232d9eaeec)
I’m ’bout to bust some shots off. I’m ’bout to dust some cops off.”
It was July 16, 1992, as the performer rapped onstage in Beverly Hills, but this wasn’t Ice-T, the artist who wrote these lyrics. It was the square-jawed superstar actor Charlton Heston. Though best known for his portrayal of Moses in the Ten Commandments, Heston brought his booming voice to the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a higher cause today: getting this song, “Cop Killer,” banned.
The occasion was the annual shareholders meeting of Time Warner, which owned the label that put out this record. Since the release of the track in March, “Cop Killer” had become a national controversy, decried by police groups and President Bush. Ice-T, who had written it in the wake of the recent Rodney King riots, defended it as an honest wake of the recent Rodney King riots, defended it as an honest portrayal of a character fed up with police brutality.
Yet the shareholders in the crowd today seemed to be believing everything Heston had to say. As he bellowed the refrain—“Die die die pig die!”—one man watched the performance in awe: Jack Thompson. Born-again and Republican, Thompson had the readiness of a schoolboy dressed for a yearbook photo. He wore his suits crisp, his prematurely graying hair neatly combed at the part, his blue eyes twinkling. He could feel the electricity of the moment. Heston had, as Thompson later put it, “lit the fuse on the culture war.”And this young warrior was ready to fight.
Compared to the NRA supporter onstage, however, Thompson hardly seemed like the warring kind. Growing up a scrawny straight-A student from Cleveland with a debilitating stutter, Thompson was so myopic that he’d run across the Little League field chasing balls that didn’t exist. His fellow players hated him. “It was fairly traumatic,” he later recalled. One day he acted out. He went into his garage, poured gasoline on the floor, tossed gunpowder caps around, and started pounding them with a hammer until they exploded in flames.
Thompson survived the prank but enjoyed the heat. An eighteen-year-old Robert Kennedy acolyte and liberal, he got his tires slashed and life threatened after leading a student protest to desegregate housing. He listened to Crosby Stills and Nash, and hosted a radio show at Dennison University.
But Jack had a Ripper growing inside. When a Black Panther student replaced the school’s American flag with a Black Power flag, Thompson confronted him. “What are you doing?” he asked. “We share the American flag!” The guy pulled a machete on him. Thompson recoiled, literally and philosophically. “It was a radical time, and you had to choose sides,” he later recalled. “I became a conservative over the lunacies of political correctness.”
With a William Buckley book tucked under his arm, Thompson entered law school at Vanderbilt University, alongside classmate Al Gore. He preferred playing golf to attending class and, despite graduating Phi Beta Kappa, flunked the bar. After moving to Miami and feeling like a failure, he accompanied a friend to a church service where everyone was dressed in shorts and T-shirts. Thompson felt at home and became born-again. Before retaking the bar, he prayed and, when he passed, took it as a sign from God to go on a crusade.
In 1987, after hearing a local shock jock on the air, Thompson hit the law books. With painstaking research, he discovered a little known fact at the time: the Federal Communications Commission had the power to regulate the airwaves for obscenity, and this station, in many ways, seemed to violate the standards. After Thompson took the unusual measure of filing a complaint with the FCC, the shock jock angrily broadcast his name and phone number. Death threats, unwanted pizza deliveries, and the local press followed, transforming Thompson into an overnight rock star of Miami’s right.
Confident, unflappable, and speedy with a sound bite, Thompson deftly played his part, faxing complaints to corporate sponsors until ads began to get pulled from the air. Despite the radio station’s legal proceedings against him, Thompson won the right in court to continue lobbying advertisers and the FCC under First Amendment protection. His hard work paid off in historic proportions when the FCC fined the shock jock’s station for indecency—the first time ever for such levies. Thompson took it as more divine purpose. “God’s people were going to be warriors with me through prayer,” he later wrote in his memoir.
Yet he already had others warring against him. Acting on the radio station’s assertion that Thompson was obsessed with pornography, the Florida bar convinced the state’s Supreme Court to determine whether Thompson was mentally ill. Faced with losing his license to practice law, Thompson underwent psychiatric testing. The test results concluded that he was “simply a lawyer and a citizen who is rationally animated by his activist Christian faith.” As Thompson later liked to joke, “I’m the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida.”
Empowered, Thompson assumed higher-profile battles. He took on incumbent Dade County state attorney Janet Reno for prosecutor, publicly challenging her to declare her sexuality. He made his name nationally by spearheading an obscenity conviction of rap group 2 Live Crew for their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. With the controversy fueling demand for the record, however, the group’s leader, Luther Campbell, laughed all the way to the bank.
