A journalist writes for the moment--the first draft of history, our profession has been called--and if the journalist is fortunate, his or her work will hold up in the years to come. Back in the fall of 2005, with the Xbox 360 on the verge of release and the Playstation 3, Wii and the event that would change the blogosphere forever Level Up still a year away, Rockstar Games released both The Warriors (for PlayStation 2 and Xbox) and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (for PlayStation Portable). We used the one-two punch to convince our editors to part with some precious space in the pages of NEWSWEEK, but with space at a premium, we had to find a way to make each word count. We decided to try to distill what makes Rockstar different from many of its peers; here's how we kicked off our story:
Videogame creators firmly believe that their work will someday become the dominant form of entertainment in the 21st century. So why isn't their message as original as their medium? The vast majority of story-oriented games shamelessly rip off the same set of sources as though they were the Gospels: "Aliens," "Saving Private Ryan," "Band of Brothers," "Black Hawk Down," "The Lord of the Rings" and Dungeons & Dragons. It's as if every Western game designer were cloned from the same DNA; indeed, a recent survey of game creators in English-speaking countries found that the overwhelming majority are straight white males (average age: 31).
The one company that consistently avoids this trap is Rockstar Games. Best known for its controversial hit franchise Grand Theft Auto, the New York City-based publisher is headed by a trio of British expatriates who draw inspiration not from the heroic side of Americana, but from its outlaw side--mob movies, pulp novels, gangsta rap, '80s cop shows and spaghetti Westerns. For its latest trick, Rockstar recently released The Warriors, based on the 1979 urban gang movie, and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, which brings its sprawling epic to Sony's PlayStation Portable. "I remember when Rockstar was nothing," says Andrew McNamara, editor in chief of Game Informer magazine. "They came to us and said, 'We're going to build a company around pop culture and youth culture.' We were like, 'Yeah, right.' And they went out and executed on every front."
The story is somewhat reductive, as such pieces must necessarily be. But our critique was pretty accurate then. How much have things changed since? Among last year's more notable story-based games, we spotted an increasingly diverse set of influences: the 1938 novel "Alamut" (Assassins' Creed); "Atlas Shrugged" and "Citizen Kane" (BioShock); "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Portal); and maybe, just maybe, Cirque du Soleil (Mario Galaxy). Even though "Black Hawk Down" reared its head in a couple of Call of Duty 4's set pieces, its most memorable moments were likely taken from YouTube videos of gunships in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the novels of Tom Clancy. It's a welcome development, this broadening of source material, to which we can only say: more, please.
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