Skip to main content

Jacked Review - The Unauthorised GTA Story?

The book that claims to go behind the scenes with Rockstar's phenomenon.

Jacked: The unauthorised behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto, by David Kushner; Collins, paperback

There are three killer lines in the author's note prefacing Jacked. The first, which we'll come back to: "This book is based on more than 10 years of research." The second is that it is "narrative nonfiction", an unusual qualifier to force on the reader of a behind-the-scenes story at such an early stage. The third is that "the current helm at Rockstar declined to participate in this book." The "current helm" is not singular. What Kushner is trying not to say is that his book is missing the key players.

So Jacked is in a bit of a bind. It can't go behind the scenes at Rockstar, so instead settles on telling the Grand Theft Auto story with heroes and villains: the boundary-pushing Rockstar boys taking their medium into the mainstream while battling media hysteria and moral conservatism.

'The incredible story behind the phenomenon that changed games forever,' it says here.

There are two problems with this. One is that Rockstar did not battle on behalf of its games, as Kushner notes several times, issuing almost no statements and granting interviews only when topics like the 'Hot Coffee' controversy were off the menu. There are no flashpoints, no meetings between the book's narrative players; the closest it gets is Jack Thompson and a bunch of placard-wavers outside Rockstar's New York studio. No-one comes out to meet them.

The bigger problem is that it turns this book's focus away from Grand Theft Auto and towards Jack Thompson. The conservative ex-lawyer (and now internet minister) is certainly a part of GTA's story, inasmuch as his rantings against it were given time across America's talk shows and newspapers. He represents an aspect of the American public psyche, too, which operates on moral fervour rather than rationality. But is Jack Thompson really worthy of a character arc?

Well, he gets one. We hear about Jack as a young man at conservative rallies, thrilling as Charlton Heston booms out a sermon decreeing that Ice T's 'Cop Killer' should be banned. "He lit the fuse on the culture war," says Jack. Word. We follow the young demagogue through law school, through his first successful prosecutions of shock jocks and early battles with Time Warner for releasing rap albums. This chapter ends with him proudly winning a 'Censor of the Year' award in 1992. Kushner clearly hopes that Jack's crazy enough to be interesting, but this is not the stuff of great antagonists.

Thompson pops up throughout the book, but there are other lengthy digressions with tenuous links to Grand Theft Auto. A chapter is given over to the story of two teenage stepbrothers who decided one night to shoot at passing cars with their parent's rifle. They killed one man and seriously injured others. When arrested, one said that GTA3 may have given them the idea.

Though this incident could be a starting point for enquiring into the nature of video game violence and copycat crimes, its treatment here is relentlessly soft-focus. The story tails off with no-one able to make any sense of the whole thing, least of all Kushner. There's no attempt to analyse, and really there's no story - just a family tragedy, bulking out a book on Rockstar.

A chapter called 'Rockstar Loft' is named after an especially pretentious club night organised by the New York branch, and makes for cringe-inducing reading.

Kushner's previous book, Masters of Doom, is a superb read that has one massive advantage over Jacked. Carmack, Romero and all the other key players at id Software talked to him; Masters of Doom is a story as told by its main players. Without Rockstar's "current helm", Kushner is forced to give people like Thompson the time of day and reassemble what he can from developers who used to work there and previously published material. Some of the time, he makes it work.

The early part of the book is uncompromised, thanks to the large number of people whose involvement with the series ended after the first game. It breezes through the formative years of figures like Sam Houser and Dave Jones before a detailed look at how DMA Design's top-down Race n' Chase morphs, through accident and design, into Grand Theft Auto.

This sequence is one of the book's best, as Kushner follows the game rattling between DMA in Dundee and Houser's BMG team (the publishers) in London, and its step-by-step evolution into a new breed. Mixed in with media types and anonymous DMA coders are characters like Gary Penn, Dave Jones and Sam Houser, and this ferment of voices creates unlikely heroes. One is the publicist Max Clifford, whose easy manipulation of parliament and the press is a brutally efficient PR masterclass. By the end, Jones is stunned into submission: "Everything he said came true." The game's growing pains, and the backdrop of the all-conquering PlayStation, find Kushner's "narrative nonfiction" at its most persuasive.

