David Kushner - Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

Contents

To Andy Kushner

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright 2012 by David Kushner. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kushner, David, 1968
Jacked: the outlaw story of Grand Theft Auto/David Kushner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-93637-5 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-19792-9 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-19793-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-19794-3 (ebk)

1. Grand theft Auto games. 2. Video games. I. Title.

GV1469.35.G738K87 2012

794.8dc23

2011043336

Author's Note

This book is based on more than ten years of research. I first played Grand Theft Auto in 1997 and began reporting on its creators, Rockstar Games, two years later. As the franchise boomed, I chronicled game culture and industry for publications that included Rolling Stone , Wired , the New York Times , GamePro , and Electronic Gaming Monthly , as well as in my first book, Masters of Doom.

My reporting took me across the country and around the worldfrom the offices of Rockstar in New York to the streets of Dundee, Scotland, where GTA began. There were long days and endless nights at game conventions and start-ups. I spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours playing games. I played Pong with Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, and, for one particularly awesome afternoon in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, rolled the dice with Gary Gygax, the cocreator of Dungeons & Dragons.

As the industry grew, I saw the controversies rise over violent video gamesespecially over GTAand covered both sides of the disputes. I sat with a crying mother in a tiny town in Tennessee, where her sons had just murdered one person and maimed anotherand triggered a $259 million lawsuit against Rockstar and others for allegedly inspiring the crime with GTA. I went to Coral Gables, Florida, to visit GTA 's chief opponent, Jack Thompson, at his home.

I spoke with leaders from the Entertainment Software Association in Washington, D.C., and went behind closed doors at the clandestine Entertainment Software Ratings Board in New York to see how games are rated. In Iowa City, I sat in a small stuffy room hooked up to electrodes while I played Grand Theft Auto and university researchers studied my brain. Yeah, it was strange.

Though all of these adventures don't appear explicitly in this book, they inform it. This is a work of narrative nonfiction, a recreation of the story of GTA. The scenes and the dialogue are drawn from hundreds of my own interviews and firsthand observations, as well as thousands of articles, court documents, and TV and radio reports. The Rolling Stone reporter who appears in the book is me.

Over the years since I first visited Rockstar Games, I've interviewed many people at the company including each of the cofounders. Though the current helm at Rockstar declined to participate in this book, I was able to draw freely from my previous interviews with them and speak extensively with those who have left. A few sources didn't want to be identified, due to personal or professional concerns. Others were reluctant to talk, then eager, or eager, then reluctant. In the end, the vast majority went on the record. A funny thing happens when you write a book like this. People start to realize and appreciate that they are part of a larger story, not only their own, but everyone's.

Prologue

Players vs. Haters

How far would you go for something you believe in?

One winter day, Sam Houser was going farther than he'd ever imagined or fearedall the way to Capitol Hill to answer to the Feds. The thirty-four-year-old had achieved the universal dream: rising from nowhere to make his fantasies real. Yet now reality was threatening to take it all away.

A scrappy Brit running an empire in New York City, Sam cultivated the image of the player he had become. Scruffy hair. Shaggy beard. Eyes hidden behind aviator shades. Gripping the wheel of his jet-black Porsche. Buildings towering. Taxis honking. Flipping stations on the radio. Pedal to the metal as the world blurred like a scene from the video game that made him so rich and so wanted: Grand Theft Auto.

GTA , the franchise published by Sam's company, Rockstar Games, was among the most successful and notorious video games of all time. GTA IV alone would smash the Guinness Record to be the most profitable entertainment release in historyleaving every blockbuster superhero movie and even the final Harry Potter book in its pixilated wake. Players bought more than 114 million copies and shelled out over $3 billion on the titles. The juggernaut helped make video games the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business. By 2011, the $60 billion global game industry would dwarf music and film box office salescombined.

GTA revolutionized an industry, defined one generation, and pissed off another, transforming a medium long thought of as kids' stuff into something culturally relevant, darkly funny, and wildly free. It cast players at the center of their own criminal universe, as Sam once told me. You were a bad guy doing bad things in fictional cities meticulously riffed from real life: Miami, Vegas, New York, and Los Angeles.