How One Game Transformed An Industry

Ten years ago, an entertainment milestone was hit. Although it seems like only yesterday, Grand Theft Auto III's tenth birthday is this weekend, so we decided to look at the history of one of the most important technical landmarks of the last decade.

At this point in time, you'd be hard pressed to come across a member of the public who hasn't heard of Grand Theft Auto. As well known for its groundbreaking innovation as its embroilment in controversy, the franchise is as critically lauded as it is publicly denounced.

Described as "sick, deluded and beneath contempt" by the Police Federation, banned in Australia and the catacylst behind Joe Baca implementing the Protect Children from Video Game Sex and Violence Act of 2002, the franchise has made many enemies in its 14 year life cycle.

Within the industry, its a different story. Tim Ingham, the online editor of industry trade magazine MCV belives that the series contains "hours upon hours of the most immersive and interactive entertainment ever seen" and he's not far off. As most of you no doubt already know, the real strength of Grand Theft Auto lies in its open ended game design and it is this design philosophy which provides the real meat of the franchise.

Ask anyone who is familiar with any of the GTA titles how they spend the majority of their time in-game, and chances are, they'll have spent innumerable hours exploring the rich and detailed worlds Rockstar have painstakingly put together.

It wasn't always this open ended, however. Although the latter games have gotten bigger and bigger with every installment, it was once a more contained environment. The Sandbox structure was still there, it just wasn't as grand in scale as latter editions. Back in 1997, the blueprint was constructed on a considerably smaller scale.

The release of the original Grand Theft Auto on the PC ushered in a new era in video games. Sure, it wasn't the best looking title on the market, it had some of the worst loading times yet seen and it wasn't even the father of controversy (check out Mystique's output in the early 80s), at the same time, it had what so many other mindlessly gratuitous games lacked, charm.

Whether we're talking about the endlessly creative radio stations, the veritable originality of the missions or even the sound effect the Elvis impersonators made when you ran them over, it was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition on almost every level and the fact that it didn't leave the UK Top 20 videogame charts for two years says it all.

The next two games, while not exactly setting the world on fire, did a good job changing the process up just enough to keep consumers interested. The expansion, London, took the original concept and gave it a visual and audio makeover; introducing London as the playable environment, complete with maps based on reality. The first true sequel, GTA II, took the tried and tested formula and added an aggregation of gangs, vehicles and opposition - in the forms of the FBI and SWAT teams. Although it wasn't as well received as its predecessors, it was still a worthy addition to the series.

It was at this point that there was a sudden change in inertia within the Rockstar infastructure, as although Grand Theft Auto had been their baby since day one, their development duties on the PS2 were focused on similar but ultimately inferior titles such as Smuggler's Run and Midnight Club, followed by the frightfully broken Oni.

Although any trace of Grand Theft Auto had mysteriously vanished, the games released within this period had unmistakable similarities to their forefather. Smuggling? Check. Guns? Check. Breaking the law? Check. It's no secret that companies have a tendency to tread the water, so to speak, before dipping in.

What we mean by this is that with every new generation of hardware comes new development obstacles. Everything down from the processor of the console to the platform of the development kits plays a contributing factor. In this scenario, the biggest hurdle of all, the transition from 2D to 3D needed to be made, and rather than release a GTA title before they'd mastered the hardware, instead Rockstar chose to take the new IP route and experiment with material not already in public circulation, to mixed results.

Recently speaking about Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar founder and GTA co-creator Dan Houser explained that "the key idea of the game was that it wasn't about violence; it was about freedom." He continues, "We thought that was something that games did very well, the idea that you're turning a viewer into an active participant. So give them the freedom of choice over what they do."

It is this sentiment which has proceeded each installment of every Grand Theft Auto, but none moreso than GTA III, because whilst previous games had given you the opportunity to explore this virtual Sandbox, the third title in the series gave you the opportunity to live in it. Aside from obvious next generation benefits such as extraordinarily detailed environments (for the time) and believable A.I, even simple things like the around the clock radio stations helped immerse the player in Rockstar's living, breathing microcosm.

The protagonist of the game, Claude, was one of the first to actively endorse the 'blank palette' characteristic which in recent times has become a staple of the industry. Whilst its storyline isn't the strongest, as for the most part, it is a tale of revenge and retribution, there are enough colourful characters to keep it intriguing, particularly Catalina, the main antagonist.

