Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (41 page)

It had the makings of a controversy.

When asked if he expected the outrage that
Grand Theft Auto
spawned, or that it might warrant questions in the House of Lords, Mike Dailly said, ‘No, although we
did think it was funny.’

Dailly might have guessed, though, given that the indignant headlines in the newspapers and the moral grandstanding from politicians had all been orchestrated at the request of DMA’s
publisher. After the Psygnosis contract had ended, Jones negotiated another multi-game deal, this time with a publisher that was new to games, BMG Interactive. It was part of the Bertelsmann Music
Group, then attempting to manoeuvre its way into this new medium. BMG hadn’t been deeply involved in the development, mainly trading feedback on the increasingly refined builds that DMA sent
to London, but it had been supportive of the game’s amoral tone. To Jones, BMG’s team felt like music promoters who treated the antisocial streak in
Grand Theft Auto
in the way
that they might any other controversial property. And they understood marketing.

‘Their word for me was, “We’re from the music industry, and we’re used to dealing with acts all the time, with acts like the Sex Pistols and so on,”’ says
Jones. ‘You know you’re going to get an outcry, and the way that they treat that in the music industry was that you embrace it. You make that part of the marketing.’

Over its development,
Grand Theft Auto
had turned into tabloid bait, yet this was the first time that Jones had realised the provocative content would be spun into the marketing
campaign. He had no qualms about that, but it felt brave. ‘I think no other publisher would have done that,’ he says. ‘They’d be more worried about having an injunction
slapped on them or something. BMG were just absolutely not.’ BMG’s strategy could not have been further from evasion. The
company hired Max Clifford,
Britain’s most talented public relations showman, to promote the game.

Clifford was famous, and sometimes infamous, in UK media circles. He had an intimate understanding of the processes and interests of newspapers, and fed his clients to them. Clifford’s
public breakthrough came when he persuaded the
Sun
to run the front-page headline FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER, which, though untrue, revived the comedian’s career. More recently,
the country’s most famous publicist had become associated with political scandal, representing cabinet minister David Mellor’s mistress Antonia De Sancha and enlivening her story with
lurid details. As DMA found out, he was a master of his trade.

‘I remember the meeting with him, it was quite a moment,’ says Jones. ‘We described everything you could do in the game, and he said, “That’s great, I understand
exactly what you’re facing. Here’s how we’ll basically just leverage it.” He told us how he would play it out, who he would target, what those people targeted would
say.’ He guided Jones through the plan: which politicians could be relied upon to react in public, which papers would join the reactionary fervour, how stories could be planted, how long they
could last and how the story would snowball. Clifford knew the media system, and how to play it. And, according to Jones, ‘every word he said came true’.

In May 1997, half a year before it was due for release,
Grand Theft Auto
came to the attention of Parliament. Somehow word had reached the House of Lords that a scurrilous game was on
its way, and questions were asked by Lord Campbell of Croy: ‘Is it true, as reported, that that game includes thefts of cars, joyriding, hit-and-run accidents, and being chased by the police,
and that there will be nothing to stop children from buying it? To use current terminology, is that not “off-message” for young people?’ Not really, as it turned out. Lord
Campbell’s feature list was remarkably similar to BMG’s own marketing campaign.

In November, days before the game appeared, the headlines
started rolling in. From the
Daily Mail
: CRIMINAL COMPUTER GAME THAT GLORIFIES HIT AND RUN THUGS. And
from the
News of the World
, simply: BAN CRIMINAL VIDEO GAME. There were more thoughtful articles in
The Sunday Times
and
Scotland on Sunday
, but they raised the same
fears. And those fears looked uncannily co-ordinated.

‘Max Clifford was the real genius here,’ says Dailly. ‘He made it all happen. He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved. He’s not
called a media guru for nothing.’ He even planted stories. A developer’s minor car scrape became a driving ban for a ‘Sick car game boss’ in the
News of the World
.
A story circulated before release that thousands of copies of the game had been stolen from a warehouse. ‘Oh yes, I remember hearing that as well,’ says Jones. ‘Nice little plant
story there. He would do anything to keep the profile high.’

