You don’t become one of the biggest, most profitable media franchises in human history without stepping on a few toes, especially when there’s literally a violent felony in your name.
“Grand Theft Auto” was destined to collide with controversy. Lawsuits, international incidents, and full-on moral panics have followed in the wake of the series’ unparalleled success. And while there’s often a kernel of truth to some concerns raised over the violent, over-the-top nature of GTA, advocacy groups and opportunists have spent decades disingenuously trying to take one of gaming’s greatest series down before it warps the fragile little minds of our children.
Anything with as much cultural significance as GTA can have an influence on someone, maybe even a bad one, but study after study after study has failed to find any link between playing violent video games and antisocial behavior in the real world. That hasn’t stopped opponents from attacking the series since pretty much day one. These are Grand Theft Auto’s biggest controversies.
1. Top Down Trouble
Back in 1997, we were just emerging from the first real video game moral panic (it was mostly about Mortal Kombat). Violence and vulgarity was the cultural vibe, with transgressive content pitched against the moral majority in a war for our attention and our souls. In Scotland, DMA Design – the studio that just made Lemmings – was about to release its next title: a top-down driving game called Grand Theft Auto.
The word was already out months before release: this is a game where you do crime. UK tabloids like the Daily Mail ran lurid headlines describing all of the anarchy allowed by the “criminal computer game that glorifies hit-and-run thugs,” while members of Parliament, such as Lord Campbell of Croy, warned that there’d be no way to stop kids from getting their impressionable little hands on it.
The Right Honorable Lord might have been sincere in his convictions, but as it turned out, he was playing right into DMA’s hands. The studio’s publisher, multimedia giant BMG, was used to creating buzz for their transgressive music acts like the Sex Pistols, and was more than happy to lean into the sleazy side of GTA. It hired a publicist who leaked details to newspapers and used a whisper network to make sure that certain pearl-clutching politicians were aware of the upcoming crime simulator. Then, they launched a radio campaign featuring clips from the House of Lords debate that made the game sound completely awesome.
Grand Theft Auto was a big success, despite its 18+ rating and the fact that it was banned in Brazil. It sold over three million copies by 1999. Grand Theft Auto’s first brush with infamy might have been manufactured, but it taught DMA and, later, Rockstar a valuable lesson: a little controversy can create a lot of cash.
2. Grand Theft Thompson
In the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting, critics pointed fingers at Doom rather than grappling with the real causes. The moral panic was in full swing when Grand Theft Auto 3 and its revolutionary, more “realistic” 3D depiction of crime hit the scene, and one man pounced on the opportunity to make himself part of its story.
Jack Thompson is a conservative attorney and activist who spent over a decade waging an obnoxious war on the industry. He was a frequent talking head on cable news, constantly blaming video games for real world violent crimes. He’s gone after a lot of different titles over the years, but he had a particular axe to grind with Rockstar.
Thompson hounded the franchise for years with lawsuits and TV hits accusing GTA of inspiring horrific tragedies. He frequently sued Rockstar’s owner, Take-Two Interactive, as well as retail stores selling GTA and Sony for making the consoles it could be played on. His clients were typically family members of the victims of violent crimes, and he usually demanded outrageous amounts of money. His most high-profile case involved Devin Moore, a man in Alabama who was convicted of killing three police officers in 2005. Thompson filed a suit alleging that it was his obsession with GTA that caused him to snap.
The Moore case gave Thompson a national platform for his one-man vendetta against Rockstar, and cable news was happy to give him a soapbox. It was a big enough deal that the BBC made a movie about it in 2015. Rockstar called it “random, made up bollocks.” IGN gave it a 4.5/10. But the case was extremely flimsy and quickly dismissed. Thompson wound up in trouble with the Alabama bar as a result of his behavior, something that would become a theme throughout his career.
Thompson was undeterred by his losses, but concerns about GTA’s violence were soon drowned out by an even more lurid scandal. GTA is, after all, about America. As a nation, we have an unfortunate tendency to give brutality a pass, but we lose our minds when bro asks his date inside for some hot coffee.