Like most Grand Theft Auto's, the admittedly revolutionary non-linear story progression takes a backseat to the open world environments and freedom of choice gameplay mechanics. When gamers these days think of freedom of choice, they think of games where their characters make predetermined, often dialog driven choices which fit into a specific path in which the player is given an ending which ties in with the decisions they've made.

As a writer for Game Informer points out, "the environments of Liberty City are stunning in scope and detail, dwarfing anything I've ever seen, and your choices are endless." In this scenario, your choices are not delivered via any pre-existing context, but rather the choice is left up to the player. Do you want to beat a prostitute to death with a baseball bat in broad daylight, wait for the cavalry to arrive and then blow up a police car with a rocket launcher? It's possible. Anything is possible, and this is where the endless levels of choice both begin and end.

There is no doubt the game's emphasis on choice is a contributing factor to exactly why so many dubious court cases started popping up all over the place after 2001, but we're sure it didn't help that the game's widespread success crossed over to the mainstream.

What opponents of the game consistently fail to realise, however, is that the whole crux of freedom of choice is that it puts the player at the forefront. Ultimately, the decisions they make are their own to make, therefore the game can't be held responsible for their own decisions. It doesn't train you to kill, contrary to what some lawyers would have you believe, it gives you the opportunity to do so if you're that way inclined.

One of the more well-known news articles relating to GTA III as a 'murder simulator' is the case of the families of Aaron Hamel and Kimberly Bede, who were tragically gunned down by two teens who attempted to claim Grand Theft Auto inspired their actions. On October 20th 2003, they filed a $246 million lawsuit against publishers Take-Two. Naturally, the court case was dismissed, particularly after Take-Two insisted that the "ideas and concepts as well as the 'purported psychological effects' on the Buckners are protected by the First Amendment's free-speech clause."

This is important because, up until this point, games that took a more realistically violent approach were persecuted against. Grand Theft Auto III came under just as much, if not more, scrutiny, yet Take-Two managed to not only overcome all opposition, but also to release not only the highest rated PS2 game but also the biggest selling title of 2001. It metamorphosed the industry from the basement dwelling, socially inept, teen stereotype that had been plaguing it for the last two decades, and kickstarted the more adult-friendly approach of the last decade.

It's easy to forget about just how much of an impact Grand Theft Auto III made when it was released in 2001. At this point, the Sandbox genre, as it is popularly known as today, didn't exist in the framework it exists in today. The likes of Saint's Row, Crackdown, InFamous, Prototype and every other open ended Sandbox title owe their existence to this title. Practically every game since has borrowed one thing or another from it, and as a result, there has been a transformation of sorts, both with regards to the environmental structure of the games themselves, as well as the public perception of the industry as a whole. With over 14.5 million units sold as of March 26th 2008, and a hell of a lot more still to come when its 10th Anniversary edition is released to the iOS and Android platforms, its influence it unlikely to be forgotten any time in the near future.

ZOMBIE NATION

This is how i roll.

The Rise And Fall Of Acclaim Entertainment

Believe it or not, Acclaim Entertainment, a company now synonomous with lizards and bad PR stunts, used to be an industry trendsetter. Not only were they a heavyweight contender in the developer division, but they also brought the likes of Mortal Kombat, Burnout, Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX and Turok into our lives. Not bad for a company that has been defunct for seven years.

Although it was founded in 1987, Acclaim Entertainment didn't start out as the jack of all trades corporation we've came to familiarise ourselves with. It started small, publishing and localising titles, and with increased revenue came increased expenditure, leading to the acquisition of both Sculptured Software, mostly known for their solid porting and localisation work, and Probe Entertainment, makers of sleeper hits Die Hard Trilogy and Alien Trilogy.

As a consequence of the output of these newly acquired studios, crossed with Acclaim's own insistence on gaining the localisation and publishing rights to titles whose developers had no western publishing branch, such as Double Dragon 2 and Bust-A-Move, the company was able to solidify its position within the industry.

It was only in the mid-90s when we started to see a downworld spiral in what can only be described as their development allocation. It began with the Bart VS series. To those of you not old enough to remember the multiplatform shameful Simpsons licensing atrocities, count yourselves lucky. Some things are better left in the past.

Due to the frequency and volume of these Simpsons titles, with nine games being released between the period of 1991 and 1994, even at that time, it didn't take an industry analyst to figure out not only that the brand had hit saturation point, but that similarly, there was something amiss at Acclaim HQ. You see, it was also around this period that a little known series known as Mortal Kombat dropped into Acclaim's proverbial laps.