Soon, Sam Houser and other key players are in New York as the newly-established Rockstar Games, focusing on building a "lifestyle brand", and DMA is in Dundee making GTA2. The tensions lead to DMA's acquisition and Dave Jones leaving to set up Realtime Worlds, and before you know it we're on GTA3. By the time this rolls around Houser is taking an even more central role, things are getting really interesting for Rockstar - and the cracks in Jacked begin to show.

The simple truth is that Kushner hasn't had the access to get new material on the making of GTA3, Vice City or San Andreas. From here on in, Jacked pulls almost all of its Rockstar-specific material from previously published sources - and a special few are ravaged mercilessly. More on this later.

The rules of videogame sex, circa San Andreas: 'Every country was cool with jacking off, as long as no penis appeared. No mentions, though, of female masturbation. Implied oral sex, no problem anywhere.'

The exception to this, which Kushner takes full advantage of, is the 'Hot Coffee' saga. Here there's a wealth of documentary material and accounts from which to build a complete picture of an incident that encapsulated Rockstar's grand ambitions and near-fatal hubris. No reasonable person would cause a fuss over inaccessible sex scenes unlocked by an unofficial third-party patch named Hot Coffee, would they? Rockstar's bosses thought it would probably blow over, and did the worst thing possible. They claimed the content was not on the disc, and blamed hackers for inserting it. They lied.

What is staggering about Hot Coffee - and Kushner is meticulous about the details - is how it balloons from an eagerly-anticipated mod (an enjoyable digression introduces the Dutch coder responsible) into a PR problem, and from there into a full-blown scandal. Sam Houser, so internally bullish about how the sex scenes were pushing boundaries, simply doesn't take it seriously until it's far too late, and ends up being grilled by the FBI. San Andreas has to be recalled and reissued while scores of lawsuits are eventually settled out of court by Take Two, costing the company at least $45 million.

From here, it's all downhill for Jacked. The Hot Coffee section is great, but Kushner gives it such prominence because he doesn't have much else to say about the games - they're described, sure, and features and locations and music tracks are listed, but Jacked never threatens to explain why these games are such magical experiences. Houser says at one point that "I don't want [San Andreas] to be remembered for Hot Coffee," but when there's no other side from either him or the author, that's all there is.

Houser didn't say that to Kushner, in fact, though by the way it's presented in the book, you'd think he did. It's one of many quotes in this book taken from an article published in Edge magazine in April 2008, The Making of Grand Theft Auto 4. (Full disclosure: I worked on Edge when this article was published and, though I didn't write the piece, am obviously familiar with the material.) This 12-page article is one of the few occasions Sam Houser has been interviewed at length, and nearly everything in it finds a home in Jacked - almost every detail in the chapter on GTA4 in particular. (See 'The Edge of Reason', left.)

GTA2 is given very short shrift in Jacked, and Chinatown Wars doesn't even warrant a mention, which seems rather harsh given that it managed to finally incorporate drug dealing.

Why isn't Kushner happy to admit that Sam Houser wouldn't talk to him? Only he knows; perhaps because it would expose the "behind-the-scenes" part of the book's title as a lie. "This book is based on more than 10 years of research." This book is a potted history of Grand Theft Auto that confuses context with content, and has a smattering of new material from minor players. It has a few worthwhile chapters, but it's not even close to the "behind-the-scenes story" it sells, and by the end Kushner is so out of options he's simply rewriting the work of others as his own. Masters of Doom is a wonderful book, and it's scarcely believable this comes from the same author.

Jacked is not the book that Grand Theft Auto deserves, but blaming Kushner only goes so far. Rockstar is a company where "unauthorised" and "behind-the-scenes" don't work together and probably never will. The company doesn't have relationships with the media so much as it has mood swings and demands - something alluded to a few times in Jacked without the hammer ever quite going down.

Sam Houser bemoans GTA being remembered for Hot Coffee and Thompson and all those other lunatics. He's right, but Rockstar's silence is why books like this are written in the way they are. Grand Theft Auto, one of the greatest game series ever, surely deserves a little more than that.

