Jacked
The unauthorized
behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto
DAVID KUSHNER
To Andy Kushner
Contents
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
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.
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