The submission to the BBFC was part of the circus. Lord Campbell had specifically drawn
Grand Theft Auto
to the board’s attention in his speech to the House of Lords. The BBFC was
concerned, and released a statement saying that the subject matter was ‘unprecedented’, but its claws had been cut by the
Carmageddon
scandal. The criminality of
GTA
was broader, and the urban rather than fantasy setting more relatable, enough to earn the game an ‘18’ certificate, but despite the concerns of the House of Lords, it was never
seriously under threat from a ban. And the worries of Parliament were far from universal. When the matter arose in January 1998, Lord Avebury dryly entered the debate: ‘My Lords, is the
Minister aware . . . that my twelve-year-old son, who has played the demonstration copy, assures me that he is not motivated to go out and steal cars?’

‘We never believed that it would actually cause that much trouble,’ says Hamilton. The controversy travelled word-wide – the game was banned in Brazil – but the
development team never had a moment’s pause about the moral standing of their product. ‘We were partly a bit naive at the time, not realising the power of what we were
creating,’ says Hamilton, ‘but I still don’t believe that there’s any harm in it.’

Grand Theft Auto
had always been lightweight, tongue-in-cheek and a game before all else. ‘We knew why every decision was made, and we were never ever influenced by
“let’s do something to create a bit of controversy”,’ says Jones. ‘We always did everything purely from the perspective of what’s going to be the most fun. It
just naturally kept pushing down the darker direction.’

The moral panic that surrounded
Grand Theft Auto
was largely hollow, and mostly the construct of a PR consultant. It turned out that there were usefully malleable branches of the press,
and even of government, who became effective if unwitting co-conspirators in seeking outrage and attention. ‘We tended to think of the politicians as idiots,’ says Dailly.
‘Complaining about a game that ninety-nine per cent of them would never have seen, let alone played. Calling it a murder simulator just showed how ignorant they were, and we knew
it.’

Clifford’s campaign worked.
Grand Theft Auto
was a good game with some amazing innovations, but its retrograde look could well have sunk its sales. Instead it was known throughout
the country as something illicit to seek out, and this was the vital impetus that convinced players to look past the graphics for long enough to appreciate the gameplay. In Britain the game sold
half a million copies that Christmas. And around the world, it sold a million more.

A little more than a decade later, in April 2008,
Grand Theft Auto IV
went on sale simultaneously across Europe and North America, and in its first week sales topped
six million copies. That number eventually rose to twenty-two million, estimated to have earned its publisher and developer nearly half a billion dollars. But buyers queuing overnight for an early
copy would find neither DMA nor BMG mentioned on the game’s packaging. And it had been a long time since the franchise had been made in Dundee.

In 1996, BMG had invested in DMA. Their four-game contract had cost them over three million pounds, and during the making of
Grand Theft Auto
, the publisher
had left the games-maker to its work. ‘Yeah, that’s the way BMG set it up,’ recalls Jones. ‘Because they knew we were creative guys, and just trusted us to get on with
it.’

But within BMG Interactive, factions were emerging. The company was splitting across the Atlantic, and across business cultures. According to Jones, ‘The guys in the UK were terrific to
get on with – while we were developing
GTA
for a couple of years, everything was going great. It only changed when the US side of things took on a lot of EA people. So they had this
kind of mismatch. Everybody in the UK was not from the gaming industry – they were from the music industry. So you had this kind of clash of cultures internally within BMG, which was kind of
strange.’

Where the UK arm of the publisher saw the tempting prospect of milking controversy, the staff in the US had a classic games-marketing perspective. How did it look? Was it visceral? Was it
cutting edge? ‘They thought this would never work in the US – that the consumer was too tech-savvy now, and they would look down upon something that wasn’t full 3D,’ says
Jones. With only three months to go to the game’s American launch, BMG US was pushing to have it cancelled. It was only the appeals of the company’s London office that saved it.

