All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (34 page)

When Sam viewed a demo of one of the essential game play tropes, he was certain the Grand Theft Auto III would be a runaway success. In fact, everyone at Rockstar believed that the ability to carjack any vehicle a player found during his or her escapades was an inventive step forward, not only for the series, but for games in general—especially because it was set in a 3-D world this time. It made you feel like an absolute monster of crime, but in a good way. Stealing virtual cars would permit you to feel independent, wild, free of guilt, even sin, because that was what you were supposed to
do in this gangster-filled world. But it wasn’t just about jacking. For the game to feel more real, the team, always editing and re-editing, changed the cut scenes. Instead of being 2-D, they became little 3-D movies enhanced by motion capture, a technique in which a computer and camera record an actor’s movement and translate it into a digital representation. Rockstar didn’t have money for actors, so workers themselves donned mocap suits and “acted.” But celebrities were involved in the voice-over. Kyle MacLachlan, Debi Mazar, Joe Pantoliano, and Michael Madsen, working for a very low day rate, added their distinctive talents to the game. Because of his work in the record industry, Sam (with the aid of Donovan) was able to cut deals to license Giorgio Moroder’s
Scarface
film soundtrack and music from the estimable English jungle drum and bass label, Moving Shadow. The enthusiasm in New York and in Edinburgh was palpable.

Six months before the game arrived on shelves, a very proud Sam and Benzies took Grand Theft Auto III to E3. At the demo booth, they waited to show their baby off to the world’s press and retailers. They waited. And waited.

“Where are the people, Les?” Sam asked in exasperation with the game controller in his hands.

“Shit. Dunno,” said Benzies, looking around. “Seem to be at the State of Emergency kiosk.” While State of Emergency was a decent game, full of terrorism, political assassinations, and populist unrest, Sam couldn’t see why it was getting all the kudos when it was clear to him that GTA III was so much better made. After the E3 debacle, Sam never really had a substantial presence at the convention again.

Sam tried his best to turn the perceived slight into a hunger that he could use to drive the team to make the game even better. But just as he began readying his fiery personality for the game’s launch, he and Dan, from a Thompson Street apartment, watched the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. In the early moments
of the disaster, Sam feared that the buildings might tip and cause a domino effect right into SoHo and farther up into Greenwich Village. For an intensely nerve-wracking two weeks, during which the country as a whole was on edge, the Housers talked about bagging the game altogether. Like everyone in Manhattan at the time, they didn’t know when terrorism would strike again. Manhattan smelled noxious, like burning chemicals, and there were posters of the missing plastered everywhere. Sam told Dan, “This beautiful city has been attacked, and now we’re making a violent crime drama set in a city that’s not unlike New York City. My God, I’m terrorized where I live, and on top of that, we’ve got this fucking crazy game that is not exactly where people’s heads are at right now.” But they had done
so
much fine work. In the end, they simply edited the game. Since Grand Theft Auto III was based in a fictional New York City called Liberty City, Rockstar immediately removed any vestige of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers from the game. They changed the paint on the police cars from NYPD blue and white to LCPD black and white. And they completely excised a character who was an activist hell-bent on bringing down Liberty City’s economy.

When the game was released on the technologically advanced PlayStation 2 in October, it sold 80,000 copies in its first week. In the second week, it sold 150,000 copies. The game received nearly universal acclaim and
Game Informer
wrote, “It’s a game you could play for weeks—maybe even months—and still discover something new every day.” As time passed, it just kept selling and selling, like vinyl out of the seventies, when music was the only thing that mattered. It kept selling like Pink Floyd’s
The Dark Side of the Moon
, more than fifteen million copies.

