Читать книгу Jacked: The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto - David Kushner - Страница 11

Chapter 5 Eating the Hamster

Grim city. Aerial view. A blaring police car tore through narrow streets in pursuit of two cars. Inside the vehicles, the gangsters seemed young, dressed in black suits, white shirts, black ties, and shades. They leaned out their windows, waving guns in the air. The cars passed phone booths and restaurants, buses and pedestrians.

It looked like something out of a video game, but this was real life. Down by the docks along the river in Dundee, the cop pulled the car over. When he approached, he saw one of the blokes holding a video camera. “We’re making a promotional video for a computer game called Grand Theft Auto,” said Baglow, the diminutive DMAer with short blond hair and glasses. The get-ups and the toy guns had been inspired by Reservoir Dogs, and, as Brian Baglow and the other geeks from DMA in the cars explained, they were just making the video for fun. The cop arched his brow. Grand Theft Auto? What kind of crazy game was that?

Though the cop let the guys off, he had reason to be dubious. As Grand Theft Auto—or GTA, as the crew had begun to call it—developed, the darkly comic urban action game couldn’t be more different from the biggest title around: Tomb Raider. Released in the fall of 1996, this action adventure of swashbuckling Indiana Jane, Lara Croft, had become gaming’s greatest phenomenon in years. It milked the muscle power of the PlayStation like nothing else, with players jumping and swimming and shooting from mountains to crypts. Lara, with her big breasts and almond eyes, was eye candy personified.

This couldn’t have come at a worse time for GTA. Games were often judged by appearance alone, and compared to glitzy Tomb Raider, the top-down, 2-D racing scenes couldn’t look more outdated. The brass at BMG wanted to cut the game. Or, as Penn put it more bluntly, “they were trying to kill it every fucking month.” Jones remained defiant. “Gameplay! Gameplay! Gameplay!” he said. “Graphically, it may not be at the cutting edge, but I believe this is going to change the world.”

Luckily for Jones, he had BMG’s crew of Nerf gun–wielding players on his side—along with a new member of the BMG team, Sam’s younger brother, Dan. Fresh from studying literature at Oxford, he’d begun to compose questions for what would be a hit trivia video game, You Don’t Know Jack. Dan shared Sam’s passion for GTA and how it defied the wizards-and-warriors fare usually associated with the industry. “Here was a game that was commenting on the world,” he later said. “It was like being in a gangster movie, rather than a game.”

The decision to focus on gameplay over graphics was well thought out. As with any creative endeavor, making a video game was all about the allocation of resources. A computer had limited processing abilities. Rather than spending that currency on power-sucking eye candy, DMA took a counterintuitive approach: putting the power toward the city’s action, physics, and artificial intelligence instead. They shared the stubborn conviction that players would agree. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. If it is a compelling and fun experience,” King said, “people will play it.”

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 Association said, “It is deplorable to open young minds to car crime in this way.” “This game is sick, and parents should refuse to buy it for their children,” said a spokesperson for a group called Family and Youth Concern. “But even that may not be the solution, because children will still get their hands on a copy. This kind of material is dangerous and will make children think it is OK to rob cars and kill.”

As the press spread, BMG and DMA rode the back of Clifford’s hamster. “Once those quotes got quoted, we were happy to have them out there because, of course, they generated interest in the game,” Dale later said.

To keep the controversy brewing, they launched a radio ad campaign featuring excerpts of the House of Lords debate. At a video game convention, they left fake parking tickets on cars that read “Penalty: For Having a Flash Car is to have it nicked and driven in a high-speed car chase with gunplay involving the Police until it is spectacularly written off. You have been warned.” The GTA logo appeared below in red-and-orange letters with a trail of flames, along with the tagline, “it’s criminal not to.”A GTA promotional poster showed a car careening in the street. A list of crimes was printed along the side: “Murder, drug busts, hijacking, smuggling, bank raids, police bribes, road rage, bribery, extortion, armed robbery, unlawful carnal knowledge, adultery, pimping, petty thievery, and double parking!” The penal code for Grand Theft Auto appeared on the game’s cover. Said Baglow, “The BBFC didn’t really get the joke.”

Yet the joke was also on him. One night he was driving home when he brushed against a tree. It was a minor fender-bender for his beat-up old car. When Clifford heard about it, however, a sparkle of possibility flashed in his eyes. Baglow later cracked open the News of the World to find the story that had been entertainingly spun.

“Sick car game boss was banned from driving,” it read. “The computer buff behind the sick car-carnage game Grand Theft Auto was once banned from the road after writing off a car. Programmer Brian Baglow was at the wheel of his high-powered Ford Fiesta XR2 when it careered out of control and smashed into a tree. Baglow was arrested and taken to court, where he received a year-long ban for careless driving. ‘It was unfortunate, but you learn,’ said the businessman, who stands to make a fortune from the game this Christmas.”

