The Nerf gang succeeded at keeping BMG at bay, while assuring Jones to stay on target. Yet privately, they were starting to sweat. Something about GTA was amiss. The cars drove unresponsively. The story seemed clichéd and uninspired. Worse, the game kept crashing—freezing to a halt mid-play. It was, as Penn distilled, “a fucking mess.” When the DMA guys sent around an unofficial in-house survey to see which game they thought was most likely to fail, GTA topped the list.
THE PHONE RANG URGENTLY, as it always did, at Max Clifford Associates. In the United Kingdom, publicists didn’t get much bigger or more controversial than Clifford. Having built his career representing everyone from Frank Sinatra to Muhammad Ali, the quick-witted, silver-haired Clifford had become, as one journalist put it, “a master manipulator of the tabloid media, the man many Tories blame for discrediting their government with a string of well-publicized scandals.”
Perhaps most notoriously, Clifford resurrected fledgling singer Freddie Starr’s concert tour in 1986 by planting the sensational headline “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” in the Sun. Like the rumor of Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head a bat, the story generated so much attention that it sold out Starr’s tour. Clifford pioneered a new game of journalism in which publicists could feed the most outrageous stories to a willing and hungry press.
On this day in 1997, however, the caller from BMG Interactive didn’t want to publicize a celebrity or a politician. He needed help promoting an upcoming computer game, Grand Theft Auto. Could Clifford feed their hamster to the press? The decision by the marketing team at BMG Interactive to hire such a powerful publicist—let alone a specialist in scandal—was unheard of in the game industry. BMG, with roots in the music business, thought a bit of rock-and-roll flair might do justice to their little punk game.
Yet as Gary Dale, the avuncular head of BMG Interactive, made clear, they had to get it just right. GTA was clearly going where no game had gone before—portraying an over-the-top criminal underworld of carjacking, Krishna-killing, drug-dealing, and chaos. It made Lara Croft look like the Church Lady, and the parent company wasn’t willing to go to hell for its deeds. “Bertelsmann is very large private company,” Dale told Clifford, “and we want to check out that we can manage the nature of the content in the right way. This is a new area. We want to get advice from a corporate responsibility point, and make sure we get the right positioning on the game and the right messaging on the game.”
Blunt and opportunistic, Clifford urged BMG to forget about convention and embrace GTA’s criminality in all of its glory. “If it’s part of the game,” he said, “it’s part of the game. In the same way in the music and the movie business, the rating system governs what’s legal or illegal. As long as it’s complying with that, my advice to you is don’t shy away from the fact. It won’t appeal to everybody, but it will appeal to some.”
Clifford recommended not only owning up to the violence, but cooking up the most outrageous hamster possible—and shoving it down the media’s throat. What better way to get people talking? Clifford said he “knew there would be the wonderful elitist members of the establishment that would take and find something like this absolutely repulsive.”
Dale relayed the news to his team. “The advice from PR was as long as you’re legal, you shouldn’t back away,” he said. Sam loved the plan. GTA needed a marketing plan as brash and bold as the game. Jones, however, wasn’t so convinced. He didn’t want controversy for controversy’s sake. Sam and the others at BMG seemed more intent on being rock stars, but Sam argued it was more about pushing boundaries. “Look,” Sam said, “you’re pushing the envelope for gaming.”
“Yeah,” Jones said.
“Apart from this, games have been seen for kids. Here’s one doing something different, like movies. We can actually use that as a marketing angle.”
Jones wasn’t so sure and had an additional concern. Looking to grow his business, he was striking a deal to merge DMA with a publisher called Gremlin Interactive. As word spread that the company was going to float itself on the market, the press put the value at £55 million—and heralded Jones as UK’s next digital titan. Jones didn’t want to rock the boat. Others at DMA shared his ambivalence about hiring Clifford to promote GTA on controversy alone.
When Jones met Clifford, he marveled at the assuredness of his plan. Clifford told him how he’d put the word out to his high-powered contacts in politics, telling them to plant the bug in the appropriate ears. “We’ll encourage the right people that it would be good for them to speak out on how outrageous this is and criticize it,” Clifford said. This, he promised, “would get publicity and, most of all, encourage the young people to buy.”
Yet, as Jones later recalled, he began to grow skeptical the more Clifford talked. “It was like…I offer a three-month plan, what I’ll say is, ‘I’ll feed these stories—Shock! Horror! You should see this!—into the ear of a lord somewhere, that there’s this game developed in Scotland which is utterly despicable and encourages people to drive over pedestrians and kill them!’ He’d say these things, and then, at the end of three months, ‘You’ll be in prime time.’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, right.’” His skepticism about Clifford didn’t last long, though. “Everything he said came true,” Jones later said.
It started while the game was still being developed, six months before its release. On May 20, 1997, Lord Campbell of Croy, the former Scottish secretary and a member of the cross-party Consumer Affairs Group, spoke in the House of Lords about a scandalous new computer game called Grand Theft Auto. The game, he explained, had hit-and-runs, joyriding, and police chases. “There would be nothing to stop children from buying it,” he warned. “To use current terminology, is this not ‘off message’ for young people?”
“The government is very concerned about violent computer games, as are the public,” concurred Junior Home Office minister Lord Williams of Mostyn. “All computer games which encourage or assist in crime, or which depict human sexual activity or acts of gross violence, must be passed by the BBFC [British Board of Film Classification], which can refuse classification. If there is a refusal, that automatically makes supply illegal.
“I do understand that the general description which you attached to Grand Theft Auto is correct,” continued Lord Williams. “One has to bear in mind very carefully the vice of these computer games. It deals not only with the sort of activity you referred to but also to acts of gross violence.”
“We simply cannot allow children and young people to be given the idea that car crime or joyriding is in any way an acceptable or an enjoyable thing to do,” added Lord Campbell, who called on the BBFC to examine GTA and determine whether it should even be legal to release. It wasn’t bluster. The BBFC had recently refused to rate Carmageddon—a darkly comic destruction-derby title marketed as “the racing game for the Chemically Imbalanced”—unless it toned down the violence and gore, all but ensuring that it wouldn’t be carried at major retail stores.
With the politicians’ debates making headlines, Clifford’s carefully scripted battle over GTA played out in the tabloids on cue. “Criminal computer game that glorifies hit-and-run thugs,” the Daily Mail hyped. “Imagine yourself being an up and coming low-life car thief, stealing exotic cars, and then add murder one, cop killing, car-hacking, drug-running, bank-raids and even illegal alien assassination!”
Despite the aging demographic of the industry, the sheer mention of the word games set off a load of critics who feared GTA would corrupt kids’ impressionable minds. A spokesperson for the Scottish Motor Trade