The Australian book review: “Jacked: The Unauthorised Behind-the-Scenes Story of Grand Theft Auto” by David Kushner, April 2012
A book review for The Weekend Australian, published on April 14 2012. The review appears below in its entirety.
Grand Theft Auto’s makers are rock stars in a world of geeks
by Andrew McMillenJacked: The Unauthorised Behind-the-Scenes Story of Grand Theft Auto
By David Kushner
HarperCollins, 368pp, $29.99
‘GRAND Theft Auto revolutionised an industry, defined one generation, and pissed off another, transforming a medium long thought of as kids’ stuff into something culturally relevant, darkly funny, and wildly free,” David Kushner writes in his second video game-themed book.
His first was Masters of Doom in 2003, which looked at Nazi and demon-shooting games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.
Here, Kushner focuses on the GTA series, which casts players “at the centre of their own criminal universe”, to quote the game’s Scottish creator, Sam Houser. Since its 1997 debut, GTA has courted controversy by allowing players to do whatever they please. Originally set in an urban environment viewed from above, the concept moved into three dimensions in 2001 with the release of GTA III on the Sony PlayStation 2. This proved to be the franchise’s breakthrough: from a camera positioned a few metres over the shoulder of the player-controlled character, gamers could follow the laws of the game world – which mirrored real life – if they so pleased.
Nobody did that for more than a few moments, though, because breaking the law was much more enjoyable: stealing vehicles, running down pedestrians, firing weapons into crowds of people, leading the police on elaborate cross-country car chases after gunning down officers in cold blood. The series has sold more than 130 million copies worldwide; four GTA games have been banned or censored in Australia at some point.
All the things you’d never do in real life, GTA made possible. Kushner describes it as a “brilliantly open world to explore”, where unlike other, comparatively plain video games, “there was no high score to hit or princess to be saved”. Jacked – a title that refers to the in-game ability to carjack – charts the evolution of the team behind the initial game through to their rebranding as Rockstar Games, which is one of the most respected names in the industry. It also examines the shockwaves that GTA’s law-defying gameplay sent through Western culture.
“It’s hard to understand those who came of age at the turn of the millennium without understanding GTA,” Kushner writes.
I was nine when I played the first game and 16 when I bought GTA: San Andreas on release in 2004. I’ve invested thousands of hours into exploring intricately detailed virtual re-creations of Miami, Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles. It’s evident that Kushner, too, is a big fan, despite his preference for a dispassionate, omnipresent style of narrative nonfiction.
Though the author has spoken at length with seemingly everyone who had anything to do with the games, many of his book’s significant scenes are exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Although they took place in reality, Kushner’s poetic licence is occasionally jarring.
In this example, Kushner writes from the perspective of a Miami attorney named Jack Thompson, who became one of GTA’s most strident critics and opponents (before being disbarred for professional misconduct):
“Thompson examined the video game box in his hand. The cover was broken into frames like a comic book — flaming cars, a girl in a pink bikini, a black guy with a big gold chain and a gun. He eyed the tiny little logo in the bottom-right corner, the yellow square with the letter R and the star. Rockstar Games? Get ready to be Jacked.”
The narrative doesn’t benefit from these attempted flights of fancy, nor do we need Kushner’s frequent, tacky reminders that the members of the development team at Rockstar were, in fact, rock stars in an industry established by geeks. “Part of what we’re trying to get away from is the lone, girlfriendless, pizza-ordering fat guy in the basement,” GTA’s marketing director says at one point.
Yet Rockstar Games is portrayed as a company full of narcissistic, arrogant wankers. Houser modelled the company on his favourite music label, Def Jam Records. He sold T-shirts and stickers bearing the studio’s name. His employees exhibited behaviour somewhere between extreme devotion and cult-like worship: they wore branded tracksuits and military jackets at industry trade shows; they’d shave their heads during “crunch” time in the lead-up to a game’s release.
When it came to the media, “ego trumped economics”: the PR team would abuse publications for awarding GTA games anything less than perfect scores, and threaten to pull ads.
These insights into Rockstar’s inner workings are the highlights of a strong, if flawed, tale about this generation’s most influential video game series. Kushner’s well-researched book will appeal to gamers and those looking to understand how gaming came of age after being dragged kicking and screaming, with the release of each subsequent Rockstar game.
