Ostensibly, players had to complete a series of missions for a motley crew of gangster bosses: whacking enemies, jacking cars, dealing drugs. Yet even better, players didn’t have to play by the rules at all. GTA was a brilliantly open world to explore. There was no high score to hit or princess to save. Players could just steal an eighteen-wheeler at gun-point, crank up the radio, and floor the gas, taking out pedestrians and lampposts and anything else dumb enough to get in the way of a good time. The fact that players could also hire hookers and kill cops made it controversial and tantalizing.
More personally, GTA made Sam Houser the rock star of his industry. Sam was passionate, driven, and creative, and Time ranked him among the world’s most influential people, alongside President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Gordon Brown, for “creating tapestries of modern times as detailed as those of Balzac or Dickens.” Variety called GTA “a hit-machine arguably unparalleled in any other part of the media business.” The Wall Street Journal dubbed Sam “one of the leading lights of the video game era. A secretive, demanding workaholic [with] a temperament and a budget befitting a Hollywood mogul.” One analyst compared his company to “the kids on the island in Lord of the Flies.”But the hard work and long hours were all in service of Sam’s ultimate mission: to take this maligned and misunderstood medium, video games, and make it as awesome as it could be. But no one had anticipated that making a game about outlaws could seem so outlaw for real. And that’s what was bringing him to Washington, D.C., on this cold day.
After years of blaming Grand Theft Auto for inspiring murder and mayhem, politicians had what appeared to be a smoking gun: a hidden sex mini-game in the new GTA. The discovery of the scene, dubbed Hot Coffee, exploded into the industry’s biggest scandal ever, the Watergate of video games. Rockstar blamed hackers. Hackers blamed Rock-star. Politicians and parents wanted GTA banned.
Now everyone, it seemed—from the consumers who filed a multi-million-dollar class-action suit over the game to the Federal Trade Commission investigating Rockstar for fraud—wanted the truth. Had Rockstar purposely hidden porn in GTA to cash in? If the company had, its game might be over. As Sam’s rival, moral warrior attorney Jack Thompson, warned, “We are going to destroy Rockstar, you can count on that.”
How did this all happen? The answer is the story of a new generation and the game that defined it. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, “The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.” It’s hard to understand those who came of age at the turn of the millennium without understanding GTA. Grand Theft Auto marked the awkward adolescence of a powerful medium as it struggled to grow up and find its voice. It was an artifact of the George W. Bush era and the fight for civil liberties.
The fact that it hit during one of the most volatile chapters in the history of media was no accident. It symbolized the freedoms and fears of the strange new universe dawning on the other side of the screens. GTA seemed to split the world into players and haters. Either you played, or you didn’t. For the players, jacking a car in the game was like saying, This is our ride now. This is our time behind the wheel. For the haters, it was something foreboding.
As Sam sat before the FTC investigators, the moment brought to mind an e-mail he had sent to a colleague when faced with compromising GTA. “The concept of a glorified shop (walmart) telling us what we can/can’t put in our game is just unacceptable on so many levels,” he wrote, “all of this material is perfectly reasonable for an adult (of course it is!), so we need to push to continue to have our medium accepted and respected as a mainstream entertainment platform. We have always been about pushing the boundaries; we cannot stop here.”
Grim city. Aerial view. A man in black runs along a river as a red sports car chases after him. Suddenly, a white convertible peels up in his path. “Over here, Jack!” shouts a beautiful young British woman behind the wheel. Jack leaps into her car, and she floors it. She has long auburn hair and stylish silver-framed shades. “You didn’t know you had a fairy godmother, did you?” she asks, coyly.
“So where are we going, Princess?” Jack asks.
“To the demon king’s castle, of course.” She shifts into high gear, speeding through a parking garage to safety.
In 1971, there was no cooler getaway driver than Geraldine Moffat, the actress in this scene from Get Carter, a British crime film released that year. Critics dismissed it, saying, “One would rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it.” Yet as is often the case with anything new and controversial, the fans won out in the end.
The scene of Moffat lounging nude in bed with Michael Caine—a Rolling Stones album propped on the nightstand beside them—epitomized how hip movies could be. Get Carter became a cult classic, and Moffat, one of London’s most fashionable stars. She married Walter Houser, a musician who ran the hottest jazz club in England, Ronnie Scott’s.
Shortly after Get Carter’s release, Moffat and Houser welcomed their first child, Sam. The boy’s brown eyes sparkled with possibility. Every kid determines to be cooler than his parents, but when your mom’s in gangster flicks and your dad’s hanging with Roy Ayers, that’s no easy game. Sam found inspiration in movies like his mom’s. He became fascinated by gangs, the grittier the better. He’d trudge down to the local library, checking out videotapes of crime films: The Getaway, The French Connection, The Wild Bunch, The Warriors.
One day at Ronnie Scott’s, the great jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie asked young Sam what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy resembled his mother—the heart-shaped face, the wide flat bushy black eyebrows. “A bank robber,” Sam replied.
WAVES CRASHED the sands of Brighton, the beach town south of London, but Sam wasn’t interested in the shore. His parents had taken him and his stocky brother Dan, two years younger, here to play outside, breathe the fresh air, and listen to the gulls. Instead, Moffat found Sam banging at a tall, psychedelically illustrated cabinet. Sam had discovered video games.
At this time in the early 1980s, games were in their family-friendly golden age. Innovations in technology and design brought a hypnotic new breed of machines into arcades and corner shops, from Space Invaders to Asteroids. The graphics were simple and blocky, the themes (zap the aliens, gobble the dots), hokey. One of Sam’s favorites was Mr. Do! a surreal game in which he played a circus clown, burrowing underground for magic cherries as he was being chased by monsters. The news shop near his house had a Mr. Do! and Sam would eagerly fetch cigarettes there for his mom just so he could play.
Sam’s parents bought him every new game machine for home, from the Atari to the Omega and the Spectrum ZX, a popular computer coming out of Dundee, Scotland. Dan, more interested in literary things, didn’t take to games, but Sam always shoved a controller into his hands anyway. “I don’t know the buttons!” Dan would protest.
“It doesn’t matter!” Sam replied, “You have to play!”
When Dan didn’t comply, he suffered big brother’s wrath. Sam later joked of having once fed Dan poison berries, sending him to the hospital. The terror subsided when Dan outgrew him. Dan proved his power by leaping onto Sam below from a balcony of their house, which resulted in a fistfight—and Sam’s broken hand. One of Sam’s favorite games didn’t require an opponent at all. It was a single-player game called Elite, and it was his world alone to explore. Elite cast the player as the commander of a spaceship. The goal was to trick out your ship however you could—mining asteroids or looting. Sam reveled in the pixilated rebellion, being what he called a “space mugger.” Video games, perhaps because they were still so new, had long been seen as second-class medium, and gamers, as a result, felt a bit like outlaws, too. Now Elite was letting them live out their bad boy dreams, if only on screen.
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