Jacked: The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto

Jacked

The unauthorized

behind-the-scenes story

of Grand Theft Auto

DAVID KUSHNER

Dedication

To Andy Kushner

Contents

Title Page

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

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

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

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 Space Invaders 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

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.”