Thompson was on his way, though—right to Charlton Heston’s side at the shareholders meeting over “Cop Killer.” With the impossible task of following Heston onstage, Thompson warned, amid the boos of protesters, that “Time Warner is knowingly training people, especially young people, to kill. One day this company will pay a wicked price for that.”
Thompson returned to Miami for the birth of his first son, whom he and his wife named John Daniel Peace. Three weeks later, on August 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew bore down. As his windows rattled and lightning slashed the sky, Thompson braced himself at the door in a scuba mask, holding it tight so that the glass wouldn’t blow through. His wife stood behind him holding little Johnny in a blanket. Thompson relished the biblical imagery and equated it to his own fight against what he called the “human hurricane” of rappers, pornographers, and shock jocks.
He survived the storm—and won the battle against Ice-T, who was dropped from Time Warner soon afterward. The ACLU voted Thompson one of 1992’s “Censors of the Year,” a title that made him proud. “Those on the entertainment ship were laughing at those on the other vessel,” he later wrote. “I felt that I had grabbed the wheel of the decency ship and rammed that other ship, convinced that the time for talk about how bad pop culture had become was over. It was time for consequence. . . . it was time to win this culture war.”
“COME ON, come on, come on, come on, take that, and party!”
Sam Houser stared into the smiling white faces of five clean-cut boys singing these words onstage. The group was Take That, a chart-topping boy band from Manchester, Britain’s answer to New Kids on the Block. In his new job as a video producer for BMG Entertainment, Sam was directing their full-length video, named for their debut hit, “Take That & Party.” For a kid weaned on crime flicks and hip-hop, this scene couldn’t be further from his more rebellious influences. The videos showed the boy band break-dancing, chest-bumping, and leaping from Jacuzzis. But it was a job—a creative job that fulfilled Sam’s lifelong ambition of working in the music industry.
By 1992, Sam had successfully retaken his lackluster A-Level tests and enrolled at University of London. Between classes, he headed over to intern part time at BMG’s office off the Thames on Fulham High Street. After his fateful lunch in New York, Sam had gotten his break interning in the mailroom at BMG—an accomplishment he took to heart, considering the obnoxious way he got in. Yet it epitomized his style: risking everything, including pissing people off, if it meant achieving his goals. “I got my first job by abusing senior executives at dinner tables,” he later recalled.
Sam already had his eyes elsewhere: the Internet. Though the World Wide Web had not yet become mainstream, Sam saw the opportunity to bring the kind of DIY marketing approach pioneered by Def Jam into the digital age. He convinced the BMG bosses that the best way to promote a new album by Annie Lennox was with something almost unheard of at the time, an online site. They relented, and Sam got to work. When Diva hit number one on the UK charts, it bolstered his cause.
BMG soon made waves in the industry by partnering with a small CD-ROM start-up in Los Angeles to create what the Los Angeles Times heralded as “the recording industry’s first interactive music label.” The newly formed BMG Interactive division saw the future not only in music CD-ROMs, but in a medium close to Sam’s heart, video games.
In 1994, the game industry was bringing in a record $7 billion— and on track to grow to $9 billion by 1996. Yet culturally, games were at a crossroads. Radical changes had been sweeping the industry, igniting a debate about the future of the medium and its effect on players. It started with the release of Mortal Kombat, the home version of the ubiquitous street fighting arcade game. With its blood and spine-ripping moves, Mortal Kombat brought interactive violence of a kind never seen before in living rooms.
Compared to innocuous hits such as the urban-planning game SimCity 2000 or Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers All-Stars, Mortal Kombat shocked parents and politicians, who believed video games were for kids. The fact that the blood-soaked version of the game for the Sega Genesis was outselling the bloodless version of the game on the family-friendly Nintendo Entertainment System three-to-one only made them more nervous.
The Mortal Kombat panic reached a sensational peak on December 9, 1993, when Democrat senator Joseph Lieberman held the first federal hearings in the United States on the threat of violent video games to children. While culture warriors had fought similar battles over comic books and rock music in the 1950s and over Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal in the 1980s, the battle over violent games had an urgently contemporary ring. It wasn’t only the content that they were concerned about, it was the increasingly immersive technology that delivered it.
“Because they are active, rather than passive, [video games] can do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence,” warned the president of the National Education Association. When a spokesperson for Sega testified that violent games simply reflected an aging demographic, Howard Lincoln—the executive vice president of Nintendo of America—bristled. “I can’t sit here and allow you to be told that somehow the video game business has been transformed today from children to adults,” he said.