While Baglow laughed off the controversy, Jones wasn’t taking it so well. When asked how he felt about the press, he said, “Good and bad.” Clifford, in a way, had done his job too well. Jones couldn’t believe how many people were willing to criticize an unfinished game that they had yet to even see. He wasn’t the golden boy of Lemmings anymore.

The press lamented that “the computer genius who developed the best-selling Lemmings was at the centre of a storm . . . over a new game which encourages players to steal cars and knock down pedestrians in a hit-and-run joyride.” As the Sunday Times later put it, “It is quite a shock to realize that the charming naivety of Lemmings and the Grand Guignol bloodthirst of Grand Theft Auto were both developed by a reticent Dundonian, Dave Jones.”

With the BBFC threatening to refuse classification, the game developers had a serious problem on their hands, potentially causing them to miss the lucrative holiday season. BMG commissioned a psychologist from Nottingham Trent University to study the game, which he ultimately approved for adults. Baglow defended the game’s wanted levels to the press. “We are being moral,” he said. “Every time the player does something illegal, that increases the determination of the police to catch them, and they will be caught. In fact, we stress that crime does not pay.”

Finally, just before the game’s release, came the ruling on GTA. “We are confronted with new problems and new forms of violence,” the BBFC said in a statement. “This kind of video has already provoked concern in Parliament and government. They involve the player in potentially criminal behavior and the infliction of violence on innocent parties. Such subject matter is unprecedented.” But not something to ban. The game would be rated for players eighteen and over.

Max Clifford had scored big time and soon let the cat out of the bag. “We got it across to twelve to thirteen million people because it’s controversial,” he said. “Do you think the News of the World would have come out with a piece like they did just because it was a great game? I don’t.”

Jones tried to transform the controversy into a teaching moment. In the final weeks leading up to the release, the team had been coding around the clock to improve the handling of the cars (each of which now drove with the appropriate physics, like big vehicles with sluggish maneuvering) and work out the bugs. He didn’t want their achievements to get lost in the noise. “People assume that computer games are for kids, and that’s very wrong,” he said. “The trouble is when people judge games on hearsay and out of context. Grand Theft Auto is all in the best possible taste.”

ON NOVEMBER 28, 1997, gamers in England got their first spin at GTA. The plan was to release it first in the United Kingdom, then, some time later, in the United States. By now, however, the release of GTA seemed like an afterthought to the hype, with it having already been declared, as the Guardian put it, “the most controversial game in a decade.” This left DMA and BMG with the unenviable by-product of such an elaborate PR campaign: living up to the buzz. The cheeky tagline under DMA’s credit read “Disgusts Governments, Policemen, and Parents.”

Yet it didn’t take long to get the verdict. As GTA’s producers feared, some players thought it paled in comparison to games such as Tomb Raider. One player dismissed its “horrendous game play due to the crappy controls. Graphics are terrible. I’ve seen better on 8 bit systems. When you answer the phone, it sounds like you are talking to a chipmunk.”

The guys at BMG found such criticisms infuriating. “What the fuck does that mean?” Dan once said. “If it’s fun to play, it doesn’t matter how it looks!” Yet as more reviews came in, there were plenty of gamers who didn’t care about the graphics at all. “Though not up to the moral standards, Grand Theft Auto is great fun, in a twisted sort of way,” wrote one gamer in a review. “GTA is quite addictive, as there is so much freedom in the way one can accomplish the different missions.” “GTA is a gas,” another effused. “You find yourself becoming immersed in the role of being the best criminal in the city.”

Across the United Kingdom, a small but passionate cult following began to form. One day, the guys at DMA found a website where gamers had assembled a timetable to keep track of the trains that randomly pass through the cities of GTA. A story spread that a shopkeeper had come back to find that his store had been broken into, and all of the copies of GTA had been stolen. Though the numbers were modest, the game sold steadily out of the gate, churning more and more copies out by word of mouth, while others would have long gone by the wayside. GTA was moving about ten thousand copies a week. Before long, total sales were approaching five hundred thousand—at roughly £50 a clip— bringing revenues of £25 million. Considering that the game cost roughly £1 million to make—largely, the cost of salaries—the game more than earned its right to a sequel.

Though Sam wasn’t in a position yet to get rich off the game, he seemed vindicated. The twenty-seven-year-old had long admired Rick Rubin—an iconoclast who changed the music industry on his own terms. Maybe Sam could do the same for video games. This little Scottish outlaw fantasy had finally put him in the driver’s seat, and he knew just where he wanted to go: Liberty City.