Читать книгу Jacked: The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto - David Kushner - Страница 14
ОглавлениеGet away from me!” screamed the half-naked man in the cage, as he struggled to remove the collar from around his neck. “Shut up, you freak!” shouted his master—an ape chomping a cigar—as he yanked the collar tighter.
The scene came right out of Planet of the Apes but wasn’t taking place in the movie. It was unfolding live inside the Los Angeles Convention Center. Pasty young guys jostled to photograph the women in leather bikinis inside the cage. A newscaster with spiky blond hair interviewed one of the actors dressed as a gorilla. “Chasing humans has always been my most favorite,” the gorilla explained, as a comely slave stroked its mane. “I like to run them down in the cornfields, yes!”
This promotion for a new Planet of the Apes video game was among the featured attractions of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the video game industry’s annual carnivalesque trade show. For three days in May 1999, more than seventy thousand wide-eyed and sore-thumbed players from the real world descended here to check out the latest, greatest games. More than nineteen hundred titles from four hundred companies flashed on giant screens in booths designed like Hollywood sets.
Publishers spared no expense to dazzle players and outdo one another. Gamers crammed into Electronic Arts’ giant booth to watch macho men Diamond Dallas Page and Sting hurl each other across a ring as part of a promotion for a new World Championship Wrestling game. The child star of the new Star Wars: Episode 1 film hyped the tie-in game. Throughout the sprawling two floors of the convention, seemingly every stripper in L.A. had been hired to work as a so-called booth babe—including a gun-wielding Lara Croft. Even David Bowie, one of the many stars promoting a game at the E3, professed himself a fan. “Of course, I play Tomb Raider,” he said. “Like every other hot-blooded male, I was in love with Lara.”
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 a GTA2 promo with the Monster Truck tour. Retailers didn’t get the joke, questioning why they’d want to encourage people to shoplift. “If you run this ad,” one threatened, “I’m not buying any games.”
Donovan’s marketing team tried to salvage the ill-conceived campaign as best they could, spending a fortune on stickers that they slapped over the Steal This Game ads with the word Censored. When Baglow questioned the plan, he was told it was guerrilla marketing in action. “It’s not guerrilla marketing,” he replied. “It’s a fuck-up.”
The problems didn’t end there. As Baglow later recalled, word spread around Rockstar that a website called “Fuckstar” had been set up online by a disgruntled former employee. When the team booted up the page, they found a vandalized version of the Rockstar logo—along with the sound of a toilet flushing. Sam and Dan hit the roof.
After hiring an investigator to look into the matter, they realized they were the ones being had. Unbeknownst to them, a GTA2 marketing exec had planted the fake site as part of an elaborate ruse intended to build buzz for the game. The plan was to leak word that a Rockstar employee had nearly been killed by real gangs while doing research for GTA2—but that Rockstar covered up the mess. In retaliation, the scorned Rockstar had supposedly set up this vengeful site, Fuckstar. The elaborate hoax had been kept from the Housers to try to give it legs, but it proved to be yet another mis-conceived disaster.
For Baglow, the marketing mishaps demonstrated how easily Rock-star could go off the rails. “During GTA2, we engaged PR and tried to court controversy, but it was not the slick PR machine that everyone imagined,” he later said. “It wasn’t the shadowy masters behind the scenes engineering controversy. It was more like things came out, and then we were, like, ‘Oh, shit.’”
DAVE JONES had been called a lot of names since he started making games. Genius. Boy wonder. Spielberg. Yet while Rockstar was busy courting trouble with GTA2 in the United States, he earned a new moniker: sheep abuser. It had happened on the release of a quirky new DMA game called Tanktics. The game challenged players to create tanks from bizarre found parts—including sheep, for power.
When word of Tanktics got out, animal rights groups protested. “I am sure they could have thought of something else to make the game exciting,” said a spokeswoman for one. “It has yet to be shown that a serial killer started by abusing animals in a computer game,” a DMA producer responded.
Had it really come to this? Yes, Jones was rich. He had a Ferrari with a vanity plate in front. He saw GTA ruling the charts, and geeks were wearing their Rockstar tracksuits around Dundee (one guy gave one to his mother, who was seen sporting a velvety blue get-up while walking her dog). Yet Jones didn’t want to be a rock star. He hated the press, the attention, and just wanted to make the next innovative game.
One day, he called in a reporter to show him his dream project: a virtual city. It was something he had wanted initially with GTA before the game had gone deep into its criminal direction. Now he was bringing it back. Unlike GTA, this world would let players be anyone they choose, from a cop to a businessman. He compared it to “a computerized version of the film The Truman Show.”
This as yet untitled game represented the underlying tension between Jones and Sam. Privately, Jones felt that despite their Rockstar posturing, they were increasingly demanding corporate executives at heart. If Rockstar was supposedly the rebel child of Take-Two, the guys seemed more like their parents instead. “There was definitely tension there,” he later said. “Should we be making a game to a deadline, or should we be making it to a quality bar?” GTA2 was proof: a lackluster sequel, in his opinion, that had been rushed out to cash in on the first.
