All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (33 page)

Also important in the canon of landmark shooters was Halo, with lines of dialog like “Marines! We are gonna pump the enemy full of lead and drown them in their own blood!” In Halo, you could almost smell the gunpowder, almost inhale the assorted stenches of combat. Like some nerdy Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore from
Apocalypse Now
, you could sit there amid the fiery trance of explosions, thinking, “I love the smell of Halo in the morning.”

Still, the attitude Doom and Halo evoked was a highly fictionalized, stylized defiance. The Housers wanted to explore a visceral feeling that was more like real life—even with what they called their company, even with one of its early names, Grudge. Sam and Dan felt the name worked because, as outsiders, they both had chips on their shoulders and could hold on to and remember resentment for quite some time. It seemed like the right kind of name for the time because it sounded like grunge, the post-punk, vitriol-filled alternative music that had burst out of the Pacific Northwest with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. But someone said the name was too negative. As Sam, Dan, and Terry Donovan, Sam’s pal from St. Paul’s School in London, were driving near Marylebone and High Street, Sam blurted, “What about Rockstar? When you say the word ‘Rockstar,’ in my head I
get the picture of a disheveled Keith Richards at his absolute lowest point. Living the life, the dream—and the nightmare, too. It’s got edge and attitude and passion. It’s not about us as stars, but what we make. Our games will be the rockstars of the twenty-first century.”

“Whhhhaaat?”
replied Donovan, who would become the take-no-bullshit head of marketing for the company and eventually its CEO. He snapped his neck and looked straight at Sam. As the son of one of Britain’s savviest, most talented fashion photographers during the Swinging London period of the sixties, Donovan knew he’d heard something special, saying, “I don’t like many of these names. But this one I can unequivocally say yes to.” It didn’t just have the punk, alternative essence. The name was positive and aspirational as well. Sam, Dan, and Terry Donovan pitched the idea of starting their own studio to Brant and some other Take-Two suits. The company was presented to Brant with such frantic eagerness, he thought the Housers and Donovan were somewhat unhinged. Brant gave them the green light, but he wouldn’t put much money into the start-up. The Houser brothers would have to prove their worth. For many reasons, that would not be a walk in the park—unless you expected to be beaten up and blamed for all the country’s ills while having your picnic in the gazebo.

They would make many open world games, but Rockstar would become best known for a genre-defining project that DMA Design had been working on called Grand Theft Auto. The game was about 50 percent completed for the PC when Sam arrived at BMG. Even when it was finished, the first in the series gave you little of the gutsy underworld graphics that are now a Grand Theft Auto hallmark. Rather, you looked from high above down on the action you controlled in a kind of predator’s-eye view. The original GTA was the brainchild of David Jones, a wry Scottish game developer who began his work in 1988 with a science fiction shooter called Menace. Three years later, Jones worked on the venerable Lemmings game, in which you as a kind of Pied Piper made bridges for as many as one hundred eminently commandable creatures, so they could move
past hazards like rivers and canyons to an exit that always seemed too far off.

The game that would become Grand Theft Auto was originally called Race ’N Chase, and your primary goal was wholly different from that of the finished product—and not that new: You’d play as a cop speeding to catch criminals. That conceit began to transform during development, when everyone involved felt it was more of a kick to run over pedestrians on the streets than to avoid them. While Grand Theft Auto didn’t look too spectacular, it was a miracle of game design that would popularize the sandbox/open world genre.

The deceptively simple formula would go something like this: Role playing game plus shooter plus driving equals a sandbox game. Here, you could make your world, not live in someone else’s. The effect is a little like what My Chemical Romance describes in their gruesomely alive rock anthem “The Sharpest Lives”: “There’s a place in the dark where the animals go. You can take off your skin in the cannibal glow.” But it’s also about Brian Wilson’s old-ass Beach Boys gem “In My Room”: Here, he retreats into his lair to deal with his most dangerous private thoughts—“In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears—in my room, in my room.” Except this world could be full of almost infinite contemplation, emotion, and action, as-big-as-your-brain-could-imagine-it big.

In GTA, you could complete heart-pumpingly frantic timed missions given to you by a crazy array of gangs. Or you could just simply drive, groove to one of seven radio stations, and explore the vast city below. You could even add your favorite CD to those stations to make the experience familiar and more about you. Yet even as the game was being finished, the Housers realized that the next salient trend in games would be the illusion of 3-D. They were sure that a Grand Theft Auto in 3-D would be a game changer. But they were planning ahead with a little too much exuberance. First, they had the debut game to worry about.

Grand Theft Auto took center stage in 1997 in the UK (before it was released in the United States), with the dynamic push of tabloid-minded PR whiz Max Clifford (who was O. J. Simpson’s flak during the former football hero’s sordid murder trial). The game was prominently featured in
Edge
, the well-regarded British game magazine, but it was a love-it-or-hate-it kind of game. Some reviewers praised it for its complexly brilliant game design, but critics who were more appreciative of detailed graphics dissed the game. Still it was a bona-fide seller for BMG Interactive, making purchasing the company’s assets a fairly attractive proposition.

Meanwhile, there was drama on the business end. Instead of being made part of BMG Interactive’s portfolio, DMA Design was sold to financially troubled Gremlin Interactive, which in turn sold it to an equally distressed company, Infogrames, in 1999. Finally, after much championing by Sam Houser, it was purchased by Take-Two in September for around $11 million. By then, DMA founder David Jones, frustrated that the company was constantly being sold, had left to form a new development house in Dundee, Scotland.

