Despite Sam’s rebellious tastes, he always worked as hard as—if not harder than—any guy in a suit up at Take-Two. This is what gave him his edge, having the vision of an outlaw but the work ethic of a Puritan. To show solidarity during crunch, Sam and the others would shave their heads (then let their hair grow long again after a game shipped).
The staff sat hunched at their desks by 8 a.m. and left at 10 p.m., with Sam always the first to arrive and the last to leave. Rockstar producer Marc Fernandez later compared it to the way an NFL quarterback leads a team by example. “Sam wanted everyone to know that no one worked harder than him,” he said. “You couldn’t really question his critique because he was out-proving you every single day.”
The tighter they became in New York, the more a sense of gang warfare emerged between Rockstar and DMA. “They were feeling that Dundee is this backwater place,” DMA producer Paul Farley later recalled. “There was definitely friction.”
Jones had other reasons to feel disenfranchised. DMA was changing hands again. French publisher Infogrames was acquiring Gremlin Interactive, the company that Jones had merged with in 1997, for an estimated £24 million. Infogrames wanted to become “the Disney of videogames,” Jones said—and how could the Disney of games be associated with GTA?
“OH, NO,” said Jack Thompson, as he tuned to CNN. It was just before noon on April 20, 1999, and the aspiring culture warrior was inside his Spanish-tiled home on a quiet suburban street in Coral Gables. His young son, Johnny, played in the background. With his wife, a successful attorney, paying the bills, Thompson had become a stay-at-home dad, caring for Johnny—as he kept one eye trained on the moral decay of America and his next call to action.
It didn’t take long to find it. Thompson watched in horror as terrified teenagers poured from Columbine High School. As the shootings unfolded on TVs around the world, millions of concerned parents desperately tried to make sense of this incredibly senseless crime. They needed something to blame, something controllable, something to assure them that this would never happen in their families. Thompson had just the answer: video games.
Since his high-profile victories over rappers 2 Live Crew and Ice-T, Thompson had become an unusually potent crusader who built on three powerful traits, a savvy knack for media sound bites, a Vanderbilt-trained understanding of the law, and, perhaps most important, a tireless ability to fight. Thompson’s best friend was his fax machine, which he used to flood the media with press releases about his latest cause.
Now he had the game industry in his crosshairs. It started in March 1998, after fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on classmates during a school prayer group in Paducah, Kentucky. When Thompson learned of Carneal’s passion for violent games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom, he worked with the attorney for three of the victims to file a $130 million lawsuit against the companies behind the titles.
“We intend to hurt Hollywood,” Thompson announced at a press conference. “We intended to hurt the video game industry.” The press ate his hamster on cue. Thompson went on national TV to warn Today Show host Matt Lauer that the Paducah shooting would not be the last of its kind. Seven days later, Columbine happened—making Thompson an even more credible media darling.
Within moments of the shootings, he had the sheriff ’s department near Columbine on the phone. “Because of my research on the Paducah case,” he said, “I have reason to believe that school shooting—and now possibly this one—was the result of a teen filled up with violent entertainment and trained on violent entertainment, video games, to kill.” The media erupted the next day with news that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been inspired by the game Doom, copies of which had been found at their homes.
For Doug Lowenstein, the staunch head of the game industry’s Interactive Digital Software Association in Washington, D.C., Thompson had fired a devastating blow. Since the Mortal Kombat hearings of 1993, he had been successfully lobbying politicians to keep regulation at bay. A former journalist from New York City, Lowenstein had the First Amendment, as he said, “deep in my DNA” since his days working on his high school paper. He believed that it protected both Nazis to march in Skokie and developers to put out violent games. “That’s the essence of free expression,” he said. “You can’t compromise on free speech.”
Articulate, intelligent, prematurely balding, and dressed in a business suit, Lowenstein presented a safely grown-up face for the industry that was still considered for kids. Yet in recent years, his successes in Washington had a downside. The industry had been coasting since the Lieberman hearings, regulating itself with its voluntary ratings board, the ESRB, and staying outside the fray of cultural debate—but not anymore.
“Columbine fundamentally transformed everything,” he later recalled. “Suddenly, everything was back to square one, and the worst and most negative stereotypes about the industry were not only revisited, but in a way reaffirmed. You had never been in battle, but now you’re fighting a war.”
Lowenstein knew exactly what was on the line: a state and federal push for regulation. Sure enough, Lieberman called for an investigation into the game industry shortly after Columbine. President Clinton soon took up the call, ordering a federal investigation into game ratings and marketing. For Lowenstein, the stakes went beyond games. “Once you [accept] the principle that violent depictions can be regulated and restricted as obscenity can be,” he said, “you’ve opened the door to most pervasive and extensive government censorship that we’ve ever seen in this country.”
Yet as Thompson made the rounds on TV, Lowenstein began to feel that he was losing the battle in the most influential arena: the press. Just one week after Columbine, Lowenstein went on the defensive when 60 Minutes grilled him during a lead segment on violent games. The show then cut to the story of Paducah and Lowenstein’s new nemesis: Jack Thompson, who sat alongside Mike Breen, the attorney for the victims in Paducah.
There on the most popular news program in the United States, Thompson, his graying hair neatly combed, had his biggest platform yet. This was his moment to take his culture war to a wider audience than ever before, to send a message to the players of the game industry that he was gunning for them. “What would you say to critics who feel that this is a frivolous lawsuit against defendants who have very deep pockets?” Ed Bradley asked.
“Hold on to your hat,” Breen replied.
“And your wallet,” Thompson said.
Get away from me!” screamed the half-naked man in the cage, as he struggled to remove the collar from around his neck. “Shut up, you freak!” shouted his master—an ape chomping a cigar—as he yanked the collar tighter.
The scene came right out of Planet of the Apes but wasn’t taking place in the movie. It was unfolding live inside the Los Angeles Convention Center. Pasty young guys jostled to photograph the women in leather bikinis inside the cage. A newscaster with spiky blond hair interviewed one of the actors dressed as a gorilla. “Chasing humans has always been my most favorite,” the gorilla explained, as a comely slave stroked its mane. “I like to run them down in the cornfields, yes!”
This promotion for a new Planet of the Apes video game was among the featured attractions of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the video game industry’s annual carnivalesque trade show. For three days in May 1999, more than seventy thousand wide-eyed and sore-thumbed players from the real world descended here to check out the latest, greatest games. More than nineteen hundred titles from four hundred companies flashed on giant screens in booths designed like Hollywood sets.
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