[Here's an article from my favorite magazine. I present it because I agree with it.]
The Bravest Game
Grand Theft Auto to world: "Go F**k Yourself."
By Ken Levine
God bless Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Sure, it's going to be a huge financial success, and I have no doubt that it's going to get great reviews and sell cubic yards of PlayStations. But what I love about it - what I adore about it - is how, despite all the criticisms, the lawsuits, the pundits, the hand-wringing and the witch hunting, Rockstar basically told the world to go take a flying leap. GTA is its game, and if you don't like it, you can go, well, refer back to this article's subtitle.
Let's be frank. San Andreas is more violent, more sexual, more racially charged, and more agitprop than just about every other game in the universe put together. The game kicks off in a fantasy version of Los Angeles in the early '90s called Los Santos. I lived in Los Angeles from '89 to '93, and Rockstar's fake L.A. is more like the real L.A. of that period than any game, book, or movie.
I grew up in northern New Jersey in a safe, dull suburb. I went to Vassar, where I spent four years writing plays, showing up to class hungover, and meeting nice, rich girls.
And then something weird happened... I graduated and moved to L.A., and suddenly the cozy world I grew up in seemed to change.
I remember watching Rodney King getting the crap kicked out of him by a bunch of thuggish L.A. cops who didn't realize they were on candid camera.
I remember watching "Football" Williams beaning trucker Reginald Denny in the head with a brick on the corner of Florence and Normandie, and the subsequent L.A. riots moving northward... toward me.
I remember seeing mudslides bring houses off hills, and watching fires burn Malibu from the roof of my apartment.
I managed to escape from L.A. two months before the Northridge Earthquake. I had barely settled down in New York before the TV was alive with images of a white Bronco in a slow motion chase down the freeway.
It was a bad time for California, and by the end of it, I half-expected plagues of locusts and rivers of blood. There was something sinister about that time and place, and something thrilling. And San Andreas captures it.
I had expected Rockstar to take the easy way out. They aren't some gonzo publisher, selling snuff films on the Internet. They're a public company. They have shareholders, board members, and quarterly reports. The pressure to make a GTA "lite" must have been enormous. Publicly traded corporations aren't generally known for artistic heroism.
But they held firm. San Andreas takes the controversial content of the original GTA and doubles down. You can engage in turf wars, participate in drive-bys, hang out on the corner and drink a forty with your homies, undertake the occasional home invasion, and even try out your luck as a pimp.
Pundits and politicians might tsk-tsk these additions, but I am not one of them. Let me be clear: In real life, I've never hurt a fly. I don't maintain a stable of prostitutes. I'm a married vegetarian living in the suburbs.
But I read books, watch movies, and play games to have a vicarious experience, to live a life that I could never and would never have. Sometimes that means being an Italian plumber collecting giant mushrooms. Sometimes its being the head of an ancient Roman faction. Sometimes it's being a gang-banger whacking the competition.
But while Rockstar was courageous in the content, they were heroic in the game design. San Andreas has a plot and a series of missions to accomplish. But both take a back seat to the simple experience of living in a dark, scary world. Just driving in this fake but oh-so-real Southern California dystopia is the most powerful game experience I've had this year. The world is completely alive, and ripe with possibilities: Girls to meet, food to eat, weights to life, jobs to pull, tattoos to get, clothes to buy, cars to jack... the list does not end. It's not a game per se - it's a simulator of a damaged life in a dangerous place.
And the people at Rockstar know this. They trust their game enough to let it be malevolent and emergent. It's not a perfect game, but it's a brave one. And in an industry that is surrounded on all sides by blandness and compromise, that kind of courage is in short supply.
Ken Levine is the General Manager and Creative Director of Irrational Games.
“Using the Semicolon can sometimes be a tricky proposition from a syntactical perspective!â€
