Then he met a nutter just as bold as him: Ryan Brant, a young guy in New York City who was considering buying BMG Interactive. They had plenty in common. Like Sam, Brant had been born into a glamorous family steeped in popular culture. His father, Peter, owned the magazines Interview and Art in America and cofounded the tony Greenwich Polo Club. Unlike Sam’s mom, who had merely acted in gangster films, Brant’s father had actually served time for tax evasion. Brant’s stepmother was the supermodel Stephanie Seymour.
After graduating from the prestigious Wharton School of Business, Brant, a wiry guy with close-cropped hair, wanted nothing to do with his father’s world of old media. In New York, Internet start-ups dotted the downtown area newly dubbed Silicon Alley. Brant knew exactly which part of the high-tech industry he wanted to crash: video games. At the time, the game industry was dominated by big publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision and then a number of smaller companies. Yet Brant saw opportunity. In 1993, at the age of only twenty-one, he used a $1.5 million investment from his dad and other private investors to found Take-Two Interactive, his own game publisher.
Brant, who had grown up hobnobbing with downtown celebrities, decided to differentiate himself by putting out CD-ROM games that resembled B-movies. He wanted to cast real stars, a practice still largely unheard of in the mainstream game business, and combine them with adult subject matter, cinematic pretensions, and a deliberate, if ham-handed, edginess. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller starred cult actor Dennis Hopper and sold three hundred thousand copies worldwide, earning Take-Two $2.5 million in profits. For a game called Ripper, Brant spent $625,000 of its $2.5 million budget to cast Christopher Walken and Indiana Jones heroine Karen Allen. “I want to create the best possible software,” Brant told Forbes, “and make as much money as possible.”
Brant showed an Ivy League prowess for figuring out how to cash in, completing an initial public offering that raised $6.5 million for the company. Yet he knew he couldn’t remain stagnant for long. One morning, he woke up with the terrifying thought: “We’re going to get killed here unless we get bigger.” He began to gobble up distributors from the United States to the United Kingdom and Australia to provide both an outlet for his games and another stream of revenues. By 1997, with a number of games on the market, the company’s revenues neared $200 million, with more than $7 million in profit.
With licensing deals in place for Sony and Nintendo, Brant needed to shore up his publishing resources, and that’s what led him to BMG Interactive. Jamie King, the BMG producer, thought that Brant was “ballsy as fuck,” a newbie willing to take on the big boys at Activision and EA. Sam desperately wanted in and pitched Brant on his vision of the future of games. “I gave a very energetic pitch to him, where I must have sweated through three layers of clothing in my own insane sweaty way,” Sam later recalled, “and everyone in the office is like ‘Who the fuck was that guy?”
The pitch worked. In March 1998, Brant paid $14.2 million in stock for BMG Interactive. The deal gave him staff and the rights to GTA and other games. Promoted to Take-Two’s vice president of worldwide product development, Sam would now be in charge of both the development subsidiaries and third-party developers, including DMA Design and Jones, who would continue work on the GTA games in Scotland. Yet there was one catch: Sam had to move to New York.
Everyone wants to live a dream life, working at a job that isn’t a job at all but a passion. Making video games in New York City, for Sam, felt like a dream come true. Eager to convince his friends to join him, Sam broke the news to his peers at BGM. “I gotta go to New York,” he told King one day. “You want to come?”
King’s mind raced with images of a past trip to New York. He had been staying at a model’s apartment in the Village and roamed Fifth Avenue in the snow while listening to Pharcyde on his headphones— determined to one day live here. Did he want to come to New York and oversee game production? “Done!” King replied. “I’m there! Just book the fucking ticket!”
Then Sam made a call to his other key buddy: Terry Donovan. A childhood friend from St. Paul’s, Donovan was a towering Brit who’d grown up in the same kind of pop culture trend–setting family as Sam and Dan. His father had directed the iconic video for the Robert Palmer hit “Simply Irresistible.” Donovan wore his lineage with rock star pride, boasting of his early brushes with greatness. “My first drug experience was at age seven, sitting in my living room with Mick Jagger, smoking a spliff,” he once said.
These days, Donovan had been working as head of artist relations at Arista, putting out dance, trance, drum, and bass records. He’d also been deejaying around town, marketing himself and the clubs. Though his only work with computers was getting his PC to write “terry is cool” as a schoolboy, Donovan listened intently to Sam’s pitch. “You gotta come out here because we’re starting a new label within the Take-Two family,” Sam told him. “it’s almost like an independent, we’re going to try doing our own stuff from BMG, try and make games that are more modern, more accessible.” Donovan, who would oversee marketing, was in.
Gary Foreman, BMG’s quiet tech whiz, got the pitch to be technical director at Take-Two. When he told his erudite gamer friends at home about his opportunity with Take-Two, however, they scoffed. Compared to GTA, the games that Take-Two made seemed cheesy and lame. “Take-Two?” they told Foreman. “What have you done? Are you kidding me?” No matter, he was in, along with the others. It was time to move to Liberty City for real.
SAM AND THE OTHERS WEREN’T the only British invasion coming to the States in 1998. So was their prized game, GTA. By now, Clifford’s hamster had grown into a Godzilla-size monster, thanks to the British media. GTA madness had even spread to Brazil, which banned the game outright, ordering all copies to be taken off the shelves. Violators faced up to $8,580 in fines.
After hearing about GTA on the Internet, gamers in the States were rabidly awaiting its release. An early GTA website, launched by a fan at the University of Missouri, went viral online. Players added news and tips about the game, spreading the word until the site had more than a hundred thousand visitors. Sam and the others made it the official hub for the game. Reports came in that hackers were copying the game and distributing it online, a practice that had yet to really break beyond the indie underworld. When the press caught wind, they hyped the real-life criminality of the game. “A top-selling Scots computer game is being stolen . . . by teenage nerds in America,” wrote the Sunday Mail.
Although Take-Two had purchased the rights to release the PlayStation version of GTA later in the year, the game arrived in the States first on PC. A small start-up in Connecticut called ASC Games, which had released a bowling title and the Jeff Gordon racing game, secured the rights. ASC followed BMG’s lead by milking the controversy to fuel sales. The company hyped the game in a press release titled “Amidst Storm of Controversy,” and irreverently promised “to unleash a crime wave on America.”
On its release in the United States, the U.S. press heralded GTA’s inventiveness and rebellious spirit. Official PlayStation Magazine called it “one of the most original, innovative, technically impressive and controversial PlayStation releases ever.” Computer Games Magazine effused, “The game’s gleeful embrace of anarchy is a refreshing change from the normal do-gooder activities found in most games. Crude and profane, this brilliant little game allows us all to get in touch with our inner Beavis.” GameSpot said, “It won’t win any awards. [But] Wanna-be socio-paths who can deal with the shortcomings will have a lot of fun.”
Yet ASC quickly experienced the real battles that followed GTA. The ASC publicist handling the game learned this firsthand when he demonstrated the game for Entertainment Weekly. As he watched the writer, who seemed entranced with the experience, he figured he could count on a high score. He was wrong. The review came out with the lowest—and rarest—letter grade yet, an F. GTA got slugged off as a “shock-schlock game . . . as monotonous as it is discomforting (you earn brownie points with your Mob boss, though), leaving you with outdated graphics