Read this next

seductrice.net
universo-virtual.com
buytrendz.net
thisforall.net
benchpressgains.com
qthzb.com
mindhunter9.com
dwjqp1.com
secure-signup.net
ahaayy.com
tressesindia.com
puresybian.com
krpano-chs.com
cre8workshop.com
hdkino.org
peixun021.com
qz786.com
utahperformingartscenter.org
worldqrmconference.com
shangyuwh.com
eejssdfsdfdfjsd.com
playminecraftfreeonline.com
trekvietnamtour.com
your-business-articles.com
essaywritingservice10.com
hindusamaaj.com
joggingvideo.com
wandercoups.com
wormblaster.net
tongchengchuyange0004.com
internetknowing.com
breachurch.com
peachesnginburlesque.com
dataarchitectoo.com
clientfunnelformula.com
30pps.com
cherylroll.com
ks2252.com
prowp.net
webmanicura.com
sofietsshotel.com
facetorch.com
nylawyerreview.com
apapromotions.com
shareparelli.com
goeaglepointe.com
thegreenmanpubphuket.com
karotorossian.com
publicsensor.com
taiwandefence.com
epcsur.com
mfhoudan.com
southstills.com
tvtv98.com
thewellington-hotel.com
bccaipiao.com
colectoresindustrialesgs.com
shenanddcg.com
capriartfilmfestival.com
replicabreitlingsale.com
thaiamarinnewtoncorner.com
gkmcww.com
mbnkbj.com
andrewbrennandesign.com
cod54.com
luobinzhang.com
faithfirst.net
zjyc28.com
tongchengjinyeyouyue0004.com
nhuan6.com
kftz5k.com
oldgardensflowers.com
lightupthefloor.com
bahamamamas-stjohns.com
ly2818.com
905onthebay.com
fonemenu.com
notanothermovie.com
ukrainehighclassescort.com
meincmagazine.com
av-5858.com
yallerdawg.com
donkeythemovie.com
corporatehospitalitygroup.com
boboyy88.com
miteinander-lernen.com
dannayconsulting.com
officialtomsshoesoutletstore.com
forsale-amoxil-amoxicillin.net
generictadalafil-canada.net
guitarlessonseastlondon.com
lesliesrestaurants.com
mattyno9.com
nri-homeloans.com
rtgvisas-qatar.com
salbutamolventolinonline.net
sportsinjuries.info
wedsna.com
rgkntk.com
bkkmarketplace.com
zxqcwx.com
breakupprogram.com
boxcardc.com
unblockyoutubeindonesia.com
fabulousbookmark.com
beat-the.com
guatemala-sailfishing-vacations-charters.com
magie-marketing.com
kingstonliteracy.com
guitaraffinity.com
eurelookinggoodapparel.com
howtolosecheekfat.net
marioncma.org
oliviadavismusic.com
shantelcampbellrealestate.com
shopleborn13.com
topindiafree.com
v-visitors.net
djjky.com
053hh.com
originbluei.com
baucishotel.com
33kkn.com
intrinsiqresearch.com
mariaescort-kiev.com
mymaguk.com
sponsored4u.com
crimsonclass.com
bataillenavale.com
searchtile.com
ze-stribrnych-struh.com
zenithalhype.com
modalpkv.com
bouisset-lafforgue.com
useupload.com
37r.net
autoankauf-muenster.com
bantinbongda.net
bilgius.com
brabustermagazine.com
indigrow.org
miicrosofts.net
mysmiletravel.com
selinasims.com
spellcubesapp.com
usa-faction.com
hypoallergenicdogsnames.com
dailyupdatez.com
foodphotographyreviews.com
cricutcom-setup.com
chprowebdesign.com
katyrealty-kanepa.com
tasramar.com
bilgipinari.org
four-am.com
indiarepublicday.com
inquick-enbooks.com
iracmpi.com
kakaschoenen.com
lsm99flash.com
nana1255.com
ngen-niagara.com
technwzs.com
virtualonlinecasino1345.com
wallpapertop.net
casino-natali.com
iprofit-internet.com
denochemexicana.com
eventhalfkg.com
medcon-taiwan.com
life-himawari.com
myriamshomes.com
nightmarevue.com
