All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (35 page)

Dan said, “You can see the usual quality isn’t there. Everyone should see that this wasn’t intentional.”

Sam continued, “This not how CJ would be with a girl. This was a very crude initial implementation. Had we completed it, it would have been more stylish, dare I say it, more romantic, more chic, a little bit more Barry White. But what’s there—it’s crude and embarrassing and childish, not what we as a company are about.” Indeed, CJ was a well-rounded character whose sad backstory included the murder of both his mother and his brother. He was also being blackmailed; in essence, CJ was trapped in a gang world he never made. It makes sense that a finished Hot Coffee would have shown CJ’s softer side.

The Housers and Rockstar were trapped, and the nightmare had only begun. Take-Two asked to see all pertinent Rockstar e-mails—including all of Sam’s missives—as they searched for a smoking gun that might prove the Housers had intentionally added the mini-game to spark controversy. They found none. By mid-July, New York senator Hillary Clinton had called for the Federal Trade Commission to look into the genesis of the game material and how it got on the game disk. She assured her constituents that she was
calling for a full and complete investigation in order to keep “inappropriate videogame content out of the hands of young people.” Politicians around the country condemned the game, including New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who, while campaigning for governor, called the release of the game “irresponsible behavior” from which our nation’s children needed protection. The Los Angeles district attorney called to obtain the Rockstar e-mails. The scandal was feeding upon itself. Powerful conservatives throughout the country feared that the game’s content could cause irreparable damage to kids.

Sam told Dan, “These guys are out to get us. They’ll garrotte us whatever we do. They don’t give a shit. This is
crazy
. They’re throwing serrated-edged boomerangs like the little kid in
Mad Max 2.
”

Sam had always been a little neurotic; he would probably agree with former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s famous motto, “Only the paranoid survive.” Worry was an essential part of his personality because it helped him to get things done, a quality that allowed him to drive the various divisions within the company forward to complete deadlines. But when the FTC hauled nine Rockstar employees, including Sam and Benzies, down to Washington, DC, for their investigation, it changed Sam forever.

Like a character in his own game, Sam had become Public Enemy Number One—except in real life it wasn’t nearly so much fun. In January 2006, Sam sat down in an uncomfortable chair in a small-ish room at FTC headquarters. Behind him was his cadre of three lawyers. In front of him were three agents of the commission. To his left in front of the agents was a two-foot-high stack of paper, including thousands of his e-mails to employees during the making of San Andreas. The fussy FTC agents went through the highlighted portions of each page, grilling him for nine hours. When they saw certain words he used in his correspondence, they would raise their eyebrows and ask, “What do you mean by this language?”

Sam, fearing that his use of the “F” word would make the FTC believe he’d surely done something wrong, explained that he used salty language in an effort to get the job done during crunch time. Then the agents came across a more recent e-mail that read, “Why are they so concerned about what we’re doing in the game when we’re bombing the hell out of people in Operation Enduring Freedom trying to keep our freedom, and they’re back here trying to curb the freedom that we’re paying the taxes to fight for?” Sam stood by his statement, saying he wasn’t particularly political. “But if you’re blasting people over there in the name of freedom, why are you clipping our freedom of speech over here? Those things seem to me to be at odds with each other.” The FTC eventually found nothing out of order with the e-mails and no grand conspiracy to pervert the youth of America with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

Even after it was over, Sam was powerfully affected by the ordeal. For some time, he had spells during which he felt terrified. He wanted to leave the country. Some of his friends, who’d been with him since the beginning, began to bail on the company. Terry Donovan left his CEO position because of the emotional tumult the investigation had caused in him. While in the UK on business, Sam had an episode on a train from Scotland to London while heading over to visit his parents. After he heard via his cell phone that the New York City district attorney was thinking about investigating Rockstar, he felt a desperate need to drop out. In what he dubbed his Black Dog period, he literally wanted to give everything up, leave Rockstar, leave his brother and his family to go live in isolation in a cave, well, somewhere. Back in New York City, his doctor said the Hot Coffee incident had left Sam badly injured, like a victim in an emotional car crash. In the end, it was the making of GTA IV that fueled Sam’s recovery. Sure, he and the others at Rockstar were outsiders again, maybe even more so than before. Sure, they were reviled. But Rockstar would come back because they had a point to
make. Rockstar did not let Hot Coffee chill their speech. They would pull no punches with GTA IV, which would be hailed as the most grittily brave game they had ever created. It would sell 3.6 million copies on its first day and earn $500 million in its first week. The success showed throughout popular culture. Coke riffed on the Grand Theft Auto theme, except the grungy lead in the extravagantly animated commercial gave back an old lady’s stolen purse, put out a fire, and gave away the soft drink as the motley cast of characters broke out into the “Give a Little Love” jingle. Comedian Dave Chappelle parodied the series with spot-on humor (and an Uzi). And in the off-Broadway play
The Common Air
, a loquacious DJ tried to be hip by talking to a kid in an airport terminal about GTA III.

Rockstar had sped through the blackness to continually make the finest games for adults on the planet. With their dangerously anarchic edge, cynical humor, and hip-hop swagger, Rockstar’s creations resonate with legions of the disaffected across the world to an extent that no games before them have achieved. And if Rockstar bottles the spirit of rebellion for the young and old-ish who feel browbeaten, subjugated, and downtrodden, well, that’s fitting enough—for that’s what the Housers feel they still are and always will be, no matter how much money they make. Because they had almost lost it all, Sam and Dan will always have that haunted edge, that gnawing suspicion and lingering fear that combined with their innate creativity to stimulate greatness. Just as a Jedi can always count on the Force, The Vibe will always be with Rockstar.

