With his school friend Sam Houser, Donovan began to think about their other obsession, video games. Houser, whose father ran a London jazz club, worked for a record company that was spinning off an interactive division, and he followed the spin, eventually landing in New York.
Ideas and geeks
Before the division crashed, Houser adopted an embryonic version of Grand Theft Auto, created by a little company in Scotland called DMA Design. In 1998, he persuaded Donovan to come to New York and build a company around the game. Compared to the music business, Donovan said, the video game industry was wide open, changing at the speed of technology. All you needed was an idea and the geek power to program it.
Most promising of all, the nascent industry was still tethered to the toy business, and pitched its fantasies to reach children. As the generation that grew up with Super Mario and Donkey Kong moved into its 20s and 30s, Donovan and his partners, who by now included Houser's younger brother, Dan, saw a huge opportunity: a market for the equivalent of R-rated movies. They formed Rockstar Games in 1998 as a division within a larger company called Take-Two Interactive Software. Drawing on their roots, they positioned Rockstar as if it were an independent record company, with a T-shirt line and a short-lived series of Rockstar nights at a local club.
"You're trying to reach the same people" as a label, said Dan Houser, 28. "Why can't you talk to them in the same language and make content that is interesting to them?" The way things had stood, he said, "you'd be watching a film about gangsters or somebody's marriage breaking up, reading a book about something serious, listening to music, and then playing a game about a dolphin. And look, the dolphin game was fun, but the subject matter was obtuse."
Grand Theft Auto is not the only game playing with what are generously called adult themes. Next month, Acclaim Entertainment, a once-leading company, plans to release BMX XXX, a racing game that includes nudity. At least seven major chain stores, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, Toys 'R` Us, Kmart and KB Toys, have announced that they will not carry the game. Wallace, the stock analyst, called the move "a hail-Mary pass to save the company," and unlikely to work.
To create the background environment for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a technical crew of about 50, working in Scotland, combined digital photos of Miami with imagery from Miami Vice and Brian De Palma's 1983 film, Scarface. They added 1980s-vintage cars and acid-washed jeans, and weaponry from baseball bats to heavy ordnance. The soundtrack allows players to flip among nine radio stations, including one that plays nothing but power ballads. As a tie-in, the music will be released on seven CDs.
Eighteen months into the development, Donovan was still learning the extent of the game's moral freedom. He had spent the previous night trying to figure out one of the new game's features, which allows the player to score points peacefully, by delivering pizzas. Finally he made a breakthrough. "What I learned as a criminal helped me to deliver pizza," he said. "The same button combination you use for a drive-by shooting is how you hand the pizza to someone. Which I thought was really cool."
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