Jacked: The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto. David Kushner
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had not previously been portrayed. When Los Angeles erupted in riots after the Rodney King beating, Sam watched—and listened—in awe to the music that reflected the changing times. The fact that Time Warner had dropped “Cop Killer” only seemed to underscore how clueless the previous generation had become.
Now the same battle lines were being drawn over games. To ward off the threat of legislation as a result of the Lieberman hearings, the U.S. video game industry created the Interactive Digital Software Association, a trade group representing their interests. The industry also launched the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to voluntarily assign ratings to their games, most of which fell under E for Everyone, T for Teen, or M for Mature. Less than 1 percent of the titles received an Adults Only or AO rating, the game industry’s equivalent of an X—and, effectively, the kiss of death because major retailers refused to carry AO games.
Yet with Mortal Kombat still burning around the world, the media eagerly fanned the flames. Nintendo, which ruled the industry, had sold a Disneylike image of gaming to the public, but this was now in jeopardy. Video games were “dangerous, violent, insidious, and they can cause everything from stunted growth to piles,” wrote a reporter for the Scotsman, “. . . an incomprehensible fad designed to warp and destroy young minds.”
While the medium was being infantilized by politicians and pundits, however, one of the biggest corporations in the entertainment business was taking up the fight. In 1994, in Japan, Sony was working to release its first-ever home video game console, the PlayStation, built on the idea that gamers were growing up. Phil Harrison, a young Sony executive tasked with recruiting European game developers, thought the game industry was being unfairly portrayed as “a toy industry personified by a lonely twelve-year-old boy in the basement.” Sony’s research told another story—gamers were older and had plenty of money of their own to spend.
The problem with reaching these players started with the hardware. Sony found that although children had no problem pretending their blobs of brown-and-peach pixels were Arnold Schwarzenegger, adults needed more realistic graphics to suspend disbelief and engage. The answer: CD-ROMs. Unlike the cartridges used by Nintendo, a CDROM could hold more content—including full-rendered video—and offer games that were more like what Harrison described as “sophisticated multimedia events.” Combining a high-end graphics machine with an entertainment console was sending a clear message to the industry: it was time for the medium to become more mainstream and grow up.
Sam couldn’t agree more. With the new BMG Interactive division pursuing game publishing, he desperately wanted in. Games were the future, he was sure, and he saw this as a medium through which a guy like him could finally leave his mark. The challenge was to change the meta-game, to bring the experience into a new era, just as the films and the music he loved had redefined their own industries.
Sam urged the BMG brass to give him a break. “I want a go at this,” he told them. “I want to get involved. I’m not involved, but there’s a lot of things I can bring to this situation.” Once again, his doggedness paid off. After graduating from college, he got transferred to the Interactive Publishing division. The game industry worked similar to the record industry. Just as labels put out CDs created by bands, publishers put out software created by developers. They oversaw the production of the game, doling out editorial direction while handling the business, marketing, and packaging. Developers dealt with the front-line creation of the games, from the art to programming.
Hits paid for flops, and if one out of ten games scored, that was enough. BMG’s early games (a backpacking title, a golf simulator), however, fell on the losing side. Yet Sam never gave up hope. Maybe he was crazy. Or maybe, somewhere out there, someone was making a game crazy enough for him.
It would be a grand theft. Stealing the high score in another gang’s territory. Dave Jones couldn’t help himself, though. He could see the Galaga machine flashing inside the fish-and-chips shop like a beacon. The tall black cabinet with the red-eyed, bug-shaped alien warlord on the front. The spiraling electronic theme song. He wanted to touch it. Slip his coin in the vaginal slot, and pound the buttons. Zap the invaders, get the high score, and put his initials at the top.
Yet this was not the part of Dundee, the industrial town north of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he lived. This was Douglas, one of the rougher neighborhoods in a city known for being rough. Once famous for its jute, marmalade, and the invention of Dennis the Menace, Dundee’s economy had tanked by this time in the early 1980s, taking its working-class residents down with it. Teenage gangs with names such as the Huns and the Shams prowled the street, looking for a fight like some Scottish version of The Warriors. Anything could set them off. The wrong look. The wrong football jersey. And especially a gawky, carrot-topped geek in glasses like Jones.
Still in grade school, Jones lived with his parents across town near his dad’s small newspaper shop. When he wasn’t fishing for salmon in the River Tay, he played Space Invaders at the greeting card store near his bus stop. Every day before and after school, he’d make sure to keep the top score.
As he passed through Douglas on an errand, he couldn’t resist having a go at the Galaga machine. His coin dropped inside with a satisfy-ingly metallic plunk. Jones positioned his right pointer finger over the smooth red convex plastic button. He gripped the stick. Hit Start. The onslaught of alien insects on screen began. In a flurry of taps, Jones obliterated the invaders and took the top score—entering his initials for all to see. Who was the real player now?
But the local toughs lurking outside had seen enough. Just as Jones stepped out the door, the gang surrounded him. Who comes here and sets the high score on our turf? Jones ran down the gray cobblestone streets, past the old ladies with their bloated plastic shopping bags, past crusty men smoking unfiltered cigarettes under the overcast sky. The gang tackled him to the ground. As the blows came, he could do nothing but wait for the punches to end. Wait and hope that he would be alive long enough to limp back to the safety of his neighborhood and his own machines.
AS JONES AND HIS OWN GANG of Scottish geeks knew, something electric was coursing over the cobblestone streets of Dundee. A computer revolution had begun. It started at the big brown Timex plant in town, which was churning out the UK’s first popular wave of home computers, the Sinclair ZX81 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
The Spectrum, with its jet-black keyboard and rainbow streak on the side, looked like a control panel to another world. All you needed to know was the code, and you were in. Word had it that Spectrums were “accidentally” falling off delivery trucks—and winding up in the hands of aspiring hackers.
Jones’s high school was among the first in the United Kingdom to offer computer studies, a course that he immediately took. Gifted at math, he taught himself to program and build his own rudimentary machines. On graduation, he scored a job at the Timex plant as an apprentice engineer, but what he really wanted to do was make games. A homebrew computer game scene was percolating from San Francisco to Sweden. Gamers made and distributed their own titles on Apple II and Commodore 64 machines. Jones joined a ragtag gang of computer coders called the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, who met at the local technical college.
With cuts facing Timex, the company offered Jones £3,000 in voluntary redundancy pay—which he happily blew, in part, on a state-of-theart Amiga 1000 computer (much to the envy of his pals). Though Jones had begun to study software engineering at the local university, his professors and family thought he was nuts. “This is never going to take off,” they told him. “You’re never going to sell enough games to make a living.”
Yet Jones believed in his dreams. With his grades plummeting, he spent late nights in his bedroom at his parents’ house, hatching his plan. While the homebrew scene was dominated by fantasy and sci-fi games, Jones wanted to bring the fast action of arcade hits such as Galaga to home machines. His first game, a kill-the-devil shooter called Menace, was released in 1988 and sold an impressive fifteen thousand copies, earning