When things got out of hand -- I mean out of hand -- was when Phillip Michael Thomas came into the picture and bodies started flying. The man had been invisible since the days of Miami Vice and Ronald Reagan, and yet here he was, cursing a blue streak and wearing a white suit that hadn't been current in at least as long. And he was jacking cars and menacing pedestrians.
I did what anybody would do under the circumstances. I jacked a fire engine.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
So began my immersion in the animated world of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the PlayStation 2 game that comes out this week riding a wave of hype, hand-wringing and canny satire.
Set in a Miami-like virtual city circa 1986 and featuring the voices of Thomas, Ray Liotta, Dennis Hopper and others, the game is the latest in a series that has been denounced by critics, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., as an incitement to mayhem.
Produced by two refugees from the English music business, it is the rare game that assigns you your mission in bluntly cinematic terms: Find the people who stole your cocaine and kill them.
In an interview in New York, Terry Donovan, one of the partners behind Grand Theft Auto, described its world succinctly: "Bigger, bolder, faster, twisted, more weirder. Remove all the boredom, heighten all the action."
In gaming circles, the release qualifies as something akin to the Super Bowl. Last year's Grand Theft Auto III sold more than 8 million copies worldwide, at about US$50 each, making it the best-selling home video game of the last two years. Sales of video games are expected to rise close to 30 percent this year, driven in large part by adult games like Grand Theft Auto.
In the bland offices of Rockstar Games, the company that produces Grand Theft Auto, Donovan and Dan Houser, who writes the profanity-laced dialogue for the game, expounded on the game's moral universe. Donovan -- 31, hulking, balding, British -- rubbed the sleep from pink, tired eyes. For the last few months, both men have been working marathon hours and trying to quit smoking, which seems to have affected them in different ways.
Donovan, who was using the nicotine patch, drifted in and out of attention, dropping hints of problems with "anger management"; Houser chattered and chomped at successive squares of nicotine gum. They discussed their product not as a game but as an experiment in narrative.
Donovan began: "Most films or whatever tie things up neatly at the end, with some kind of -- what's the correct literary term for the scene where the character discovers the saving grace?"
"Denouement," Houser said.
"Thank you. Traditionally the denouement is the moment where everybody feels OK about themselves no matter how many bad things happened. And if you remove the need to make someone feel morally justified in everything they've just done, you leave yourself a lot more freedom."
To critics, the environment is nothing but a playground for pathology. Like past Grand Theft Auto games, Vice City inverts the usual direction of video carnage. Instead of blowing bad guys away, you play one of the bad guys, what the company calls an "aspirational gangster," free to kill whomever you want.
In an often-mentioned feature, you can also pick up a prostitute, pay her for (offscreen) services, then kill her and get your money back. Other games may offer more killing and gore, but few are as ethically ambiguous. All Grand Theft Auto editions have come with a voluntary "M" rating, not for sale to minors, though in practice many stores sell M-rated games to children.
It doesn't hurt
Michael P. Wallace, who follows the industry for UBS Warburg, predicted that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City would sell 3 or 4 million copies before Christmas, for reasons not immediately obvious to outsiders. "Violence gets you headlines, but this is about the game play," Wallace said. "And the violence doesn't hurt."
In a statement this year, Lieberman singled out the game as a tutorial in bad behavior: "Games like Grand Theft Auto are particularly troubling because they go beyond just celebrating violence generally, and actually reward players for engaging in organized crime, murdering innocent people and other forms of perverse, anti-social behavior."
Since the criticism began, Donovan has compared the violence and humor of the game with that of The Sopranos. But the comparison does not hold up. The brutality in The Sopranos forces viewers to confront their feelings about the characters and their lives; in Grand Theft Auto, it just shapes the scenery. The game owes more to the quip of the director Jean-Luc Godard, who when asked why there was so much blood in his film Pierrot le Fou, answered, "Not blood, red."
Warren Spector, a game designer for a rival company called Ion Storm, said he found the violent content of Grand Theft Auto "reprehensible" but also beside the point. "People focus on the wrong things," he said. "The real appeal has little to do with the havoc." What the game did, Spector said, was create a virtual world where players are free to decide where to go, what to do.
"You can kill everything that moves, or you can kill no one," he said. "Every player has a unique experience. It's free-form, sandbox-style play. That's the future of games." Still, Spector lamented, "the best example of game design of the last couple years is something I don't want to show my mother."
With sales of games and consoles expected to top US$10 billion this year, the video game industry generates more business than the movies. But in the food chain of popular culture, video games still occupy a slot next to comic books or crossword puzzles: popular, often imaginative, but not the sort of thing you talk about in mixed company.To Donovan and Houser, this is unjust.
Donovan advanced a theory of pop evolution. "If you grew up in the '70s, you wanted to be a guitar player," he said. "If you grew up in the '80s, you wanted to be a DJ. I grew up a bit in the '70s and a bit in the '80s." Donovan came of age in London amid the accouterments of celebrity and music. His father, Terence, was a fashion photographer and directed music videos, including Robert Palmer's slinky Simply Irresistible. His brother, Dan, played in the band Big Audio Dynamite and was briefly married to the English ingenue Patsy Kensit. By the time Donovan graduated from spinning discs in nightclubs to a job at a record company, he felt the fun of it had passed him by.
"You go on thinking the music business is going to be phenomenal when you get there," he said. "But it's only phenomenal because somebody else has already taken all the risks or broken all the rules. I wasn't sitting at my desk with my nice pair of monitors going, `Yeah, yeah, I'm going to change the world tomorrow.'"
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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