Andrew McMillen is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist.
Qweekend story: ‘I went to the drive-in and this is what I saw’, September 2011
A story for Qweekend; my first contribution to their weekly ‘what I saw’ series of observational short stories.
Click the below images for a closer look, or read the article text underneath. Photography by David Kelly.
I went to the drive-in and this is what I saw
Thirty-eight kilometres south-east of Brisbane lies a large, lumpy car park just off the Pacific Motorway. It’s an unremarkable piece of land but for the two enormous white billboards at either end. At half-past five on a Saturday afternoon, a dozen vehicles are queued at the entrance. Relaxed female staff stride out to the central booth and begin letting traffic through.
Two different sessions screen simultaneously at the Yatala Twin Drive-In Theatre – hence the name – and since seeing one costs adults $13 each and two costs $16, it seems wasteful not to commit to the double. “What movie are you watching, darlin’?” the attendant asks. My partner and I opt for the pair showing in field two: fantasy-action film Thor and medieval-themed comedy Your Highness.
The parallels between regular cinemas and the Twin begin with “seating”. As with an indoor theatre, central real estate is snapped up first, while late entrants are relegated to the wings and neck-craning front rows. In the middle of the property, a single-storey building serves the dual purposes of business HQ and food outlet. The decor borrows heavily from the ’50s-era American diner aesthetic, right down to the life-size Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe statues in the foyer – “Please don’t touch”, reads a sign on Elvis’s guitar. A formidable wall of sweets makes young eyes water. Attendants serve dagwood dogs, Chiko Rolls, hot chips and popcorn, while an elderly manager potters behind the scenes.
All four films screening tonight are new(ish) releases. Those parked in field one will be privy to Rio and Fast & Furious 5. This ensures that visiting the Yatala Twin isn’t a novelty excursion into yesteryear but an independent alternative to watching films at a megaplex.
Beyond a row of tall trees at the foot of the property, the queue of brake lights on Stapylton-Jacobs Well Road extends into the fading dusk. Most headlights are dimmed once inside the theatre, as drivers heed a sign that reads: “Definitely no lights”. Seated at a table outside the diner, eyeballing the procession of slow-moving vehicles, we’re glad we got here early.
It’s chilly in Yatala tonight. Slippers and ugg boots are common; children, especially, are revelling in the chance to publicly parade their brightly-coloured pyjamas. The painful shriek of low-bodied sports cars scraping their undersides on the bumpy terrain occasionally interrupts a PA soundtrack comprised solely of golden-oldies.
We gaze up at the giant white billboard and attempt to estimate its height. Twenty-five metres? Thirty? (We learn on the theatre’s website later that it’s actually 13.4m.) As we walk back uphill, the diner’s painfully bright fluorescent lights destroy what limited night-sight the human eye can muster. It’s a complaint echoed by a pair of teenage girls, with whom we nearly collide. “We can’t see a bloody thing!” they say, startled.
Dean and Jess, a couple of Yatala regulars, are lounging on a mattress in the back of their station wagon. How does tonight compare to previous outings? “It’s cold,” Dean says. “That’s about it!” We all laugh. His mother once worked for the defunct Richlands Twin Drive-In Theatre. After getting his driver’s licence, Dean and his mates often spent weekend nights within these very grounds. “We like coming here. It’s peaceful. You get to lie back,” he says, gesturing at the mattress.
A strange feeling descends in the calm before Thor. It’s the realisation that we’re sitting in a dark carpark with hundreds of others, listening to a live Elvis album recorded in the 1950s. Parents tell their children to stay within sight. Some have brought fold-up chairs; others make use of ute trays. Blankets are a prerequisite. Many simply sit in warm little bubbles, radios tuned to the relevant frequency. Everyone respects their neighbours’ space. There’s something incredibly romantic about the manner in which this experience brings people together, far more so than an average trip to the cinema. Who knows how many children have been conceived here?
Beside each parking space is a steel pole lit by tiny, candle-like orange bulbs. The poles hold two chunky, steel-encased speakers designed to be hung inside car windows. The units are hefty. They give off the impression that the hardware hasn’t been upgraded since the theatre was opened, in October 1974, with one screen. (It became the Yatala Twin in 2000.)