Yet video games had never been only for kids in the first place. They rose up to prominence in the campus computer labs of the 1960s and the 1970s, where shaggy geeks coded their own games on huge mainframe PCs. From there, the Pac-Man fever of home consoles and arcade machines lured millions into the fold. By the early 1990s, legions of hackers were tinkering with their own PCs at home. A burgeoning underground of darkly comic and violent games such as Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom had become a phenomenon among a new generation of college students.
At the same time, Sam’s peers were riding a gritty new wave of art. Films such as Reservoir Dogs and music like Def Jam’s shunned cheesy fantasy for gutsy, pop-savvy realism. These products were bringing a lens to a world that had not previously been portrayed. When Los Angeles erupted in riots after the Rodney King beating, Sam watched—and listened—in awe to the music that reflected the changing times. The fact that Time Warner had dropped “Cop Killer” only seemed to underscore how clueless the previous generation had become.
Now the same battle lines were being drawn over games. To ward off the threat of legislation as a result of the Lieberman hearings, the U.S. video game industry created the Interactive Digital Software Association, a trade group representing their interests. The industry also launched the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to voluntarily assign ratings to their games, most of which fell under E for Everyone, T for Teen, or M for Mature. Less than 1 percent of the titles received an Adults Only or AO rating, the game industry’s equivalent of an X—and, effectively, the kiss of death because major retailers refused to carry AO games.
Yet with Mortal Kombat still burning around the world, the media eagerly fanned the flames. Nintendo, which ruled the industry, had sold a Disneylike image of gaming to the public, but this was now in jeopardy. Video games were “dangerous, violent, insidious, and they can cause everything from stunted growth to piles,” wrote a reporter for the Scotsman, “. . . an incomprehensible fad designed to warp and destroy young minds.”
While the medium was being infantilized by politicians and pundits, however, one of the biggest corporations in the entertainment business was taking up the fight. In 1994, in Japan, Sony was working to release its first-ever home video game console, the PlayStation, built on the idea that gamers were growing up. Phil Harrison, a young Sony executive tasked with recruiting European game developers, thought the game industry was being unfairly portrayed as “a toy industry personified by a lonely twelve-year-old boy in the basement.” Sony’s research told another story—gamers were older and had plenty of money of their own to spend.
The problem with reaching these players started with the hardware. Sony found that although children had no problem pretending their blobs of brown-and-peach pixels were Arnold Schwarzenegger, adults needed more realistic graphics to suspend disbelief and engage. The answer: CD-ROMs. Unlike the cartridges used by Nintendo, a CDROM could hold more content—including full-rendered video—and offer games that were more like what Harrison described as “sophisticated multimedia events.” Combining a high-end graphics machine with an entertainment console was sending a clear message to the industry: it was time for the medium to become more mainstream and grow up.
Sam couldn’t agree more. With the new BMG Interactive division pursuing game publishing, he desperately wanted in. Games were the future, he was sure, and he saw this as a medium through which a guy like him could finally leave his mark. The challenge was to change the meta-game, to bring the experience into a new era, just as the films and the music he loved had redefined their own industries.
Sam urged the BMG brass to give him a break. “I want a go at this,” he told them. “I want to get involved. I’m not involved, but there’s a lot of things I can bring to this situation.” Once again, his doggedness paid off. After graduating from college, he got transferred to the Interactive Publishing division. The game industry worked similar to the record industry. Just as labels put out CDs created by bands, publishers put out software created by developers. They oversaw the production of the game, doling out editorial direction while handling the business, marketing, and packaging. Developers dealt with the front-line creation of the games, from the art to programming.
Hits paid for flops, and if one out of ten games scored, that was enough. BMG’s early games (a backpacking title, a golf simulator), however, fell on the losing side. Yet Sam never gave up hope. Maybe he was crazy. Or maybe, somewhere out there, someone was making a game crazy enough for him.
Chapter 3 Race ’n’ Chase (#ulink_d260f20f-b573-5fca-8a8e-8316fc35c86e)
It would be a grand theft. Stealing the high score in another gang’s territory. Dave Jones couldn’t help himself, though. He could see the Galaga machine flashing inside the fish-and-chips shop like a beacon. The tall black cabinet with the red-eyed, bug-shaped alien warlord on the front. The spiraling electronic theme song. He wanted to touch it. Slip his coin in the vaginal slot, and pound the buttons. Zap the invaders, get the high score, and put his initials at the top.