It was hated. It was disdained by the gamers who loved Grand Theft Auto and, really, by anyone who called himself a hard-core gamer. Those hard-core gamers said the new genre of casual games was generic, repetitive, and thoroughly unexciting.

In 1999, much of Sony Online Entertainment’s early work was with casual games. The seasoned gamers on the team hated them too. In addition, the editorial staff initially abhorred what it saw as a lowest common denominator audience. Sony’s PlayStation 2, which played games and DVDs, had been released that past March to great acclaim; it was this console that almost everyone cared most about, and the online videogame space where people played bridge or bingo inside their Web browsers was anathema to the serious gamer’s sense of what was paramount in games: to find and seek out the new. But Sony’s
market research was showing that the people who flocked to games such as online poker and
Jeopardy!
were non-gamers—middle-aged women, busy housewives, or single mothers who had a few minutes here and there to play games that were not terribly involved as far as game play was concerned. And Sony had found that these middle-American gamers were loyal and hard-core in their own way. Women were the driving force behind Sony’s huge, caring community, and they comprised the majority of the eight million registered members for the company’s gaming portal, The Station. When The Station held contests, the floodgates opened and thousands of entries were received.
*

Even though game critics looked as if they’d been sprayed by a skunk when the phrase “casual games” was mentioned, no one could ignore the immeasurable potential of these small online applications. Truth be told, many of these offerings weren’t so very unlike the classic games of the eighties—like Pac-Man. As casual games blossomed, they were geared to women more than men—even though most were still made by men. By 2001, a billion-dollar industry had been born. Since the cost of making the games wasn’t high, eager young game designers could set themselves up in a dorm room to work solo or with two or three fellow henchmen. The only problem was the inherent similarity among the games. Like Nolan Bushnell with Pong, the game makers seemed to want to release endless versions of the same game. The conundrum was a little like Aesop’s ancient “The Crow and the Pitcher” fable. You had to add “pebbles,” the games, to bring up the water consumers would drink. But the pebbles couldn’t be too different or they wouldn’t fit in the pitcher, in this case the niche of casual games. Would different pebbles change the taste of the water? Would those who wanted to drink even care if the water tasted too different?

Flashback to 1997. In the wilds of Indiana, two teenage college students who epitomized the word “slacker” met in a computer science class in Indianapolis. They would soon find out more about casual games than behemoths like Sony would learn over the next decade. John Vechey and Brian Fiete were teenagers who didn’t quite fit into the Purdue University milieu. Fiete had already learned more about computer coding on his own than any instructor could teach him. He’d been mesmerized by games ever since he could remember. As a child, he was drawn to the most violent games he could find in the Sumpter, South Carolina, backcountry. He spent hours in Aladdin’s Castle, Bally’s arcade chain, playing the vengeful ninja in Shinobi and thrilling to flying games where planes bombed vessels below into smithereens. In school, he amused himself making Pac-Man clones and text-based role playing games. But what Fiete really wanted to do was to make a game that many people could play at once via a modem. He felt that playing games online with others was the future.

For his part, John Vechey wanted to plunge into game making headfirst—forget the books. For him, college seemed to slow things. He had come from a lower-middle-class family in northern Wisconsin that occasionally ate government-provided cheese during hard times. His mother, an independent spirit, married many times. Once, she and a stepdad built a cabin in the woods to save money. John, too, inherited his mother’s freewheeling, do-it-yourself mentality. At Purdue, Fiete and Vechey met as freshmen in a computer programming class and immediately started talking about games. It was clear within minutes that they were on the same wavelength.

“You want to make a game?” asked Fiete even before the third class of the first semester was over.

“Hell, yeah,” enthused Vechey. “I don’t know anything about it, but just tell me what you want me to do.”

“Well.” Fiete often spoke in measured tones, carefully choosing his words. “I have this idea for an Internet game. I need someone to do graphics.”

“I can do it. No problem. I mean, I don’t know much of anything about art. But I can try. I can start right away. I mean, the Internet! Let’s do it.” Vechey wanted everything to happen yesterday. He was impatient, even with the progress of the Internet. He became puzzled when he saw America Online for the first time. He liked the service, but he was flummoxed that you couldn’t play games against another person online. He thought that was a slam dunk.

Vechey started working on drawings right away, finishing them in a day or so. He showed Fiete his sketches, including one for a spaceship.

Fiete perused the drawings for a minute, and his eyes stopped on the spaceship. “That doesn’t look like a UFO,” he said, scratching his head. “It looks like a woman’s nipple!” Both started cracking up.

The two holed up in their dorm rooms, taking about four months to make the first version of their online game. After changing the game from a turn-based strategy effort to an action game, they changed its name from Ambush to ARC. The trickiest challenge was pounding out networking code so the game could be used on the Internet without choppiness. Both Fiete and Vechey had played games, like Quake, online that were perfect for higher speed connections but slowed appreciably with a dial-up modem. Fiete’s clean code combined with Vechey’s rudimentary graphics added up to no latency, even on slow connections. They found a cheap host and bought a used 486 computer because those with Intel Pentium chips were too expensive at the time.