The speakers buzz with distortion whenever things explode in Thor (which is often), or when starlet Zooey Deschanel breaks into song in Your Highness. Those who possess adequate stereos and generosity toward their fellow man blast the radio at windscreen-rattling volume.
During the interval, the queue for the ladies’ is dozens-deep. Happily, the guys’ queue is non-existent. Most of those parked in field two leave after Thor. Some cars creep forward a few rows.
Fifteen minutes into Your Highness, the yellow glow of the RACQ logo glides by. Three cars over, 32 year-old Alisha and her partner Frank are stranded. They had intended to relocate and watch Fast & Furious 5, only to find that their engine wouldn’t turn over. Theatre staff have a battery pack on hand to assist but it hasn’t helped. Frank’s son, Ryan, is in the back of their white wagon. “We come here every three or four months, just for something different,” says Alisha. “Ryan likes coming. In summertime, it’s awesome.” She butts out her cigarette on the bitumen. “There needs to be more of them,” she adds. “We come all the way from Ipswich. There’s one there, but it just shows old movies.”
As soon as the credits start roll, brake lights pierce the darkness. Our neighbours shoot off a few minutes before the film’s end. They leave in such a hurry that they fail to put their rubbish in a nearby bin. It’s the sole instance of unbecoming behaviour witnessed during nearly six hours spent parked before the giant, white billboard in field two. Our engine starts with the assistance of crossed fingers.
The Vine interview: David Roads of Airbourne, June 2011
An interview with Airbourne for The Vine. Excerpt below.
Airbourne are a rock and roll band from Warrnambool, Victoria. On face value, it appears that they like loud guitars, open chords, beefy drums, headbanging, and climbing scaffolding at festivals. They write songs with titles like ‘Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast’; ‘Blonde, Bad and Beautiful’; and ‘Cheap Wine & Cheaper Women’. At times, they sound a lot like AC/DC; which is to say, all of the time they sound a lot like AC/DC.
Their website URL claims ‘Airbourne rock’. The cover of their most recent album, No Guts. No Glory. (yes, the punctuation is compulsory), features an artful drawing of the four band members looking very rock ‘n’ roll amid evocative “rock” symbolism. Which, to their credit, tells you exactly what Airbourne are all about before you even hear a distorted G chord.
Witness: a smoke-belching industrial factory, including masculine workers exiting the gates, fists aloft; a doe-eyed woman in a bikini drinking a martini while covered in cash, empty shot glasses by her side; some young rockers/punks hoisting a skull-adorned flag on the edge of a cliff; and, best of all, a semi-trailer busting through a wooden barrier while being pursued by two helicopters and a light aircraft. The semi-trailer is driven by Lemmy – of Motorhead fame, who also appeared in their video for ‘Runnin’ Wild’ – but that’s not even the weirdest part of the album cover; which essentially a combination of everything that any teenaged male has ever mindlessly doodled in the margins of his high school notepads. No; the weirdest thing is that Lemmy’s semi is inexplicably pursuing a mini tornado. Yes.
All of which makes them a very easy target for ‘serious music fans’—which, if I’m being honest, I probably consider myself to be. Meaning I’ve never paid much attention to Airbourne. The closest I’ve come is seeing them at festivals, watching from a hundred metres back with a smirk on my face, not really paying them attention or respecting them in any way whatsoever. Yet they’re probably among the most recognisable Australian bands at an international level—they’re signed to Roadrunner Records and are frequent festival bookings in both Europe and the United States. Yes, although there is a fair bit of cultural cringe attached to Airbourne, it’s tough to deny that they’re good at what they do. And strangely, I couldn’t help but develop a newfound respect for Airbourne after chatting to guitarist David Roads (above, far right) for the first time, here now on TheVine.
–
What does an average day look like for you, when you’re not out on tour?
We’re very busy lately. We’re currently working on album number three. So at the moment we’re just kind of based in Melbourne and we’re rehearsing a lot. With the tour coming up next week, we’re starting to rehearse a lot more because we’re going back and [getting] the old stuff ready for the tour.
What gets you out of bed each morning? What do you look forward to when you first wake up?
Well lately, a sunny day! [laughs] The weather’s been so crappy here down in Melbourne. But, you know, we’re focused on what we’re doing at the moment with the album—I want to get in there and just make a rockin’ album. I guess our head’s in that at the moment, but [we'll be] back around Christmas time. And we just got back from tour. We’re trying to have a bit of a break. We still did Big Day Out and stuff, but we’re kind of still in ‘work mode’.
