“Why?”
“Because of the content. The content’s so awful, I couldn’t give it anything higher than an F.”
By the time the game came out for PlayStation in the summer of 1998, however, even the worst review couldn’t slow it down. GTA had arrived in the United States, and so had the unlikely stars behind it.
THEY CALLED IT THE COMMUNE. It was a ground-floor apartment on Water Street in the South Street Seaport area of Manhattan. Practically no windows. A cave of darkness. This was where Sam, King, Foreman, and Donovan moved in—along with Sam’s three cats—when they landed in New York in the summer of 1998.
Just to be in Manhattan was electrifying, especially after so many years idolizing the States. The honking horns. The Noo Yawk accents. The salty smell of hot dogs wafting up from street vendors. The Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. All of the great restaurants, from the dive Radio Mexico down the street to the trendy Balthazar in SoHo. The guys spent hours flipping through the channels on TV, just watching the wonderfully American excess pipe in: sensational crimes on local TV, the game show models, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, pornographer Al Goldstein on public access flipping off rivals with a big “Fuck You!”
“I can’t believe what’s being pumped into the living room,” Donovan said.
“We’re here!” King effused. “We work on the games, they’re risky and ambitious, we don’t know what we’re doing! It’s exciting. It’s amazing. Now we’re here in games industry and totally high profile, whether we like it or not.”
They were young, far from home, with no real clue how to run a video game company, but they had something crucial: the dream and the drive. Working out of a cramped office in SoHo, the guys began mapping out plans for a GTA mission pack set in London in 1969, along with a formal sequel, GTA2. At night, they’d return to the Commune to stay up late playing video games and plotting their future. Sam’s job was to oversee the company’s publishing efforts in the United States, including games beyond GTA. He also had a personal mission of his own: “to bring our attitude, try to make games that felt more relevant to the audience that was playing them.”
The guys knew just how they wanted to do it, by starting their own video game label—“a hip, happening label, more about lifestyle, not toys or technology,” as Donovan once described it.
“Take-Two has an identity, EA has their identity,” King agreed, “it’s important that we have our own identity, and let consumers know what we stand for, a certain kind of branding.” As Baglow, who had come from DMA to handle PR for Take-Two, said, they wanted to create “an outlaw label,” something that reflected the renegade spirit of GTA.
Sam phoned his brother Dan, who was still in London but planning to join them in the States soon to work at Take-Two and oversee the writing of the games. Dan, like Sam, was sick of an industry telling grown men to play the roles of elves and wanted something more. He was convinced, as he said, “that there was this huge audience of people who play console games in particular and who were very culturally savvy and culturally aware, but who were being fed content when playing games they found slightly demeaning.”
They wanted to make the games that they wanted to play. To do this, they didn’t want to model themselves on other game companies such as EA, which they considered a crass, sequel-spewing machine. Their goal, as King later put it, was simple but bold: “to change everything.”
ONE DAY SAM and the others piled into a car for a road trip to Six Flags Great Adventure, the theme park in Jackson, New Jersey. The guys loved roller coasters almost as much as hip-hop and wanted to celebrate their new move with a day on the rides.
GTA was on its way to selling more than one million copies worldwide. They still weren’t rich, but they were emboldened. They wanted to brand themselves while they were hot, so that consumers knew they weren’t just buying into a game but a lifestyle. They just needed a name. They would still remain part of Take-Two Interactive but as a branded label. Grudge Games was Donovan’s favorite, suggested because they were, as Sam once put it, “world-class grudge bearers.”
“Minimum ten years,” Dan said.
When they had run the idea by Brant, though, he balked. “You know, guys,” he said, “I know where you’re going with that, but it’s a little on the negative side.”
During a recent trip to London, Sam had tossed out the name Rockstar. “I like everything, from the Keith Richards it evokes to the campiness it evokes,” he later said, “and everything in between. . . . at the end of the day you can’t fuck with Keith Richards!”
“It’s a nod to the past and a snipe at it at the same time,” Donovan agreed. “And also, in a weird way, a snipe at the lameness of the present. In some ways, the golden age of the rock star is done. Not many Keith Richards around now. Now they’re drinking herbal tea!”
Foreman had one concern about calling themselves Rockstar: they had better deliver. “People will make fun of us,” he said, “we’ll get shit, but then pressure would be on. We’ll have to live up to it. We have to make sure our games are really, really good.” Yet that, for them, was a given. Now the cofounders of this label simply had to make it official.
Over in the midway at Six Flags, they saw a vendor selling wooden plaques. For a few bucks, visitors could have their own messages burned into the wood, such as “Bon Jovi Rulez!” As the acrid smell of sizzling carbon filled the air, they watched the carny etch their new name into the wood: Rockstar Games.
They decided to burn one more sign for good measure. Something they could hang next to this one in the Commune back in New York. A phrase to remind them forever of this day when their mission began. A cheeky message, perhaps, for anyone who might ever try to stop them.
“Fuck Off Cunts,” it read.
Fuck off! Go home! Go back to England!”
It didn’t take long for Sam and his gang to read how their competitors felt about their calling themselves Rockstar. Game development companies, whose employees are predominantly male, are a unique breed of frats—brainy, creative, self-effacing members who are expected to be comfortable in their underdog status. They’d sooner compare themselves with Napoleon Dynamite than Keith Richards.
After Sam announced his label’s name in a December 1998 press release—“the Rockstar brand will finally deliver an elite brand that people can trust,” he promised—the flames hit the online gaming forums. Game developers bristled over the cocky New Kids On The Block. The fact that these Brits were in New York City, far from the hub of game development on the West Coast, only made them more outcast.
Yet characteristically, the antagonism only emboldened the guys further. King, always ready to burst into a stream-of-consciousness rant similar to Sam’s, fumed about how no one seemed to get their sense of mission or irony. “Rockstar came from growing up and being in awe of all the rock stars and the musicians and the hip-hop artists having limos, trashing hotel rooms, having stories like you snorted a fucking load of ants because you were so high!” he’d say, breathlessly. “The glamour! The photography! The backstage! The groupies! The T-shirts!”
It was as if the other developers actually liked being dismissed as nerds. “Everyone’s saying we’re a bunch of geeks in a garage on a Saturday night who should be out dating,” King went on. “Fuck you! We’ve got Grand Theft Auto coming! It’s a wake-up call to everyone. Games are going to be cool!”
The plan started with their office. The team moved into 575 Broadway, a gorgeous red brick building in SoHo over the Guggenheim Museum annex. They arrived to work from the Commune, walking from the subway past