But the relationship between DMA and BMG was still mixed. ‘The BMG deal as a whole was good and bad,’ says Dailly. ‘It did give a massive cash injection, and DMA’s size
jumped from 50 or so to 130. It was also the beginning of the end . . . DMA took on too many projects, and this meant some didn’t get the staff and work they needed – a downward spiral
in terms of cash drain.’

In the wake of
Grand Theft Auto
, DMA once again had a spurt of income, and the team were feeling very positive. Jones wanted to cement the success and reduce his company’s
distractions from development. He brokered DMA into a takeover by the Sheffield-based publisher Gremlin Graphics. On the surface, it was a good fit. DMA was quirky and original, but successful.
Gremlin, a publisher since the 8-bit computing era, was solid, and perhaps a little dull – its main range of games was a series of reliable sports simulations. Jones
thought they would complement each other, an imaginative developer and a responsible publisher.

DMA’s acquisition by a publisher was permitted by its deal with BMG, but it complicated the relationship. In a sense, though, that was already moot. ‘Strangely enough, BMG had
already made the decision to get out of the gaming business,’ says Jones. ‘They were in the process of closing down their US division, so
Grand Theft Auto
was actually then
licensed to a non-BMG company in the US. Which I thought was a real shame, because they hadn’t had much success with gaming, and along came
GTA
and really started to trail blaze just
as they were pulling out of the industry.’

The US licensee was ASG Games, which peddled the same controversy in America as BMG had in Britain. But ASG was a tiny publisher and the rights for the US PlayStation version that followed a few
months later belonged to a larger company called Take Two Interactive. Within two years all of these companies, DMA, BMG, Take Two and Gremlin Graphics, would have finished a complex game of
musical chairs that would leave control of
G
rand Theft Auto
with a new development team and a new boss, and on a different continent.

‘On the first
GTA
it was always BMG, there was no Take Two,’ says Hamilton. ‘We had various people visiting from the US. It was quite late on before we actually saw
Sam.’

Sam Houser worked for BMG Interactive in London during the making of
Grand Theft Auto
. He was an English public school boy, the son of prestigious players in London’s swinging
heyday – his father was one of the owners of Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, and his mother an actress who had played opposite Michael Caine in
Get Carter
. Houser had grown up
connected to the media world, and had landed some work experience with the music arm of BMG while retaking his A-levels. After working his way through a slew of junior jobs in the company,
including directing early video footage of
Take That
, he had manoeuvred himself into the division which he saw as the most exciting: computer games.

At first Houser was merely one of the BMG Interactive team reviewing the builds of
Grand Theft Auto
that DMA sent from Dundee to London every couple of weeks.
He was a producer of the PlayStation conversion, but wasn’t well known to the Dundee team until after thoughts turned to a sequel.

GTA 2
transformed the franchise from an also-ran project for DMA’s new recruits to the star of its slate. ‘It was different now, in that we were no longer the unfortunate
project of the company,’ says Hamilton. ‘We were now the big one that everybody wanted to be working on.’
GTA 2
had a bigger budget, and by now Sam Houser became
involved. He was still based 400 miles away, but slowly becoming more visible. ‘I do remember him coming over,’ says Hamilton. ‘I remember a short, hairy guy. That would be
Sam.’

There was a shift in the development style, too.
Grand Theft Auto
had been led by the design and technical aspects of the game: programmers threw in ideas, guided by the limits of the
technology. For
GTA 2
the technological framework was taken for granted and, as Hamilton observed, the game became more ‘artistically’ led.

Houser wasn’t a games coder, and in fact he had no computing background at all. But he was a games player, and a cultural sponge: during his teens he had immersed himself in hip-hop and
East Coast rap. In this respect he was more BMG music than DMA games – his youthful interests rarely overlapped with those of kids who spent hours poring over code in their bedrooms. For the
programmers,
GTA 2
was about a more professional development cycle, and a complete technical rewrite of the code. For Houser, it was the chance to introduce gangs to the franchise. They
were the subject of the game’s introductory video. Houser directed it himself.