This is a story about a rock star. It’s 1996 and in Dundee, Scotland, this guy named Dave Jones is worried. Not this Dave Jones. And not this Dave Jones is working on a project and he’s run into a problem. He’s been working on this for about a year and it’s bad, worse than bad. It’s boring. Dave has had big hits before. In 1991, he had a really big success that sold millions of copies. But now he needed another hit and he was looking for somebody to put it out. This project, there was nothing wrong with it per se. Technically, everything was right. It followed all the rules. And that’s when somebody in Dave’s group realized that was the problem. Following all the rules was boring. What if they did the complete opposite? That was the breakthrough that Dave needed. He took his project to a division of one of the biggest record labels in the world, BMG. He went into their London office and met with an executive named Sam, and Sam was the absolute perfect person to work on this.
Sam was from London and came from a show business background. His mother was a famous actress, Geraldine Moffett, who had been in movies like Get Carter. His father had run one of the biggest jazz clubs in the country. And from an early age, Sam was fascinated with both of his parents careers. He loved movies, especially crime movies, and he loved music. But the music that Sam discovered when he was a teenager that really got him excited was hip hop. Sam became fascinated with the music, with the culture and with the place that it came from, New York City. For his 18th birthday, Sam’s dad actually took him on a trip to New York, and that made him fall in love with the city even more. And on this trip, Sam’s dad took him to lunch with a friend of his who happened to work at BMG. And at this lunch, the BMG executive was talking about how they were having in trouble connecting with younger audiences and the brash 18 year old Sam said, well, why is everybody that works there so old? This BMG executive whose name was Hines Hen, admired Sam’s boldness and in fact, he offered him a job at BMG. Now, it wasn’t a great job. Sam started off working in the mailroom, or the post room, as they call it in the UK, but it was a foot in the door. Sam started working his way up through the company. He got a job being a music video producer, producing videos for artists like take that. And then a unique opportunity presented itself. Sam was a big proponent of the internet being the future, not just of the music business, but of everything. When the label was wanting to promote the new album diva by Annie Lennox, Sam was the guy saying that they should make a website for it. So it made sense when BMG opened a new division called BMG Interactive, that Sam would want to be a part of it. BMG Interactive was gonna be this music labels foray into a new art form, one that Sam was also really passionate about, video games.
When Dave Jones came into Sam’s office, what he was bringing to him was a video game. Dave Jones had been running his own video game company called DMA Design since 1987. He had been working at this computer factory in Scotland called Timex, but when he got laid off, he took his Severance money and bought this computer called the Amigo 1000 and started making his own games. He hired a bunch of his friends that he knew from this computer club they had been in called the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club. Their first game, 1980 Eights Menace, was a surprise hit, selling 15,000 copies. It was enough money to keep going. They made another game called Blood Money in 1989. And then in 1991, they had a huge hit with the game lemmings. But Dave Jones didn’t want DMA to just be known as the Lemmings Company. He was making money from pumping out sequels, but he wanted to do something different and he wanted to do something more mature. So DMA started working on a cops and robbers game. They called it race and chase. And originally, it was designed to be a multiplayer game. And one of the things you did was act as a police officer driving around trying to catch criminals. And that was when Dave Jones ran into that problem I was talking about. The game was boring playing the cop. You had to keep avoiding pedestrians. You had to keep stopping at stop lights. And that’s when somebody on the team had the idea, what if you played as the criminal? What if instead of trying to avoid pedestrians, you actually got points for running them over? And that simple idea changed everything when the group got BMG Interactive as their publisher and got Sam Hauser on board. More ideas started coming. During play testing, they discovered this glitch where the police officers who were chasing you were too aggressive. They were running stuff over, going crazy, doing everything they could to try to stop you. But everybody realized that actually made it really fun, and they turned that into a wanted system. The game had now morphed into something completely different than race and chase, and so they gave it a new name. They called it Grand Theft Auto.
Sam Hauser not only saw the potential in this game, but coming from a music industry background, he saw the potential to exploit the game’s possible controversial elements. He hired a big PR firm, something that was pretty unheard of in the video game industry, specifically to drum up controversy and publicity for this new video game. It was a stroke of marketing genius and it helped Grand Theft Auto become a huge hit.
Eventually, Sam Hauser, along with his younger brother, Dan Hauser, left BMG to start their own company and they named the company Rockstar, with Sam producing and Dan acting as the lead writer. Rockstar completely revolutionized the industry in Grand Theft Auto, the little game created by a few people in Dundee, Scotland who just wanted to have some fun, became one of the biggest franchises in video game history.
Now all the people in here are working on what DMA hopes will be its new blockbuster. It’s a game called Grand Theft Auto.
My submission based driving game where you’re basically driving in the city, stealing cars, running over pedestrians. What we must do is convene with the programmers at delivery stage to tell him what is fun. A programmer has an idea of what a game should do. But a programmer’s ideas aren’t always fun.