Mortal Kombat was something of a paradox in the arcades and because Acclaim and Midway had a long-standing working relationship, they got first dibs. Not only did they promote the game, but they did it with a bang, running non-stop promotions and advertisements, in what many pundits claim to be the first big, slashy product launch promo, demonstrating steadfast innovation at a time when Sega was still trying to capture the Generation X audience with its 'AGES' advertisements and Nintendo were scared to put blood in their games.

The fundamental problem with Mortal Kombat's success stems not from anything relating to Midway or Ed Boon's vision, but instead by just how polished the arcade title was (begin laugh track.... now). Taking only 6-8 months to port to consoles, Acclaim started to get a little notion that this was possible with all titles.

They tried the same tactic with Mortal Kombat 2, segregating Sculptured Software and Probe Entertainment to development duties on the two biggest ports, SNES and MegaDrive, and, what do you know, it was not only a success, but it smashed records and was deemed as a cultural phenomenon. With over $50 million cartridges sold in the first weekend, outselling the likes of True Lies and The Lion King at the box office, no one could deny its runaway commercial success.

In many regards, this can be considered the beginning of the end for Acclaim because although they continued operating for another decade, rather successfully I might add, this was the turning point in their business mantra. The rules had changed and so had Acclaim.

On 1st January 1995, Acclaim acquired NBA Jam developer Iguana Entertainment and began a new chapter of their history. By this point, the next generation was about to begin, with Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's N64 about to go head to head in the public domain.

To usher in this new era, Iguana began developing a brand new IP for the N64 entitled Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Having been given an early technical demonstration and being impressed with the talent of the studio, Nintendo of America began working with the team and later offered Acclaim into their 'Dream Team' collaborative effort, a scheme where partners with Nintendo would develop exclusive titles and receive technical and game support from the Big N in return. Naturally, despite its lack of analog support, Turok was a commercial smash, becoming one of the top selling launch titles.

Despite the success of Turok, however, it was at this point that Acclaim initiated their timed self-destruct mechanism. After a series of poorly received WWF licensed titles, Vince McMahon decided to take the license elsewhere, instead capitalising on the success of THQ's WCW titles. Although this was a significant blow at the time (bear in mind, this is the Attitude era we're talking about), it was by no means an insurmountable obstacle to Acclaim's rise to the top. Licenses are lost on a yearly basis, right? Well, yes and no. The loss of the brand itself was a deep, but recoverable wound, however, its Acclaim we're talking about. They're their own worst enemy.

Steve Perry is a name most of you will have been unaware of, but in spite of this factor, its also a name which is irrevocably intertwined with the self-destruction of Acclaim. During his tenure at the company as an executive, he rather infamously made some of the worst PR decisions in the history of the industry.

Oscar Wilde once said that "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about," and if you really take the time out to think about it, he's bang on the money. The problem is that Steve Perry took the saying a little too to heart and made some morally unethical and frankly absurd promotion decisions, no doubt in some desperate attempt to return to the creative highs of the Mortal Kombat days.

Shadowman, a title with an intriguing premise fused with middle-of-the-road gameplay, was one of the first franchises to get the PR treatment. Although the game was unremarkable, the PR gamble with its sequel most certainly was not. Acclaim offered to pay for the funerals of the recently deceased if their relatives allowed them to plant a small billboard on the headstone advertising Shadowman: 2econd Coming. Understandably, mourners were furious, and the Church Of England issued a statement basically stating that there was no chance in hell (see what I did there?) they'd allow such activities within their grounds, which ultimately led to the campaign falling apart.

Not content with possibly the biggest misfire in gaming history, Acclaim went a step further, offering prospective parents $10,000 in US savings bonds to name their child 'Turok' for a year. If this wasn't bad enough, a 25 year-old gamer named Jason Read claimed he was planning on breaking the world record for the longest time spent standing in line. What was he waiting for? The shockingly abhorrent Turok: Evolution. Of course, by the time the papers had published the story the next day, he'd vanished.

These tactics are ofen referred to as 'guerrilla marketing,' wherein a product can be promoted via the attraction of attention, often in irregular circumstances. A foundational issue with this type of promotion, however, is that real creativity is not only a requirement, but its a necessity. In the words of Darren Paul, managing director of Night Agency, "the field of guerrilla marketing is similar to advertising. There’s good and bad marketing. There’s good and bad execution. And there are negative case studies of companies crossing the line.”

