The video game “Grand Theft Auto IV” is likely to be a cultural, business and technological milestone.
The game targets 18-34-year-old males who are hardcore, or play a lot of games all of the time
I’m on the hardcore fringe, part of the aging male demographic — and so not really part of the target group. I’m also wary of the violence and sexual material for which GTA games are known (more on this in a sec).
So I guess it speaks volumes then that I am ready to play this game. I think GTA IV is going to define state of the art for the leading edge video game business.
In the past, I have drawn the line at playing bad guys in crime games. I just didn’t get a thrill out of playing games where I don’t have much choice but to kill cops and score with prostitutes. I’d rather be a hero, not an anti-hero. Maybe there is a generational gap between people like me — who grew up with the innocence of Pong and graduated to opera of violence in “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” – and those youngsters who grew up with the sex and gritty street violence of the GTA series. In the past GTA games, you could do anything. They had open worlds where you could explore, wander, and discover. But it wasn’t fun unless you were bad. Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games, shares this opinion that video games lost a lot of their audience and innocence when they took a turn toward violence. We can blame Rockstar Games, the company that developed GTA, for being part of an industry where game companies constantly try to one-up each other, resulting in a race toward new lows.
The newest GTA IV game from Take-Two Interactive’s Rockstar could be one of the most controversial of all time, igniting a culture war that will play out in our political campaigns and courtrooms (sites such as GamePolitics.com write about it almost every day). Don’t even think about giving it to your kids unless you think that cold-blooded murder is good for them. Florida attorney Jack Thompson has already succeeded in getting public transit ads for GTA IV pulled in Miami and Chicago. Thompson has battled Take-Two for years on whether its violent games cause school shootings and whether the company intentionally targets its mature content at kids. The company says its games are mature entertainment targeted at adults.
Yet, either because of the controversy or in spite of it all, GTA IV is expected to be one of the best-selling games ever. Game sites such as IGN.com have given GTA IV a perfect 10 out of 10, an unprecedented game rating. On average, GTA IV has scored 99 percent on the Xbox 360 on GameRankings.com, which aggregates critic scores, and a perfect 100 on Metacritics.com. Microsoft’s “Halo 3,” which sold eight million-plus units since the fall, scored 93 percent on GameRankings.com and 94 on Metacritics.com.
The Nintendo Wii has taken the gaming market by storm with its much more casual fare that is fun for families and other gamers to play in a light social setting. GTA IV is more for the lone gamer who plays in the dark. But with sales projections so high, this game is a test as to whether the hardcore gamers — including the aging Pong veterans like me who only have a little time to play — are ready to strap on their six-shooters in such numbers to prove that hardcore gaming is still a mass market.
For business readers, this game is even more interesting because it has sparked a hostile takeover bid by Electronic Arts, which has offered to pay $2 billion for Take-Two. In the first two weeks alone, it could sell 5 million copies at $60 a piece or more on both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, according to analyst Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Management. Worldwide, he expects it to sell 8 million to 12 million. That’s as much as $720 million in sales at retail.
That leaves me in a quandary. Call me high and mighty, but in the past I just didn’t like GTA. I like to play the “good guy,” even though I understand that a whole lot of parents and peace lovers out there feel like there is no such thing in a violent video game. GTA pushes my buttons the way it does with the anti-violence crowd, but for different reasons.
I’ve lost a member of my family to gun violence. It was my one and only brother. And, I tell ya, the experience stinks. It was a long time ago. When that happened, I never really thought I would play violent games again. I was more likely to join the censors, anti-violence child advocates, and lawyers looking to blame school shootings on violent video games. And I remain appalled at the celebration of street violence that brings pain to so many families.
Somehow, though, I started to rebuild barriers in my brain that distinguished between fantasy and reality. I started playing military strategy games, enjoyed real-time strategy games such as “Age of Empires,” where the amount of blood in the game was miniscule and was hardly gratuitous. My tastes evolved as games did. I was enthralled with the march of 3-D graphics in the past decade. Graphics realism seems like it has no bounds, contributing to the rise of companies such as Nvidia and the allure of increasingly realistic 3-D worlds in games like the “Halo” series. I anxiously await the day when you can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Over time, I have retrained my brain to realize that, after all, this is just a game.
The total recovery, or perhaps relapse, of my hardcore gaming habits became complete with the launch of Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare game last fall. The game’s graphics are outstanding and you really get the feeling that you’re part of a crack team cutting down scores of enemies in modern-day landscapes in the Middle East and Russia. Games are almost at the point where we can’t distinguish the realism of the violence and the characters from movies or real life. But the game didn’t make me feel besotted in any way. It was respectful of the sacrifice of soldiers. It had the highest production values I’ve seen in a game. And I still got to play the good guy, saving the world from terrorists. I’ve played little else in the past few months. On multiplayer, I am now a Colonel I rank on Call of Duty 4.
As a gamer, I’ve felt like I have still had some innocence left in me. Sure, I played other gritty crime games — clones of the GTA-style open worlds — where you could do a lot of bad stuff. “Saint’s Row” from THQ was one of those. But I didn’t really enjoy running down innocent civilians with cars, killing prostitutes at point-blank range, or mowing down gang members. It just wasn’t that fun. I wrote about my personal stand on playing only good guys in the past. I articulated it in one of the finest documentaries ever done on video game violence, Spencer Halpin’s “Moral Kombat.” I can deliver a powerful and personal message about video game violence. I don’t belong in either the pro-game or anti-violence camp.
But that brings me to another branch in my emotional evolution as a gamer. Grand Theft Auto IV promises to be such a crowing achievement in video games that I am prepared to play it with the same relish as any 18-year-old kid who doesn’t give a second thought to issues that give me pause (even if I have a sense of guilt because of my personal experience). Read the rest of this entry »
