Video games were sexy, and celebrities and publishers wanted to cash in. The allure of new technologies electrified the air. With the Internet booming and Wall Street soaring, the dot com bubble was churning out legions of young millionaires. Bill Gates’s worth alone topped $100 billion. Video games were the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world. In the previous three years, the industry had grown by an astonishing 64 percent—on target to gross more than $7 billion in the United States alone and surpass total box office movie sales.
Yet despite the boom, as everyone here knew, video games had never seemed more misunderstood. With less than a month having passed since Columbine, video games had landed in the crosshairs of the culture war. Thompson’s crusade had reached Capitol Hill, where Senator Sam Brownback effectively put the business on trial in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. “A game player does not merely witness violence, he takes an active part,” he warned, “the higher your body count, the higher your score.” The Feds passed an amendment to the juvenile crime bill in the Senate on the marketing of violent games to kids.
Lowenstein methodically countered the claims, pointing out the vast number of adults (and moms) buying games. “Video games don’t teach people to hate,” he told Time. “The entertainment-software industry has no reason to run and hide.” Yet journalists at E3 couldn’t find many industry people to talk to. Those who went seeking comments at an E3 panel called “Ethics in Entertainment: Will the Medium Ever Reach Maturity?” found an empty room.
Among the no-shows were the guys from Rockstar Games, who were more concerned about making a splash of their own. To mark the debut of their label at E3—the trade show that epitomized the very corporate industry they were taking on—Sam and the cofounders sauntered past the Pokemon mascots and the furry apes in tracksuits designed by Hanes, the graffiti artist behind the original Tommy Boy record logo, and emblazoned with the R* logo. The fact that few, if any, gamers at the show appreciated the fashion statement was beside the point. “It didn’t matter to E3, but it mattered to us,” King recalled. “We’re an art house! We’re an art collective! We were obsessed.”
They had earned the swagger. GTA: London 1969 had debuted at number one on the UK game charts, followed by the original GTA at number two. And even more, GTA had been in the top twenty for the entire seventy-five weeks since its release, an astounding figure in an industry that usually saw games quickly fall off the charts. “The Grand Theft Auto franchise has proven to hold a longevity that is unusual to find in a video game series,” puffed Sam in a press release. They had even struck a deal to bring GTA to the family-friendly Nintendo 64 and Game Boy systems.
With GTA2 due in October, Rockstar’s British invasion had just begun, but its strategy wasn’t merely to promote the games at E3. It was to sell Rockstar as a brand. For Sam, it was a way to evoke the kind of obsession for music he felt while growing up. “People have the same passion toward the game as certainly I would have to Adam Ant or David Bowie or to Abba,” he later said. “People are frenetic about it and want to feel the same passion is going on behind the scenes.”
Rather than demean themselves by joining the circus on the main floor, the guys at Rockstar seeded GTA2 like a Def Jam street campaign. GTA2 stickers got slapped on anything that stood. One of Sam’s decrees was no longer to refer to the game by its full name but rather by its cryptic acronym. T-shirts were printed up with only the GTA2 logo on the front. GTA2 took swipes at other games, too—such as when players would get a message on their pagers in GTA2 from a Lara, thanking them for the hot time last night. Fake pills embossed with the GTA logo were reportedly found by gamers in small plastic bags around the halls though, adding to the mystery, there was no evidence that Rockstar was behind the ploy.
Across the street from the convention, Sam and the cofounders par-tied with another group of rebellious game makers from Take-Two Interactive called Gathering of Developers—or GOD for short. GOD had transformed a parking lot into a rock-and-roll happening called “The Promised Lot.” Beer flowed. Bands played. Strippers cavorted in Catholic school skirts. King hammed it up in a photo with a fake-boobed dude in the Catholic girl get-up, pretending to chop up a pile of coke with a gold American Express card.
To get a demo of GTA2, reviewers had to make a special appointment to meet with Rockstar behind closed doors. The preview couldn’t have been more different from the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy of the massively multiplayer online role-playing games out on the floor. Gamers zipped around the cyberpunk streets of GTA2, running missions and road-killing pedestrians.
Publicist Brian Baglow, now rechristened as Rockstar’s “lifestyle manager,” made the rounds, hyping the new features—Gangs! Better missions! Better graphics! With Sam’s ambitions growing, Baglow desperately tried to fill his boss’s burgeoning appetite for rave reviews. Sam didn’t want only the game press; he insisted on reaching hipster magazines such as Face and Dazed and Confused.
Press members would be led into an interview as if they were meeting Oasis. Sam and Donovan would then take over, celebrating GTA2’s gangs and grit. “You can sit and watch gang wars taking place while you’re around the corner having a cigarette,” Sam would say, “and he does actually smoke in the game.” While other publishers shied away from the post-Columbine furor, Rockstar hit it head on. “Our responsibility is to 99.9 percent of the population who aren’t actually planning to murder anyone in the next two weeks,” Donovan said.
Even more unusual for a game company, Rockstar showed off a short live-action film it had shot to promote GTA2. With no budget and with King producing, the team approached it like their own indie Goodfellas. For props, Foreman and King had tracked down an underground weapons shop in New York. When the gun dealer flipped on the light, Foreman and King looked around to see shelves of MP5s, M16s, and M60s. “Most people making games didn’t get to do this kind of stuff,” Foreman later deadpanned.
They shot the film in Brooklyn with a small cast and crew, only to have the sky open up in a torrential downpour. Without the proper know-how or permits, the locals freaked out on the guys, throwing them out of locations. Sam and Donovan finally showed up in a huff, furious to find that King had spent $150,000 and counting. Donovan eventually got into the spirit, letting himself get tied to a chair, dressed as a Hare Krishna, as thugs pretended to pummel him senseless. Dan e-mailed a photo of the scene to the GTA fansite Gouranga! which promptly posted it online.
Gamers at E3, however, watched the film dubiously. Who did these self-described Rockstars think they were? GTA, despite its cult success, was far from a mainstream phenomenon. Compared to the other games at the show—such as Sony’s ultrarealistic Gran Turismo, showcased for the upcoming 128-bit PlayStation 2 system—GTA2 looked outdated. One writer dismissed it for having “chess-like 2D graphics.”
Undeterred, Rockstar continued its outlaw campaign for GTA2 beyond E3. Increasingly confident, Sam and the cofounders insisted on doing it themselves, rather than take the standard route of farming it out. “This is a cultural product and we understand how to present it better than an advertising agency ever could,” Dan said. Sony, after all, had been brazen with its own outlandish campaigns—which included ads that showed a hip young couple with PlayStation controller button nipples.
Yet Rockstar’s overconfidence got the better of Sam and the cofounders when they pushed the controversy too far. The cover of the game showed a car against a black background with the tagline “Steal This Game” underneath. They took out Steal This Game ads on billboards and buses and TV commercials and planned to launch it at a football match in the United Kingdom. They even sponsored