Share and Follow
Police chase thugs on dirt bikes, scantily clad women cavort on the top of speeding cars, an alligator is dragged out of a swimming pool and wanders into a convenience store — like everyone else here, looking for trouble.
This is sleazy Vice City, heavily modelled on Miami, where our two heroes, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, are about to add to the mayhem as they rob, shoot and burn rubber to their depraved hearts’ content. ‘Look who’s back!,’ snarls a menacing woman in a floral dress, clutching a hammer in each hand.
Look indeed, for this is the trailer for the next iteration of a gleefully violent video game that will hardly need much introduction given the notoriety it’s already attracted and the multi-billion-pound sales it’s racked up.
Grand Theft Auto VI won’t be released until 2025 but befitting the sort of Hollywood blockbuster whose producers can only dream of making this game’s sort of money, its creators are already whetting the hungry appetites of the millions of punters who will dutifully go out and buy it.
Viewed 50 million times on YouTube in just nine hours, the 91-second-long trailer —launched this week for what is popularly known as GTA — was yesterday on track to become the most watched video in a single day on the platform.
Grand Theft Auto VI won’t be released until 2025. Pictured: A woman in a bikini from trailer
The 91-second long trailer to the game was viewed 50 million times on YouTube in just nine hours. Pictured: A scene from the trailer
Sam and Dan Houser – the creators aged 51 and 50 – are the sons of Walter Houser, a wealthy lawyer who co-owned Soho jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, and Geraldine Moffat
The official warning at the start of the film — which is clearly meant to evoke the opening credits to 1980s TV series Miami Vice with its soaring aerial shots, flocks of flamingos and copious female flesh — says that it ‘may contain content inappropriate for children’.
Well, its legions of young fans will certainly hope so. If it’s inappropriate for a lot of adults too, all the better.
Based on the simple but apparently revolutionary premise of allowing players to be the criminals rather than the cops in a grimy, chaotic but intricately developed online urban jungle, GTA hit on a wildly successful formula of enabling nerdy computer gamers to indulge their wildest criminal fantasies from the comfort of their own homes.
And since that has meant graphic sex, violence, rape, torture and casual executions of police officers, it is clear that those who argue this sort of screen brutality has a dangerously desensitising effect have been generally shouting into the wind.
Groups such as Freedom from Torture and Amnesty International complained when GTA V, the previous one in the franchise, sank to a new low by allowing players to torture a man by pulling out his teeth, giving him electric shocks and hitting him with a sledgehammer.
One critic even wrote that ‘if the Devil had to invent a game, it would be this one’. But it only provided Grand Theft Auto with more useful publicity.
Elon Musk said this week he could never enjoy a game that involved killing policemen but there were plenty who didn’t share his qualms.
On its release in 2013, Grand Theft Auto V made £650 million on its first day on sale. It smashed every industry record and became the fastest selling entertainment product in history.
A decade later, it’s still among the most popular games, having sold more than 190 million copies and made more than £6.3 billion. Given the highest ever grossing film, 2009’s Avatar, only made £2.3 billion, that tells you something about the jaw-dropping value of the video games market.
And for all its determinedly American setting and Quentin Tarantino levels of violence, this is a very British success story. First released in 1997, the world’s grittiest game has rarefied origins in the shape of two ex-public schoolboys from London whose games company, Rockstar, has become a global behemoth.
Read Related Also: John Lennon artwork on display at Atlantic Beach gallery
Sam and Dan Houser, aged 51 and 50, are the sons of Walter Houser, a wealthy lawyer who co-owned Soho jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, and Geraldine Moffat, an actress whose roles included writhing around naked in bed with Michael Caine in the 1971 thriller Get Carter.
Sam, who as a child was once asked by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie what he wanted to be when he grew up and said ‘bank robber’, was educated at St Paul’s School like his brother, Dan.
The GTA creators are already whetting the hungry appetites of the millions of punters who will dutifully go out and buy it. Pictured: A biker gang scene from the trailer
On its release in 2013, Grand Theft Auto V made £650 million on its first day on sale. Pictured: A scene from the GTA 6 trailer
Despite their obsession with cutting-edge American culture, especially gangster movies and New York’s rebel hip-hop culture, they were collected from school each day in their father’s Rolls-Royce.
While the more academic Dan went to Oxford, Sam — the business brains at Rockstar — was hired by German record label BMG. He moved into BMG’s expanding video game division, and he and his brother got their big break in the mid-1990s when Scottish company DMA pitched a game called Race ‘N’ Chase.
Sam tweaked the game so that players were the criminals rather than the police, winning points for running over pedestrians and other crimes. His brother would write their games’ complicated stories, and both of them soon bought the rights to what became the first version of Grand Theft Auto, which was launched in 1997.
Sam said they wanted to make video games cool, the sort of thing you could go to the pub and boast about playing. The Housers relocated to New York where they gained a reputation for working staff to distraction.
Sam — now estimated to be worth £120 million — admitted working ‘obscenely hard’ and joked that the two brothers had been having a ‘mid-life crisis from about 12 years old’.
A former employee was less understanding, telling a Rockstar biographer: ‘The money turned them into jackasses very quickly.’ Another said: ‘These people are insanely smart and really good at being mean. They’re British.’ Sam was accused of regularly screaming at underlings and hurling phones.
A former assistant to Dan told the Wall Street Journal he once called her a ‘whore’ and a ‘c***’ simply because she brought him the wrong bagel for breakfast.
The newspaper called Sam a ‘secretive, demanding workaholic [with] a temperament and a budget fitting a Hollywood mogul.’ Fans, however, insisted their volcanic tempers only reflected their perfectionism.
After two Rockstar staff committeed suicide in 2007 — their deaths were not linked to the company — the brothers tried to improve the office atmosphere by hiring a spiritual healer to perform an exorcism.
Complaints about slave-driving, party-boy bosses are par for the course in the tech world but the Housers have had to navigate more serious bumps in the road.
In 2005, after the U.S. was rocked by a series of mass shootings including the Columbine High School massacre, the brothers were denounced by Hillary Clinton over their games’ content and summoned before the U.S. Federal Trade Commission when a hardcore pornographic scene was found hidden in the 2004 game GTA: San Andreas.
In 2019, the company’s Edinburgh branch, Rockstar North, was accused by tax campaigners of staging a ‘drive-by assault on the British taxpayer’ after it was revealed the company hadn’t paid corporation tax for ten years while claiming £42 million in UK government subsidies. Rockstar defended its record, saying it had boosted the economy and created more than 1,000 long-term jobs..
In recent years, Sam, who remains Rockstar’s president, and Dan, who left the company in 2020, have sought to tone down their antisocial image.
The game that has made their fortune, however, looks set to mine a very rich seam by continuing wildly in the opposite direction.