Sam, Dan, and Rockstar North had approached game making with a granular rock ’n’ roll intensity that has rarely been matched by designers. Their mission was to make movie- and music-inspired games that they were certain would have a great supremacy in the
gamer’s mind, games that made action films look puny in comparison. Stating that Dan Houser’s writing is merely influenced by film, especially the gangster genre, is to offer only a couple of scenes from the whole movie. Mentioning that the writing often wins because of its grinding, gnashing satire and searing social commentary gets closer to the point. Dan Houser can occasionally be long-winded. But he is among the better narrative writers in our popular culture today, not only in videogames, but in any medium. He and his team are not writing a linear story. Rather, the narrative is like a 3-D chess game of sorts, often very different from the linear structure of a movie and fairly different from even a narratively experimental book like Peter Carey’s
My Life as a Fake
, which frequently moves around in time. So he is a master of popular writing, especially because he is dealing with a genre of games that is open-ended. You can go anywhere, and wherever you go, treading down whatever dark alley you choose, you are eventually funneled through the story to its conclusion. And once you hear the words spoken, watch the action that ensues, and then participate in the story, exploring Liberty City, San Andreas, or Vice City becomes more than a game. The rough, tough Bukowski-esque dialog sticks with you just like opening paragraphs of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, where shotgun blasts are heard as “somber explosions.” Therefore, you don’t play the game as much as you get to know a world and its people. And you feel as though you are the first to do so. You live it and you dream it. That’s what makes the game’s endings all the more satisfying and breathtaking. There is a sad joy in the final mission of Grand Theft Auto III. After hearing the venomous invectives of the harpy-voiced Catalina, the game’s antagonist and possibly a cannibal, you speed away and ultimately shoot down her helicopter over the sprawling Cochrane Dam in Cedar Grove, in an explosion one game character calls “better than the fireworks on the Fourth of July.” You know you’ve done what you have to do, but there’s not much joy in it. Even when you
get the girl, she talks and talks inanely. As the game ends and the screen becomes black, the crack of a gunshot pierces. Did you kill her? Did she kill you?

Not everyone saw Grand Theft Auto III as a jewel of popular art. Walmart was so worried that kids would play the game that it began checking the IDs of every buyer. For a while, Australia banned the game due to its violent and sexual content. Politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman railed against it, saying the violence was horrendous and that the Housers “have a responsibility not to do it if we want to raise the next generation of our sons to treat women with respect.” After seeing GTA III, Jack Thompson, a conservative activist lawyer, made it his crusade to ban the spread of violent videogames. The Housers didn’t react publicly, but privately they shook their heads. They had made the game for adults. Through the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, they had labeled it with a Mature rating, hopefully ensuring that no one under seventeen would purchase the game.

“I don’t get it,” said Dan of the controversy. “This isn’t a toy. It’s expressly not for kids.”

“It’s clearly for older people,” agreed Sam. “It’s relevant to me. I’m older now. I don’t want to play as penguin. I want to play as a man and do things that a man does.”

With Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Rockstar added new ingredients to what Sam began to call The Vibe, which, he said was “like injecting blood like Tina Turner did to [The Who’s] Tommy as the Acid Queen. They put Tommy in that weird sarcophagus thing and she starts injecting him, and he comes out happy” as a blissed-out baby for the good part of the drug trip. Then, he goes in again and comes out covered in snakes for the bad portion. So à la Tommy in that film scene, the game would be rife with these supreme emotional highs and lows. Sam, a fan of the 1980s pop culture, suggested that the team create a game that melded the TV show
Miami Vice
with
Scarface
with the music of the era. He was greeted with “Everyone’s trying to
forget
the eighties. This is idiotic.” But he had watched every episode of
Miami Vice
again and was certain a game that took place in the culturally maligned decade would be perfect. So Rockstar moved into a licensing deal with Epic Records that included a call to Michael Jackson to convince him to add “Billie Jean” to the game and to a separate, seven-disk box set of CDs. Sony’s record chief Tommy Mottola came by Rockstar’s SoHo office to confirm that the eighties still resonated with Americans, and not always in an ironic way. It was as though Sam finally had his record company, except it was tucked neatly within Rockstar Games.

With Lazlow Jones, a former radio host, Dan created in-game radio stations that featured well-known DJs and commercials brimming with parody. Some programs could be so humorous, you had to pull off to the side of the road during a mission to avoid crashing. Rockstar continued to add celebrity voices to the GTA experience as well, including Dennis Hopper as porn director Steve Scott and Burt Reynolds as the corrupt real estate tycoon Avery Carrington. Dan, a fan of Reynolds since the Smokey and the Bandit movies, went down to the recording session in Tribeca expecting to find a guy so affable, they might raise a glass together. For some reason, Reynolds was uncomfortable with Dan in the studio, and began crying, “Get the limey out of here. I’m not going to work if this limey Brit is in here!” The atmosphere became so tense that Reynolds and Dan were chest to chest and fisticuffs were about to break out. The two had to be separated by the studio’s engineer.