3. Hot Coffee
Following the revolutionary design of GTA 3 and Vice City, anticipation for San Andreas was through the roof. At Rockstar, designer Sam Houser didn’t want to disappoint fans who expected the franchise to push even more boundaries.
“We are keen to include new functionality and interaction in line with the ‘vibe’ of the game,” he wrote at the time. “To this end, in addition to the violence and bad language, we want to include sexual content, which I understand is questionable to certain people, but pretty natural (more than violence), when you think about it and consider the fact that the game is intended for adults.”
During development, Rockstar worked on a full-fledged minigame to serve as the final stage of the game’s dating activity, in which the player controls main character CJ in flagrante delicto. Unfortunately for Houser, sex would tip the scale and result in San Andreas being slapped with an “Adults Only” rating. Up to 80% of U.S. retailers flat-out refused to stock anything rated AO. If they wanted San Andreas to sell, CJ must remain chaste.
It was allegedly too late to fully remove the sexual content from the game, since it was already deeply intertwined with the code. Instead, the minigame was merely disabled. As one Dutch modder soon discovered, it would be a simple matter to switch it back on.
Patrick Wildenborg and his modding buddies started digging into San Andreas as soon as the game came out in October of 2004, cracking open the codebase and discovering strangely named files like “KISSING” and “SNM.” They realized these were animations of explicit (albeit fully-clothed) sex acts from a dummied-out dating minigame, but Wildenbord decided to sit on the discovery until the PC version released the next summer. With one simple change in a hex editor, the forbidden content was restored. Wildenbord published his discovery on June 7, 2005, naming the mod “Hot Coffee.”
The ESRB certainly didn’t think it was hot. It announced an investigation into the games rating process, prompting the mainstream media to start paying attention. Major retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy immediately stopped selling San Andreas, and Rockstar issued a recall and replaced the tainted copies with a patched version sans the offending, invisible code.
In the 2000s, a controversy involving modding and cut content was pretty novel. Non-video game people had a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept that bad stuff was completely inaccessible to the layperson, and both sides took advantage. Rockstar slyly insinuated that the modders created the Hot Coffee themselves, even though Wildenborg had their back and took down the files in solidarity. Meanwhile, the media and politicians acted like sex was a major selling point. Jack Thompson seized the opportunity and reached across the aisle to find an unlikely ally in his quest to annoy gaming out of existence. He prepped Hillary Clinton for a press conference, which resulted in a resolution from Congress calling for an FTC investigation into Hot Coffee.
The FTC said that Take-Two was deceptive in marketing San Andreas, but let it off with a warning. It was less lucky with the class-action lawsuit that eventually settled for 20 million dollars, but the furor quickly faded. Rockstar had pulled away from the Pay & Spray of public opinion, ready to enter the HD era with their wanted level erased.
4. HD Hijinks
Grand Theft Auto 4 was a big change of pace from the prior “3D Universe” trilogy, notably less violent than its predecessors. Gone are the dismemberments and arcadey gore of the 3D Trilogy, replaced with Euphoria crumple physics– arguably just as unsettling as Tommy Vercetti slicing heads off with a katana, but definitely not as splashy. Despite kind of getting what they wanted, critics refused to let up.
While the violence angle was looking a little dusty, folks found plenty of other reasons to get big MADD about GTA 4. The organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving was upset that the game allowed Nico to get behind the wheel after bro-ing out with Packie or Little Jacob, and petitioned the ESRB to slap the game with an AO rating.
Rockstar stuck to its guns, insisting that its audience was “more than sophisticated enough to understand the game’s content.” They were also sophisticated enough to appreciate the franchise debut of full-frontal male nudity in the “Lost and the Damned” expansion pack. Parents groups sounded the alarm in response, warning that the game “should be kept away — far away — from children.”
No one, least of all Rockstar, would disagree with that statement. Most of these controversies wouldn’t even exist if everyone would just acknowledge that GTA is not a game for kids, even if a ton of kids play it. Every lawsuit, every uproar, every federal investigation has ended up in the same place: the onus is on concerned guardians and retailers to keep these M-rated titles out of kids’ hands, and Rockstar is free to make the games they want to make, no matter how hard people like Jack Thompson try to shut them down.
Thompson was at the height of his relevance in the runup to GTA 4, picking fights with Penny Arcade and scrapping with Adam Sessler on G4. He had become such a pain-in-the-ass to Rockstar by this point that Take-Two preemptively sued him in order to cut off any frivolous lawsuits about GTA 4. The parties settled, with Thompson agreeing not to sue to block the sale or distribution of any of Take-Two’s future games. In exchange, Rockstar dropped the contempt of court charges stemming from Thompson’s improper conduct during his bully campaign against Bully. The war, at long last, was over.
For five months. Then Thompson accused Take-Two of stealing his likeness and trying to get the game banned. It didn’t work. GTA 4 was a smash hit, and its successor was about to become the biggest thing ever.
5. Pleading the Fifth
GTA 5’s most notable creation was Trevor Phillips, a raving psychopath who canonized the chaos and carnage that players experienced in older titles. For once, an in-game character represented the emergent freedom enjoyed by gamers embarking on unscripted rampages between missions– a balding, tattooed embodiment of Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton’s darkest fears.
In a way, his presence almost defused larger concerns about violence, at least in the “think of the children” sense. Trevor was clearly a cartoon character, a straw man who couldn’t survive very long in the real world. If there were really a bunch of Trevors out there copying GTA, we would notice.
Instead, it was one very specific scene that threw GTA 5 in hot water. During the mission “By the Book,” the player controls Trevor as he interrogates an innocent man on behalf of the federal government, using a wrench, a car battery, and pliers to torture information out of him.
Obviously a satire of the U.S. military’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the War on Terror, turning torture into a quick-time-event was a bridge too far for many in the media. The mission was widely criticized by the press and condemned by politicians, teacher’s unions, and even Amnesty International, despite the litany of violent crimes against humanity GTA 5 allows one to commit every minute.
We’ve talked a lot about when Grand Theft Auto offends the religious right, TV pundits, entire countries, and the ambitions of activists and politicians. But what about when the series gets under the skin of a celebrity?
In 2014, actor Lindsay Lohan brought a lawsuit against Take-Two, alleging they had stolen her likeness for GTA 5. The whopping, 67-page complaint was really based on two allegations: First, that the blonde, bikini-clad woman who featured heavily in the marketing was based on a picture of Lohan throwing up her, quote, “signature peace sign.”
This claim kind of falls through when one realizes that the woman in the picture looks absolutely nothing like Linsday Lohan. If anything, she looks like early 2010’s “it-girl” Kate Upton, though it turns out that the actual model for the image was a woman named Shelby Welinder, who literally produced receipts by posting her invoice from Rockstar on Instagram.
The second claim of Lohan’s suit involved a character named Lacey Jonas, a rather broad parody of Hollywood divas. And… yeah, you don’t have to squint too hard to see that Lohan was probably an influence. Fortunately, art is allowed to poke fun at celebrities, whether they like it or not.
Rockstar fired back, arguing that the lawsuit was frivolous, Lohan was simply filling it for publicity purposes, and that parody and satire of public figures is protected by the First Amendment. At least on that last part, the court agreed. According to the decision, “this video game’s unique story, characters, dialogue, and environment, combined with the player’s ability to choose how to proceed in the game, render it a work of fiction and satire.” Lohan was out of luck.
For GTA 5, the controversy came and went with a whimper. By this point, violence was part of the fabric of gaming, and the game took far more heat for selling Shark Cards, the in-game currency for its ever-popular online mode, than any of the mature content it contains. No one really cares about violent video games anymore. That battle is over, and people like Jack Thompson lost.
Grand Theft Auto rose to dominance by pushing boundaries, breaking taboos, and playing with fire but rarely getting burned. If anything, the history of outrage surrounding GTA only added to its irresistible mystique, solidifying its stature as a cannot-miss cultural event. There’s little doubt that Grand Theft Auto 6 and beyond will continue to court controversy while raking in billions and reshaping the entire medium of video games to their image.