Acclaim was one such company. Unfortunately in the upper hierarchical structure, executives adopted their already fledging process of a 6-8 month development lifecycle and applied it to the PR department, resulting in ideas such as the aforementioned 'world record attempt' and their intention to install billboards which had seeping blood pouring out of them at bus shelters. In both scenarios, nothing transpired, almost certainly deliberately, but the product was out there and that's all that matters (in Steve Perry and his corporate lackeys minds anyway).

You'd think that with the success of Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX, Acclaim would find some way not to fuck it up. Wrong. Didn't I say already this is Acclaim we're talking about? Despite the resounding success of the franchise in the wake of Tony Hawk's meteoric rise to super stardom, they went ahead and attempted to create a spin-off brand, originally called Dave Mirra BMX XXX. Expectedly, Dave Mirra wanted nothing to do with it and insisted his name and likeness was removed from anything to do with the game.

The publisher and Dave 'The Miracle Man' Mirra came to an agreement on July 31st 2002 to stop using the BMXers name. Unbeknownest to him, however, despite the legal binding, they'd no intention of stopping to use his name or likeness in order to market the title and went ahead and did so anyway, which resulted in Mirra suing the company and asking for over $20 million in damages.

To add insult to injury, somehow the Olsen twins got word of how shoddy and dilapidated their Acclaim licensed titles had been, and claiming that the developer/publisher wasn't giving their brand enough support, ended up suing.

It's around this point that any CEO who knows what they're doing would settle the jumped up executives down, overcome any development obstacles that had previously proved to be a thorn in their sides and integrate their development studios in order to create something that would put them back on the map again. Whilst keeping a low profile, they could churn out sequels to established IPs that would get the critics, and more importantly, the customers back on their sides.

What did Acclaim do? Nothing. Or more specifically, at least, the same thing they'd been doing since they first pioneered their 6-8 month development cycles back in 1992. Turok: Evolution was a rushed mess, the less said about Batman Forever, the better, the ECW games were lacklustre and Legends Of Wrestling was understated but flawed.

Speaking of Turok: Evolution, you'd think it couldn't get any worse than the whole baby bribes thing, but somehow it did. Whilst promoting Evolution, Acclaim put into practice 'Identity Marketing'. In other words, the company offered to pay five gamers to be called Turok for an entire year. They originally claimed the promotion was the idea of a Dr. Simeon Cantrell of Australia's Marketing Science Centre, author of a book called Market Their Pants Off, but this turned out to be an elaborate lie. Dr. Cantrell didn't exist. The book's ISBN number actually turned out to be a book of 'knock knock' jokes. Funnily enough, in retrospect, the joke was on you, Acclaim.

One of their last truly awful PR stunts was the Burnout 2 fiasco. To celebrate the launch of the sequel, they offered to pay the speeding fines of anyone caught on speed cameras for that day. Not only is this highly irresponsible but its also illegal, leading us to believe that at this point, they'd lost their marbles.

The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was the firing of Iguana Entertainment founder, Jeff Spangenberg, who decided, rather than to take it lying down, to take them to court over breach of contract and fraud. He believed they were trying to cut costs by cutting management, and in his words, "Acclaim had also been on a mission to cut entrepreneurial managers in their acquired units and replace them with more corporate types."

In his suit, he claimed that CEO Gregory Fischbach urged him to buy $20,000 in stocks then abruptly fired him, resulting in him losing stock options. Another area of interest within the suit was Sprangenberg's allegations that Fischbach put pressure on him to speed up development production to cut costs. Though Sprangenberg claims to have pled with him not to release another flawed game, "Fischbach was unrelenting in his demands for a product release -- with or without bugs -- in an apparent effort to post short-term profits." When the count case was finalised, Sprangenberg went on to found Retro Studios, creators of the Metroid Prime trilogy and Donkey Kong Country Returns. The rest, as they say, is history...

When a story like this comes up, its difficult to identify with the corporate and industry types, the executives who try to sell a game based on Giant Enemy Crabs. Call us cynics, but the real cynics are those who try to sell a medium we love to us with fresh gimmicks and marketing stunts that, frankly, insult our intelligence. Although I was opposed to the removal of the booth babes at E3, there was no chauvinistic or immoral undertones to my reasoning, instead factoring in the fact that they'd been such a staple part of the show for so long that removing them would also be removing a part of the cultural history. Thankfully, I was proven right, and, on another level, in the future hopefully companies out there look at exactly how Acclaim managed to shoot themselves in the foot so many times that they had no toes left through their undeserving and unwavering arrogance and 'shock factor' and learn from it.