In all its games, Rockstar continued to enrich a dark but lively underworld with essential humor. That hilarity in the writing was even more a part of The Vibe during the ambitious Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when, on Bounce FM, DJ Funktipus spews the barb, “I’m the Funktipus and I got my tentacles wrapped around your San Andreas. Ain’t my fault.” And you wonder, “Who the hell
is this guy? I wanna hang with him, buy him a beer, and get him really loaded so he can spill some tales. Come on, Funkitpus. Tell me about that crazy night with George Clinton. Oh. Wait. You
ARE
the voice of George Clinton.” Beyond the radio stations and their over-the-top on-air personalities, the adventure within the state of San Andreas was inspired by four real states: California, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon. In a way, San Andreas was the ultimate road trip, one that was menacing and rapturous at the same time.

It was also a role playing game inspired by the old Tomagotchi toys. Sam once took a friend’s virtual pet and sadistically overfed it until it died. His friend was angered, but Sam never forgot the almost mad scientist feeling of experimentation he got when watching what would happen as he stuffed more food down the little monster’s gullet. Similarly in San Andreas, tough thug CJ’s demeanor and physicality would change if he chowed down too much. Sam saw that one game tester had made CJ become massively fat. Like a character out of Tod Browning’s
Freaks
, this CJ wore tighty whities, a cape, a bandit’s mask, and an Afro. In a kind of a media bridge of game to old-school fiction, the tester crafted a short story around all the things he was doing with CJ in San Andreas. All this RPG-ness was completely integrated through his actions while playing. It was incredibly subtle game design. There were no on-screen buttons or sliders you could use to change your character’s size. But it was still there. While there was evil and violence everywhere, like Doom gone urban and hyperreal, it was The Sims and SimCity as well. It was life in a blender spawned by game genres in a blender.

But as the game continued to pile on the sales, and the media attention, life outside the game took a treacherous turn for the brothers. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Take-Two and founder Ryan Brant, the son of billionaire publisher and horse breeder Peter M. Brant, with severe accounting irregularities, pointing to income that had been inflated by $60 million in 2000 and 2001.
(A disgraced Brant would eventually resign from Take-Two, purportedly for medical reasons.) Brant’s troubles hit Sam hard, because the executive had believed in him enough to give him a life-changing break.

Sam had been living in San Diego and working at the Rockstar division there since May 2005 and was witness to the beginning of a fascinating open world game called Red Dead Redemption. He still was riding high from the success of San Andreas and felt the follow-up to 2004’s Red Dead Revolver, a Western-themed offering about rough-riding cowboys, was something he always was meant to do. Sam immersed himself in work, trying to enjoy the fact that he was creating art with a hardworking team that was taking the sandbox genre to a different time in history.

Then, lightning struck a second time. When an incident that occurred in June became public in early July, those who disdained Rockstar for its game content found more reason to become unhinged. A Dutch techie named Patrick Wildenborg had used some self-created code to open up the PC version of San Andreas. Inside, he discovered a locked portion of the game that featured the gangster character CJ having what amounted to R-rated sex in various positions with a girlfriend. (Without Wildenborg’s software key, all you heard were the sounds of passion.) Soon, the modder’s program was all over the Web. It went viral and thousands upon thousands were playing the sexual mini-game called Hot Coffee.
*

In San Diego, Sam had been thinking what a good life he was living. His son had just been born. He had just bought a country house with his brother. Maybe now he could relax a bit. And so could all of Rockstar. Then he read about Hot Coffee on a message
board. Immediately he had a sinking feeling. Everything moved in slow motion. Hot Coffee tore away the short-lived feelings of peace and accomplishment. He called up the New York office of Rockstar. Was this true? How could it be? How could this have happened? Sam remembered that a level designer had proposed the addition of the mini-game in question. But when the content was seen, the code had been nixed by all involved in making decisions, especially those at Rockstar North in Edinburgh. The snippet shouldn’t have remained on the disk—no way, no how. But there it was, and critics were coming out of the woodwork to lambast Rockstar. Sam called Dan. “They’re acting like this was meant to be in the game. It’s unfinished. Not meant to be in the game!”