As the press spread, BMG and DMA rode the back of Clifford’s hamster. “Once those quotes got quoted, we were happy to have them out there because, of course, they generated interest in the game,” Dale later said.
To keep the controversy brewing, they launched a radio ad campaign featuring excerpts of the House of Lords debate. At a video game convention, they left fake parking tickets on cars that read “Penalty: For Having a Flash Car is to have it nicked and driven in a high-speed car chase with gunplay involving the Police until it is spectacularly written off. You have been warned.” The GTA logo appeared below in red-and-orange letters with a trail of flames, along with the tagline, “it’s criminal not to.”A GTA promotional poster showed a car careening in the street. A list of crimes was printed along the side: “Murder, drug busts, hijacking, smuggling, bank raids, police bribes, road rage, bribery, extortion, armed robbery, unlawful carnal knowledge, adultery, pimping, petty thievery, and double parking!” The penal code for Grand Theft Auto appeared on the game’s cover. Said Baglow, “The BBFC didn’t really get the joke.”
Yet the joke was also on him. One night he was driving home when he brushed against a tree. It was a minor fender-bender for his beat-up old car. When Clifford heard about it, however, a sparkle of possibility flashed in his eyes. Baglow later cracked open the News of the World to find the story that had been entertainingly spun.
“Sick car game boss was banned from driving,” it read. “The computer buff behind the sick car-carnage game Grand Theft Auto was once banned from the road after writing off a car. Programmer Brian Baglow was at the wheel of his high-powered Ford Fiesta XR2 when it careered out of control and smashed into a tree. Baglow was arrested and taken to court, where he received a year-long ban for careless driving. ‘It was unfortunate, but you learn,’ said the businessman, who stands to make a fortune from the game this Christmas.”
While Baglow laughed off the controversy, Jones wasn’t taking it so well. When asked how he felt about the press, he said, “Good and bad.” Clifford, in a way, had done his job too well. Jones couldn’t believe how many people were willing to criticize an unfinished game that they had yet to even see. He wasn’t the golden boy of Lemmings anymore.
The press lamented that “the computer genius who developed the best-selling Lemmings was at the centre of a storm . . . over a new game which encourages players to steal cars and knock down pedestrians in a hit-and-run joyride.” As the Sunday Times later put it, “It is quite a shock to realize that the charming naivety of Lemmings and the Grand Guignol bloodthirst of Grand Theft Auto were both developed by a reticent Dundonian, Dave Jones.”
With the BBFC threatening to refuse classification, the game developers had a serious problem on their hands, potentially causing them to miss the lucrative holiday season. BMG commissioned a psychologist from Nottingham Trent University to study the game, which he ultimately approved for adults. Baglow defended the game’s wanted levels to the press. “We are being moral,” he said. “Every time the player does something illegal, that increases the determination of the police to catch them, and they will be caught. In fact, we stress that crime does not pay.”
Finally, just before the game’s release, came the ruling on GTA. “We are confronted with new problems and new forms of violence,” the BBFC said in a statement. “This kind of video has already provoked concern in Parliament and government. They involve the player in potentially criminal behavior and the infliction of violence on innocent parties. Such subject matter is unprecedented.” But not something to ban. The game would be rated for players eighteen and over.
Max Clifford had scored big time and soon let the cat out of the bag. “We got it across to twelve to thirteen million people because it’s controversial,” he said. “Do you think the News of the World would have come out with a piece like they did just because it was a great game? I don’t.”
Jones tried to transform the controversy into a teaching moment. In the final weeks leading up to the release, the team had been coding around the clock to improve the handling of the cars (each of which now drove with the appropriate physics, like big vehicles with sluggish maneuvering) and work out the bugs. He didn’t want their achievements to get lost in the noise. “People assume that computer games are for kids, and that’s very wrong,” he said. “The trouble is when people judge games on hearsay and out of context. Grand Theft Auto is all in the best possible taste.”
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1997, gamers in England got their first spin at GTA. The plan was to release it first in the United Kingdom, then, some time later, in the United States. By now, however, the release of GTA seemed like an afterthought to the hype, with it having already been declared, as the Guardian put it, “the most controversial game in a decade.” This left DMA and BMG with the unenviable by-product of such an elaborate PR campaign: living up to the buzz. The cheeky tagline under DMA’s credit read “Disgusts Governments, Policemen, and Parents.”
Yet it didn’t take long to get the verdict. As GTA’s producers feared, some players thought it paled in comparison to games such as Tomb Raider. One player dismissed its “horrendous game play due to the crappy controls. Graphics are terrible. I’ve seen better on 8 bit systems. When you answer the phone, it sounds like you are talking to a chipmunk.”
The guys at BMG found such criticisms infuriating. “What the fuck does that mean?” Dan once said. “If it’s fun to play, it doesn’t matter how it looks!” Yet as more reviews came in, there were plenty of gamers who didn’t care about the graphics at all. “Though not up to the moral standards, Grand Theft Auto is great fun, in a twisted sort of way,” wrote one gamer in a review. “GTA is quite addictive, as there is so much freedom in the way one can accomplish the different missions.” “GTA is a gas,” another effused. “You find yourself becoming immersed in the role of being the best criminal in the city.”
Across the United Kingdom, a small but passionate cult following began to form. One day, the guys at DMA found a website where gamers had assembled a timetable to keep track of the trains that randomly pass through the cities of GTA. A story spread that a shopkeeper had come back to find that his store had been broken into, and all of the copies of GTA had been stolen. Though the numbers were modest, the game sold steadily out of the gate, churning more and more copies out by word of mouth, while others would have long gone by the wayside. GTA was moving about ten thousand copies a week. Before long, total sales were approaching five hundred thousand—at roughly £50 a clip— bringing revenues of £25 million. Considering that the game cost roughly £1 million to make—largely, the cost of salaries—the game more than earned its right to a sequel.
Though Sam wasn’t in a position yet to get rich off the game, he seemed vindicated. The twenty-seven-year-old had long admired Rick Rubin—an iconoclast who changed the music industry on his own terms. Maybe Sam could do the same for video games. This little Scottish outlaw fantasy had finally put him in the driver’s seat, and he knew just where he wanted to go: Liberty City.
Just as Sam was riding high on the success of GTA, he hit a new obstacle: BMG Interactive was being sold. The division had been bleeding cash. Though still relatively green in business, Sam saw examples of mismanagement—such as opening offices in twenty-seven countries around the world. The executives of the German conglomerate were souring on video games. With buzz building about the nascent Internet, Bertelsmann had turned its sights on television and the Web. Dale, BMG’s head, tried to convince the company to stay in the game business, but to no avail. “Bertelsmann ultimately decided they didn’t want to be in the video game business,” he later recalled. “Games just weren’t part