Yet this was not the part of Dundee, the industrial town north of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he lived. This was Douglas, one of the rougher neighborhoods in a city known for being rough. Once famous for its jute, marmalade, and the invention of Dennis the Menace, Dundee’s economy had tanked by this time in the early 1980s, taking its working-class residents down with it. Teenage gangs with names such as the Huns and the Shams prowled the street, looking for a fight like some Scottish version of The Warriors. Anything could set them off. The wrong look. The wrong football jersey. And especially a gawky, carrot-topped geek in glasses like Jones.
Still in grade school, Jones lived with his parents across town near his dad’s small newspaper shop. When he wasn’t fishing for salmon in the River Tay, he played Space Invaders at the greeting card store near his bus stop. Every day before and after school, he’d make sure to keep the top score.
As he passed through Douglas on an errand, he couldn’t resist having a go at the Galaga machine. His coin dropped inside with a satisfy-ingly metallic plunk. Jones positioned his right pointer finger over the smooth red convex plastic button. He gripped the stick. Hit Start. The onslaught of alien insects on screen began. In a flurry of taps, Jones obliterated the invaders and took the top score—entering his initials for all to see. Who was the real player now?
But the local toughs lurking outside had seen enough. Just as Jones stepped out the door, the gang surrounded him. Who comes here and sets the high score on our turf? Jones ran down the gray cobblestone streets, past the old ladies with their bloated plastic shopping bags, past crusty men smoking unfiltered cigarettes under the overcast sky. The gang tackled him to the ground. As the blows came, he could do nothing but wait for the punches to end. Wait and hope that he would be alive long enough to limp back to the safety of his neighborhood and his own machines.
AS JONES AND HIS OWN GANG of Scottish geeks knew, something electric was coursing over the cobblestone streets of Dundee. A computer revolution had begun. It started at the big brown Timex plant in town, which was churning out the UK’s first popular wave of home computers, the Sinclair ZX81 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
The Spectrum, with its jet-black keyboard and rainbow streak on the side, looked like a control panel to another world. All you needed to know was the code, and you were in. Word had it that Spectrums were “accidentally” falling off delivery trucks—and winding up in the hands of aspiring hackers.
Jones’s high school was among the first in the United Kingdom to offer computer studies, a course that he immediately took. Gifted at math, he taught himself to program and build his own rudimentary machines. On graduation, he scored a job at the Timex plant as an apprentice engineer, but what he really wanted to do was make games. A homebrew computer game scene was percolating from San Francisco to Sweden. Gamers made and distributed their own titles on Apple II and Commodore 64 machines. Jones joined a ragtag gang of computer coders called the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, who met at the local technical college.
With cuts facing Timex, the company offered Jones £3,000 in voluntary redundancy pay—which he happily blew, in part, on a state-of-theart Amiga 1000 computer (much to the envy of his pals). Though Jones had begun to study software engineering at the local university, his professors and family thought he was nuts. “This is never going to take off,” they told him. “You’re never going to sell enough games to make a living.”
Yet Jones believed in his dreams. With his grades plummeting, he spent late nights in his bedroom at his parents’ house, hatching his plan. While the homebrew scene was dominated by fantasy and sci-fi games, Jones wanted to bring the fast action of arcade hits such as Galaga to home machines. His first game, a kill-the-devil shooter called Menace, was released in 1988 and sold an impressive fifteen thousand copies, earning critical acclaim and £20,000—enough for this car fanatic to buy a 16-valve Vauxhall Astra.
To capitalize on the buzz, he left school and started his own game company, DMA Design, a reference to a computer term, Direct Memory Access. Jones hired friends from the computer club and moved the team into a two-room office on the second floor of a narrow red-and-green building, just above a baby accessories shop called Gooseberry Bush. Pasty-faced with polygonal hair, they looked like extras from a Big Country video. By day, they’d code; by night, hit up the local pubs or compete in games at their office. It was Animal House for nerds. They trashed the office so much that Jones’s wife insisted on coming over to clean the toilet.
This wasn’t just fun and games, though. DMA exemplified the DIY spirit of the times: all you needed was a computer and a dream. Jones was on a mission to make games as cool and fast as his sports car. “We have three to five minutes to capture people,” as he once said. “I don’t care how great your game is, you have three to five minutes.” The edict worked again. Blood Money, billed as “the ultimate arcade game,” came out in 1989 and sold more than thirty thousand copies in two months. Jones felt elated. He was on his way.
In the competitive arena of game making, developers would compete to exploit the latest, greatest programming innovations. One day, a DMA programmer discovered how to animate as many as a hundred characters on screen at a time and made a demo for the team. Jones watched in awe as a line of tiny creatures stupidly marched to their deaths—smashed by a ten-ton weight or incinerated in the mouth of a gun. It was just the sort of dark Scottish humor that got everyone laughing. Let’s make a game out of that!