healthandfitnesslives.com
androidnews-jp.com
allstarsru.com
bestofthebuckeyestate.com
bestofthefirststate.com
bestwireless7.com
britsmile.com
declarationintermittent.com
findhereall.com
jingyou888.com
lsm99deal.com
lsm99galaxy.com
moozatech.com
nuagh.com
patliyo.com
philomenamagikz.net
rckouba.net
saturnunipessoallda.com
tallahasseefrolics.com
thematurehardcore.net
totalenvironment-inthatquietearth.com
velislavakaymakanova.com
vermontenergetic.com
kakakpintar.com
jerusalemdispatch.com
begorgeouslady.com
1800birks4u.com
2wheelstogo.com
6strip4you.com
bigdata-world.net
emailandco.net
gacapal.com
jharpost.com
krishnaastro.com
lsm99credit.com
mascalzonicampani.com
sitemapxml.org
thecityslums.net
topagh.com
flairnetwebdesign.com
rajasthancarservices.com
bangkaeair.com
beneventocoupon.com
noternet.org
oqtive.com
smilebrightrx.com
decollage-etiquette.com
1millionbestdownloads.com
7658.info
bidbass.com
devlopworldtech.com
digitalmarketingrajkot.com
fluginfo.net
naqlafshk.com
passion-decouverte.com
playsirius.com
spacceleratorintl.com
stikyballs.com
top10way.com
yokidsyogurt.com
zszyhl.com
16firthcrescent.com
abogadolaboralistamd.com
apk2wap.com
aromacremeria.com
banparacard.com
bosmanraws.com
businessproviderblog.com
caltonosa.com
calvaryrevivalchurch.org
chastenedsoulwithabrokenheart.com
cheminotsgardcevennes.com
cooksspot.com
cqxzpt.com
deesywig.com
deltacartoonmaps.com
despixelsetdeshommes.com
duocoracaobrasileiro.com
fareshopbd.com
goodpainspills.com
hemendekor.com
kobisitecdn.com
makaigoods.com
mgs1454.com
piccadillyresidences.com
radiolaondafresca.com
rubendorf.com
searchengineimprov.com
sellmyhrvahome.com
shugahouseessentials.com
sonihullquad.com
subtractkilos.com
valeriekelmansky.com
vipasdigitalmarketing.com
voolivrerj.com
worldhealthstory.com
zeelonggroup.com
1015southrockhill.com
10x10b.com
111-online-casinos.com
191cb.com
3665arpentunitd.com
aitesonics.com
bag-shokunin.com
brightotech.com
communication-digitale-services.com
covoakland.org
dariaprimapack.com
freefortniteaccountss.com
gatebizglobal.com
global1entertainmentnews.com
greatytene.com
hiroshiwakita.com
iktodaypk.com
jahatsakong.com
meadowbrookgolfgroup.com
newsbharati.net
platinumstudiosdesign.com
slotxogamesplay.com
strikestaruk.com
techguroh.com
trucosdefortnite.com
ufabetrune.com
weddedtowhitmore.com
12940brycecanyonunitb.com
1311dietrichoaks.com
2monarchtraceunit303.com
601legendhill.com
850elaine.com
adieusolasomade.com
andora-ke.com
bestslotxogames.com
cannagomcallen.com
endlesslyhot.com
iestpjva.com
ouqprint.com
pwmaplefest.com
qtylmr.com
rb88betting.com
buscadogues.com
1007macfm.com
born-wild.com
growthinvests.com
promocode-casino.com
proyectogalgoargentina.com
wbthompson-art.com
whitemountainwheels.com
7thavehvl.com
developmethis.com
funkydogbowties.com
travelodgegrandjunction.com
gao-town.com
globalmarketsuite.com
blogshippo.com
hdbka.com
proboards67.com
outletonline-michaelkors.com
kalkis-research.com
thuthuatit.net
buckcash.com
hollistercanada.com
docterror.com
asadart.com
vmayke.org
erwincomputers.com
dirimart.org
okkii.com
loteriasdecehegin.com
mountanalog.com
healingtaobritain.com
ttxmonitor.com
nwordpress.com
11bolabonanza.com