When Grand Theft Auto II was released in late 1999, Sam was primed and ready for success on a higher level. He was stoked about the refinements, the wide-open-world-ness full of freedom and the ability to choose and cultivate your own badass adventure. He loved the fact that if you were favored by one gang of thugs, you were not liked by the other. You would be hated, stalked, run down, and attacked when entering their well-guarded territory. There were puns galore, too. For instance, some vehicles were called Wang Cars (as in the British insult “wankers”). But Rockstar didn’t account for Driver, a PlayStation game released four months earlier, which gave the illusion of speeding along in 3-D. Via a clunky old answering machine, Driver encouraged you to take on a titillatingly illegal driving mission. You would immediately become thuglike, picking up your masked pals, who robbed the local bank and screeched away to
a safe house. If you avoided the out-of-control police cruisers, which sometimes flew over your hood like hulking metal turkey vultures, all the better. Ultimately, the sometimes gruesome evil that your man did was balanced by the fact that he was an undercover cop. Driver set a benchmark for games in the future.

A week after Grant Theft Auto 2 was released, Sam still believed sales would be of the blockbuster variety. Then Take-Two executives walked into Sam’s office. They were sullen. “It’s tanking,” said one.

“Completely stiffing,” said the other.

Sam thought they were playing a joke on him. “How could Driver be the game with the stellar reviews?” he wondered. “It looks better, but I can’t get past the difficult tutorial level. And there are never more than two cars on the road at the same time. This is just a tech demo. Grand Theft Auto II is a real game.” But it was true. The initial reviews for GTA II were bad, and sales were flat as a pancake. Sam, the proselytizer who felt Rockstar could be the most innovative company on earth, was forced to eat his first bit of crow. He said to Dan, “That was a humbler. Don’t count your fucking chickens. Don’t take anything for granted. That’s what we learn from this.”

To complicate matters, David Jones was raiding what remained of DMA Design for his new company. Of the eighty employees who were left after the Take-Two acquisition, only eighteen remained after Jones sank his teeth into them. Then Jones offered the most talented group within DMA a deal they had to take seriously. Sam had worked closely with these designers from Edinburgh on a satirical Nintendo 64 game called Space Station Silicon Valley, a radiant send-up of the sci-fi genre in which animals had evolved with technology to produce, say, a hippo powered by a steam engine. Sam firmly believed that the Space Station designers were the most talented of the DMA lot. And he actually clicked with them, saying, “These are the only guys who don’t make me feel like a freak as the
unwanted publisher guy.” If he lost the group to Jones, designing a Grand Theft Auto in 3-D would be an impossible task.

“We don’t want to go with David,” said Leslie Benzies of the Edinburgh team. “But he’s offering us all this stuff, money, creativity. We’d rather work with you. But you’ve got to match what he’s offered, man.”

Sam and Jones were no longer friends or even colleagues. In fact, they have not talked since the incident. Within days, Sam had a deal ready, which the Edinburgh team promptly signed. They had shown Sam and Dan the demo of their latest baby on the Nintendo 64 console, one that showcased monsters like Godzilla and dinosaurs roaming a city in which the buildings could be decimated with one or two whacks of a giant paw or claw. The graphics were minimal and the demo was presented as a wire frame model, basically a 3-D representation of the level design possibilities, made with rudimentary lines. When Sam saw it, he thought, “Why would I want to stomp around and destroy this city? I’d rather drive around it and check out the city and go inside the buildings.”

By early 2000, Sam, Dan, and the other unique spirits at Rockstar came together as a thunderous force of nature to create what is thought of today as a Grand Theft Auto game. Their labors would result in one of the most memorable games in videogame history, Grand Theft Auto III. Because Jones and his team had gone their own way, the Housers and Rockstar North were now free to brainstorm in no-holds-barred fashion. As the ideas flowed forth, the game turned into something more inspired and subversive than before. But there was a pressing challenge. The Housers were essentially living hand to mouth, and Take-Two didn’t have a lot of money to budget an expensive game from its twenty-four-carat-quality developers in the UK. To remedy the situation, the Housers helped to keep their company afloat by taking work they otherwise wouldn’t
have, like the Bass Hunter fishing game and ports for the commercially unsuccessful Sega Dreamcast console.

Dan traveled often to Scotland to write the violently compelling plot and ever-branching story. He created a crazy conglomeration of all of the best gangster movies he had seen. He would think, “If I did this scene, how could I make it even better than it is? How can it be grittier? How can I push the envelope?” As Sam saw it all come together, he could barely contain himself. He saw in Rockstar a motley crew of weird personalities who had all worked as one to create something that was countercultural, yes, but might, just might, resonate with a very large audience. Together, they all clicked like a sleek, magnificent machine, although they weren’t always on time for their deadlines. “Every convention was put aside,” Sam explained to the execs at Take-Two. “It isn’t about furry creatures, and it isn’t like Indiana Jones. It is a contemporary urban game with gangsters. The faces of the characters have these affectations that are so blatantly Dan. The city has a look to it that is so blatantly Aaron Garbut [the obsessed-with-minutiae art director]. And Leslie Benzies [the detail-conscious executive producer] is getting all the right things out of everyone else.” Each had found his respective voice, but the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It was like a band that had toiled for years on a grassroots level was finally ready to break into the Top 10—with a vengeance.