They called it Lemmings. The object was to save the creatures from dying. Jones’s crew devilishly dreamed up the most punishing fates for the little beasts: falling into holes, getting crushed by boulders, being incinerated in lakes of fire, or getting ripped to shreds by machines. To survive, you had to assign each creature a skill, from digging to climbing, building to bashing. With more than 120 scenes of zig-zagging creatures, the game didn’t only play—it teemed with life.
Lemmings was released on Valentine’s Day 1991 with a warning label: “We Are Not Responsible For: Loss of sanity. Loss of Sleep. Loss of Hair.” Lemmings became an immediate hit, selling fifty thousand copies on its first day alone. The game would go on to earn DMA more than £1.5 million, selling nearly 2 million copies worldwide. “To say that Lemmings took the computer gaming world by storm would be like saying that Henry Ford made a slight impact on the car market,” one reporter wrote.
Just twenty-five, Jones was one of the wealthiest—and most famous—game designers on the planet. His journey from drop-out to millionaire made him one of the industry’s biggest success stories. Ecstatic, he treated himself with his flashiest sports car yet, a Ferrari. Jones hit the road, speeding through the grim city past the gangs. If only there was a game in that.
“FUCK! Fuck! Fuck!”
It was just another day at DMA, and the biggest and most pungent coder on the team was having one of his tantrums again. Game making could be a mind-numbing craft—fashioning living worlds from abstract code—and sometimes this guy had to blow off steam. But as he stood banging his head against a wall and shouting, he saw a sprightly Japanese man beside him. “Oh, my God,” muttered another coder nearby, “that’s Miyamoto!”
Sure enough—it was him, Shigeru Miyamoto, the elfin genius of Nintendo, the inventor of Mario. Not long before, it would have been unthinkable that the biggest name in gaming would grace this little indie start-up in Dundee. Yet with the extraordinary success of Lemmings, Jones had scored a multimillion-pound contract to create two games for the Nintendo 64. “We think David Jones is one of the very few people in the world that are in the Spielberg category,” Howard Lincoln, now the president of Nintendo of America, told the press. Miyamoto, who took the screaming coder in stride, had come to experience the magic of DMA firsthand.
Flush with cash, DMA had moved to a 2,500-square-foot office in a mirrored, militaristic building inside the Dundee Technology Park on the west end of town. Jones invested £250,000 in outfitting their rooms with the best technology they could buy. DMA was said to have one of England’s biggest installations of refrigerator-size Silicon Graphics computers—so big that the minister of defense expressed security concerns. DMA needed the muscle power to bring Jones’s geekiest dream to life: “a living, breathing city.”
Virtual worlds were the stuff of science fiction but still not much of a reality in gaming. The appeal was obvious. Real life could be unpredictable and frustrating, but a synthetic world was something you could control. Jones had, as he put it, “a fascination with how alive and dynamic we could make the city from very little memory and very little processing speed. How could we make something living inside the machine?”
Jones set his team free to come up with their answers. Programmer Mike Dailly engineered a cityscape from a top-down point of view. Another DMAer coded dinosaurs running through the streets. Another replaced the dinosaurs with something cooler, more contemporary, and closer to the boss’s heart: cars. As Dailly watched the little virtual cars speed through the city, he thought, “We have something.”
Jones liked the concept of Cops and Robbers—casting players as the police out to bust the bad guys. “Cops and robbers is a natural rule set that everybody understands,” he said. “They know how to drive a car. They know what a gun does.” Thinking Cops and Robbers too generic a title, they renamed it Race ’n’ Chase instead.
Walking into DMA was like seeing a bunch of grown men playing with a Hot Wheels set—except on their PCs. From the overhead view onscreen, tiny pixilated cars cruised the streets, blips of people climbed onto buses and trains that stopped along their routes. Jones pushed for a more and more realistic simulation. Though cars could speed down the street, they had to stop at traffic lights that blinked from red to green. Jones watched gleefully as his little world teemed with life.
When a demo was ready, he took the game to a prospective publisher in London, BMG Interactive. The company wooed Jones heartily, eager to get into business with the UK’s boy wonder of gaming. Jones left with a deal to deliver four games over the next thirteen months for Sony, Sega, and Nintendo. He retained ownership and received an estimated £3.4 million. “They will treat computer companies in the same way that they treat their music companies,” Jones effused to a reporter.
Back in the BMG office, Sam and the others booted up Race ’n’ Chase. There was just one problem: the game kind of sucked.
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