The Outlaw History of Grand Theft Auto

The Brooklyn home where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's recently sold for $12.5 million, making it the most expensive single-family home in the area. The new owner: Dan Houser, co-founder of video-game developer and publisher Rockstar Games.

Rockstar is the gaming house behind games such as Red Dead Redemption, a lauded open-world ode to spaghetti westerns, and L.A. Noire, which won a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2011. But what made Rockstar's name was Grand Theft Auto, the violent and complex series that changed video gaming over the last decade. And Houser's purchase of a literary icon's house is one of those symbolic moments that makes people wonder: Has GTA, perhaps the most controversial video-game series ever, gone so mainstream that it's no longer controversial?

That's what David Kushner set out to discover. Kushner (a contributor to Popular Mechanics) is the author of the book Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, out tomorrow. "It's still early," Kushner says. "Relative to music and print and even film, video games are the youngest medium we have, next to the Internet."

Jacked is an unauthorized take on Brit brothers Sam and Dan Houser, who moved to New York City in 1998 to create Rockstar Games. It's also about the medium of video games maturing through the development of this one series over the course of a decade. Beginning in 1999, and continuing as the games evolved through many iterations, "I was constantly covering GTA," Kushner says. "It defined a decade, and you could argue it was a defining entertaining product of its generation, not just in games."

Kushner says he first interviewed Sam and Dan Houser for Rolling Stone in 2003. "The thing that immediately got my attention was when they started talking about Def Jam [the hip-hop record label]," he says. "It's like they wanted to do for video games what Def Jam had done for music, which was to create something edgy, relevant, fashionable, and contemporary, as opposed to games about wizards and warriors," Kushner says. "That was what was cool about GTA. We hadn't seen that. Even games we considered gritty?Doom and Quake?were still fantastical."

Grand Theft Auto, on the other hand, was an amalgam of real-world cities with heavy-handed crime. And it started with a simple switch: Changing a bad game about cops and robbers called Race N Chase to a game that made the robber the center of attention. As such, you no longer had to wait for stoplights to turn green. Why wait for pedestrians to cross the street when you can just run them over? "In many ways, it's kind of innocent," Kushner says. "One of the oldest games in the books is cops and robbers, but it was always fun playing the robber because you aren't one in real life."

With its homage to Def Jam and references to U.S. cultural institutions like Miami Vice, the Grand Theft Auto series is really a love letter to America, Kushner argues. But America's reaction to that love letter was more enthusiastic?but also more puritanical?than the Housers expected.

"In England there were headlines and controversy with members of Parliament decrying a game that not only had they never seen, but was not even completed," Kushner says. That was due in large part to UK publicist Max Clifford, a master of tabloids whose Barnum-and-Bailey approach, focused Parliament's attention on the game's portrayal of acts of crime. But when the game came to the U.S., that's when the controversy really blew up. "American media distilled GTA to one sentence: Beating up prostitutes," Kushner says.

With that message, and amid high-profile school shootings and other teen gun attacks, it's no surprise that the game series became a magnet for litigation. Multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuits in the 2000s blamed Grand Theft Auto's creators when teens who had played the game were later accused of serious crimes, including murder. Many of those claims were dismissed outright (and the attorney who brought several of them was later disbarred) but eventually the Federal Trade Commission investigated Rockstar for distributing porn in a sex-filled, hidden mini-game called Hot Coffee found within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Rockstar's parent company finally settled that case in 2006, and another suit over Hot Coffee in 2009.

"The core of the controversy was that video games are for children. Period," Kushner says. But despite its many days in court, GTA perseveres. And as many games as Rockstar has sold (and will continue to sell), its biggest legacy may be that it shattered that sentiment once and for all. Lawsuits will undoubtedly continue, but the idea that video games are for kids only has been left behind. "I do believe that with the GTA decade, we're past video-game controversy," Kushner says.

Indeed, the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V is coming later this year, and its impending release is remarkably uncontroversial. "Of course it'll be different, of course it'll be better, and I'm sure it'll break every record again," Kushner says. "I think the majority of the reviews won't talk about the violence or controversy. They'll just take it for what it is: A great game."

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