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Grand Theft Auto has proven to be one of the most successful, influential, and beloved video game series of all time, but it wasn't all smooth sailing for Rockstar, a studio which has probably been blamed for each and every one of society's ills at one point or another. According to Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, GTA's success created a whole lot of issues thanks to scrutiny from the US government.
"Our experience was success created loads of problems," Houser says in a recent interview for Virgin Radio (via VGC). "It was just worth it to have fun and do what you want to do."
Pressed on the exact nature of those "problems," Houser says that "it brought the US government down on us. They decided we were the only people on the internet peddling pornography, apparently, which was ridiculous. They nearly shut us down. We got fined a huge amount of money and it was very disruptive to the company. Some of my team members quit, and it was really tough."
After the popularity of the series exploded in the wake of Grand Theft Auto 3's launch, GTA became one of the more popular scapegoats for criticism of violence and sex in video games. Houser doesn't name any specific incident, but his comments seem to allude to the Hot Coffee controversy, when modders discovered an unused playable sex minigame buried in the files of San Andreas.
Ultimately, the Hot Coffee discovery snowballed into an FTC investigation and an ultimately failed bill sponsored by Democratic then-senator Hillary Clinton which would've made it a crime to sell M-rated games to minors. Rockstar wasn't technically fined for the incident, but the company did suspend sales of the game while the developers fully removed the Hot Coffee files, which cost publisher Take-Two a reported $24.5 million dollars at the time.
As Houser sees it, the US politicians going after GTA were presenting these issues as "matters of public decency, but our discovery was they wanted a media bogeyman. It was mostly led by sort of centrist Democrats and they wanted a media bogeyman. They couldn't go after Hollywood because they were getting a lot of money out of Hollywood, and they couldn't go after rap music as that had funky racial connotations, so go after video games. We were an easy bogeyman and didn't understand the system."
From Houser's perspective, video games like GTA provided an easy scapegoat. "'We finally figured out the problems in America,'" he says, mocking the perspective of US politicians. "'It's these idiots.' And we were those idiots."
Rockstar certainly got the last laugh with many of the best open-world games of all time under its belt and GTA 6 poised to be one of the biggest entertainment launches ever.