Do you view music as a job?
Yeah, we’re full-time with the band. If we’re not off the road, we’re on the road, touring. And when we release new albums, we go overseas for the majority of the year. Last year we were over there for 10 months touring for No Guts. No Glory.
If music is a job for you, what’s the most stressful part?
You can call it a job. It’s our living but it’s not really…I guess job’s a bad choice of word. It’s a lifestyle for us. As musicians, we love playing rock and roll, we love touring as a rock band. There’s nothing real stressful. There’s a lot of fun involved. It’s like, if you love what you do, you’re living the dream, I guess. We have a lot of fun when on tour and all that kind of stuff.
I guess sometimes it can get a bit stressful when you’re on the road. Sometimes when you’re sick of touring you can get sick with the flu, or a bad cold. That gets pretty hard, because the show goes on. You get up and have got to play that night. That can be about as stressful as it can get, really, I guess. But when you’re making an album it’s a bit stressful, because you’re still writing an album that’s going out to the world. You get in there and just do the best job that you can.
For the full interview, visit The Vine. The music video for their song ‘Bottom Of The Well‘ is embedded below.
IGN Australia story: ‘Blockbuster or Bust: The New Face of Development?’, 2011
A feature story for IGN Australia. Excerpt below.
Blockbuster or Bust: The New Face of Development?
Triple A or the highway?
In February, IGN Australia took a magnifying glass to the state of the Australian game development industry. We found that locally, trends pointed toward bigger development studios – whose bread and butter was console game development, often for overseas publishers – closing down. In their absence, smaller businesses – who focus on developing games for mobile and social platforms – are where the real growth is happening. However, one of our interviewees suggested that it’s a “distraction” to talk in terms of geographically-specific industries. “It isn’t helpful to talk in local terms,” he said. “It’s a global industry.”
With that in mind, we substituted our magnifying glass for a telescope, and peered across the Pacific Ocean toward the United States of America, where many of the world’s largest video game publishers reside. With the inferences from Activision’s most recent earnings call – that, increasingly, console game development is becoming “blockbuster or bust” – rattling around our brains, we asked a couple of triple-A-scale publishers for their take on this topic, as well as questions like: is basing your business exclusively around triple-A level development a sustainable approach? Is it riskier than ever to be debuting new IPs [intellectual property; ie, new games] in a crowded marketplace, where a handful of household names earn the lion’s share of revenue? And finally, does it take a huge set of balls to launch new shooters that directly compete with Call of Duty’s current market dominance?
Bethesda Knows Best
We’ll deal with that last question first, since it’s the most provocative. The company best-positioned to answer it is named Bethesda Softworks, whose headquarters – and its in-house game studios – are located in Rockville, Maryland. Bethesda also has offices in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Benelux and Tokyo. We can’t be sure, since they’re a privately held company – “we don’t ever release sales figures, annual reports, or employee numbers,” says Pete Hines, VP PR & Marketing – but we believe they’re among the biggest privately-held publishers in the world. Hines responds cautiously when asked about the size of Bethesda’s balls in relation to its propensity for launching new IPs.
“The size of the balls it takes probably varies from [game to game],” he says “You could do a new IP that isn’t a big $30-50 million project. Look at Tiny Wings on the iPhone; that’s new IP. But if you’re going to try and put out a brand new shooter on the [Xbox] 360 and go head to head with Brink, Rage, CoD, Battlefield and the others, then certainly, it’s a bigger risk, and it takes some guts to say, ‘Yeah, we know what we’re up against, but we believe in this project and feel strongly enough about it that we’re going to do it.’”
As avid IGN readers would know, the first two titles Hines mentioned are Bethesda releases. Brink is being developed by British studio Splash Damage, and will be released in May 2011; while Rage is the new shooter from the legendary id Software, the team behind Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein. It’s due in September. Bethesda is publishing both games, and they also have another IP – a third-person action game for PS3, 360 and PC – called Hunted: The Demon’s Forge due in June. While Hines won’t discuss development budgets – “I wouldn’t want to give you ballpark [figures]; big games and big ideas cost a lot of money to make,” he responds – it’s clear that there’s a lot riding on these three titles.
To read the full story, visit IGN Australia.
