With their office in place, they needed a logo for their label—as iconic as Def Jam’s. When they marched into Take-Two’s office to unveil their plan, however, they drew blank stares. “We want to make stickers, and we want to make T-shirts!” King said.
The guys in suits just stared back blankly. “Why?”
“What do you mean why?” King responded. “Because it’s cool!”
Sam shared King’s frustration with his new corporate parents. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked Dan. “Take-Two isn’t even in the top twenty-five game publishers. They’re nobodies. All they have is a few corporate guys and a couple of accountants. That’s it.” Yet their ambitious boss, Ryan Brant, insisted on giving the boys their freedom, despite being a subsidiary of Take-Two. Rockstar commissioned a gifted young artist named Jeremy Blake to design the logo. After several iterations, they decided on the winning one: a letter R with an asterisk, R*.
As they battled to brand their identity under the corporate parentage of Take-Two, Rockstar began to build its team. As president of Rockstar Games, Sam would oversee the vibe and the vision of their products. He began hiring people who shared their mission to change the gaming culture and industry. All that it took was a few minutes with Sam for prospective employees to fall under his spell. Who was this shaggy, bearded Brit, spitting and ranting about making games cool? As one early hire said, “I bought into his vision and charisma.”
Yet if you wanted to join the game industry’s most elite gang, you had to play by its rules. Baglow, the former writer and publicist for DMA, learned this quickly after he showed up in New York to head Rockstar’s PR. Accustomed to the more typically geeky office culture back in Dundee, Baglow had simply bought a bunch of T-shirts to wear to work at Rockstar, a different color for each day. Donovan, mountainous and chrome-domed, looked down at Baglow as if he were a lowly Hobbit. “Fucking hell, mate, are you just changing your texture map?” he joked, referring to the graphic scheme used to color objects in video games.
The next day, Sam and Dan took Baglow along to the hip shops on Broadway, buying him a wardrobe they felt was more worthy of their new international PR manager: Dockers, hoodies, and a gray T-shirt with their logo and the words “Je Suis Un Rockstar” on the back. “I look more like a Long Island white boy than a dick from Dundee,” Baglow quipped, after he donned his new garb. Baglow was told he had to, as he put it, “learn the Rockstar way.”
The Rockstar way didn’t end with the wardrobe. It was built on attitude, as Baglow learned one day during lunch. He had come back into the office with a bag from a nearby Chinese take-out place. Sam snarled at the sight of the restaurant’s name on the bag. “Oh, no!” he snapped, “you’re not getting that!” Baglow learned that the restaurant had done something inexplicable to piss off Sam and had landed on the boss’s burgeoning black list. “There are places we can’t go because Sam had a bad experience,” another Rockstar explained to Baglow.
Though they had only about a dozen employees, the sense of loyalty was already tight. King started to call themselves the 575ers, for their Broadway address. With Sam leading by example with his passionate work ethic, they labored into the night, cast in the bluish glow of their screens. Later they’d head to their favorite bar, Radio Mexico, as alive and electric as the city outside, to guzzle cervezas and fried cheese balls.
WITH THE ROCKSTAR BRAND and team in place, they set about on their most important job of all: publishing the kind of games they wanted to play, no matter how strange they appeared to the rest of the industry. Their inexperience, relative to the corporate giants who ruled the business, only made them feel more empowered. Yet they felt that the stakes were high anyway, and their dreams were theirs alone to lose.
Rockstar wasn’t limiting itself to GTA. The company had Monster Truck Madness 64 for the Nintendo 64 in the works, as well as Thrasher! Skate and Destroy, inspired by the skater magazine. Thrasher! gave an early hint of the cultural mash-ups Rockstar wanted in its games. Instead of the standard arena rock soundtrack, Rockstar licensed vintage hiphop such as “White Lines” by Grandmaster Flash and, even more unusually, released a promo on 12-inch vinyl with a Japanese logo.
By 1999, GTA had sold more than a million copies worldwide but remained little more than a culty underground anomaly. PC gaming was still dominated by the fantastical fare of D&D knock-offs (such as Asheron’s Call and EverQuest) and first-person shooters (Quake, Unreal Tournament). Console titles, even more mainstream, stuck to the predictable worlds of zombie killers (Resident Evil), cutesy gorillas (Donkey Kong 64), and movie tie-ins (Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace).
Rockstar, however, refused to give up on its quirky urban satire. Next would come Grand Theft Auto: London 1969, a mission pack of extra levels for GTA. Sam relished the opportunity of doing bobbies and robbers in his hometown, sort of a virtual Get Carter. “London in the sixties was slick, glamorous and cool but with an ever-present undercurrent of ultra-violence,” he said, when announcing the game.
Of course, he could press more buttons back home, too. When Matt Diehl, a reporter from Spin magazine, interviewed Sam about the game, he found a long-haired, frenzied Brit with a White Album beard. “You’re running bagfuls of speed to a Member of Parliament’s hooker,” Sam effused, “and there’s both female and male prostitution!” It was all part of his master plan. “We’re about doing games that have relevance,” he went on. “Most games let you be Tommy the Dancing Leprechaun who slays the dragon. You can’t go to the pub and say, ‘Wow, I just slayed the dragon, man! But if you say, ‘I just carjacked fifty-five cars and ripped off drags, that’s relevant.”
At the same time, Rockstar began work on a full-blown sequel, GTA2. Taking a cue from Blade Runner, they set the action in the seedy near future of an unnamed city in America. There’d be a sleazy Elvis Presley bar called Disgracelands and an overrun mental institution. Instead of only police chasing the player as his wanted level increased, there’d be the FBI and the National Guard on the trail, too.
Yet what most excited Sam and the others were the gangs. Instead of random people roaming the streets, seven identifiable groups of criminals ruled the three districts of GTA2. As the player answered phones in different areas, nearby gangs would send him off on missions to complete. Each gang had its own symbol and style, just as in The Warriors: the Loonies, symbolized by a winking happy face, were gleefully violent hoods who doled out brutal jobs of killings and explosives; the Rednecks were represented by a Confederate flag and pickup trucks; and the Krishnas were back, chanting outside their temple.
Depending on how players impressed or pissed off the gangs, they would reap either the reward or the sorrow. Rockstar swiped the tagline from mob films, “Respect is everything.” For the 575 crew, the game felt vividly autobiographical, as King said, “from growing up in gang culture and going through thick and thin as teenagers, to the way we were a gang at Rockstar like the gangs within these games.”
With Rockstar now driving the future of GTA, the pressure mounted on Jones and the gang back in Dundee. Gone were the free-form days of anything-goes development and the luxurious four years they spent making the first GTA. Rockstar, for all of its employees’ youthful glee, still had a taskmaster parent behind-the-scenes: Take-Two. Their urge to rebel brought tensions to the fold.
As a public company with milestones to meet, Take-Two demanded a specific date for GTA2’s release: