How offensive? It's not simply a matter of being able to barrel stolen cars over innocent pedestrians and cops at will, which was already a feature of the previous games. Here's what happens when you pull up to a working girl in the red light district of Liberty City: She leans into your window, and after some dickering, climbs into the passenger seat. Here's what happens when you drive her to a secluded area and pull over to the side: The car goes up, and down, and up again.
"Eventually the hooker will finish up (the rocking will speed up really fast and then stop suddenly) ..." an anonymous poster enthuses on hardcore gamer site Fatbabies. During the transaction, your health meter climbs, while your cash meter is depleted at a rate of $1 per second. "It's really no big deal though," the poster explains, "since you can just hop out of the car when she's done and beat your money right back out of her. ;)"
To be sure, this tacky Easter egg suggests that the developers at Rockstar games have, to put it nicely, Issues With Women. But unsurprisingly, GTA III has topped the video game sales and rental bestseller charts since its debut. For the console audience's core demographic, the 18-34 male, the Maxim reader, the "American Pie" DVD owner, Grand Theft Auto III must seem like digital cocaine.
"We have delivered titles that maintain more mature content," acknowledges Darren Horwitz, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. (SCEA), while professing no knowledge of Grand Theft Auto III's hookers 'n' cars feature. "But that is not the major factor in our development of games. It is about delivering the most realistic game experience ... while reaching the broadest demographic possible, child, teen, adult, grandparent, etc."
For now, Grand Theft Auto III is available only for the PS2. And while a port to the XBox is supposedly in the works, there's no word from Microsoft as to when it'll appear on its own console -- and with so much scrutiny on the XBox, it's hard to believe that Microsoft would add such a controversy magnet to its library anytime soon. (Microsoft officials contacted for this article were unavailable despite persistent efforts to obtain comment.)
But Grand Theft Auto III isn't selling so well simply for the sex-with-hookers bit. Reviews for the game have been consistently stellar, praising the title's breadth of open-ended, nonlinear gameplay and engrossing story line -- elements usually associated with more ambitious PC games. Come next January, Rockstar plans to add another title to its genre of inventive, free-form sociopathy, also available only on the Playstation 2. State of Emergency is a gamepad-driven satire on the anti-globalization movement, sure to be a gadfly for people across the political spectrum. ("[T]he oppressive American Trade Organization . . . are clamping down on organized resistance," Rockstar's description reads. "It is up to you to smash up everything and everyone in order to destabilize the ATO. Use any item available to begin fighting, including pipes, bricks and benches -- even dismembered body parts.")
In terms of branding, these kinds of games have helped position the Playstation 2 as something like the HBO of video-game consoles-- full of graphic violence and sexual content, yes, but also displaying a high degree of sophistication and a willingness to take creative risks.
Also under this rubric would be truly unique titles like FreQuency, developed exclusively for the Sony console. A kind of mixmaster Tetris, in which you try to weave a geometric milange of beats and melodies into a pleasing audio shape, it includes cuts from avant garde electronica figures like DJ Q-Bert, Crystal Method and Meat Beat Manifesto. And the project was always intended for the PS2, from very early on in its development, according to Greg LoPiccolo, vice president of product development for Harmonix Music Systems.
"Sony had been pretty outspoken about its vision for PlayStation 2 as a platform not just for games, but also for fundamentally new kinds of interactive entertainment," he says. "FreQuency is an extremely innovative game and we knew that we were going to need an innovative publisher to 'get' our vision and to take the product to market properly. Sony is a company that has always been progressive in this regard."
FreQuency is the kind of game you can play with your girlfriend. In fact, it's the kind of game that makes your girlfriend and her girlfriends kick you out of the living room so they can play it. "FreQuency is positioned as a game for all ages," company spokesman Ryan Bowling tells me by e-mail, "both female and male, for the gamer and non-gamer."
"I don't know if Sony actively pursues these unique projects or not," Geoff Keighley says, "but I wouldn't be surprised if these games appearing on the PS2 is simply a result of developers knowing it has the largest installed base."
Which would partially explain the presence of the Lost, a literate, survival-horror title with role-playing elements that's on the PS2 release list. "It was clear to me that the PS2 would be the leading console when the Lost debuted," says Ken Levine, general manager/creative director of Irrational Games. A loose adaptation of Dante's "Inferno" (it even includes a Virgil figure, though in this version, the Roman poet looks more like a bipedal lizard), it's the story of a young single mother who must travel through the nine circles of hell to retrieve her dead child. In hell, Amanda is assisted by corporeal embodiments of her soul (for good and ill), and each ring of the underworld is actually a manifestation of modern evil -- violent sinners, for example, are condemned to a plain resembling a World War I battleground, and the greedy are confined to a perverse Las Vegas.
Levine says Sony was genuinely excited by his cerebral approach to the genre. "I think they were psyched that we were trying to do something different," Levine says. "I don't think it's any secret that the survival horror genre has gotten pretty stale . . . [and by] bringing role playing into the mix and basing the game on a modern-day retelling of Dante, their opinion was, 'Well, that's pretty different. Do you think you can pull it off?'"
Levine is one of the creators behind the PC classic System Shock II, and during his stint at Looking Glass Studios, collaborated on the design of another computer game masterpiece, Thief: The Dark Project.
Next page: Can online gaming save the Xbox?
