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Steven Williams
Freelancer, Editor of this feature
What: GTA: San Andreas
When: Late 2004
Where: London
Why: An early glimpse of San Andreas
Odd, but the game is the thing I least remember about my first visit to Rockstar. And that game was San Andreas - it’s not exactly forgettable. This trip was to their London base on the Kings Road, and as it happened I’d been reading John Lydon’s biography - the Sex Pistols and punk were very much a Kings Road thing. So on the way from the Tube I got talking to the cabbie, who’d been driving 25 years (that’s taxi short cuts for you), about where Vivienne Westwood’s infamous Sex boutique had been. It was the epicentre of it all - or so Malcolm McLaren would have it. Turns out it was pretty close by: 430 Kings Road. Rockstar’s at 555.
I mentioned all this to the two friendly PRs once I found my way in, and they casually replied they often went drinking with guys from the Pistols. Rock ‘n’ Roll! Yet these tattooed, baggy-shorted, rockstar-knowing Rockstars would soon be giving me the most corporate presentation I’ve ever had in my life.
This weird duality defined Rockstar for me. It repeated everywhere. Even in the address: here’s a company based on one of London’s most famous streets, and you can’t find it. It’s not marked, not numbered; the entrance is not at the front. I actually had the cab wait, it looked so unpromising…With the other big companies you know what you’re getting, but with Rockstar it’s a bizarre mix of there and not there, chummy and corporate, hot and cold. Like GTA; comedy and ultraviolence, crime and punishment, sex and death. Grand Theft Auto is not just what they do, it’s what they are.
So we chat about old punks, get coffees, splodge into black leather sofas - and everything goes professional. One of the two produces a clipboard and the lights snap off, leaving just the TV as a distant light-square flickering over blue-lined tattoos. A neat little lamp on a stalk clicks on over the clipboard. It’s perfectly adjusted. The speech starts. I make comments like before... the flow will not be broken. I shut up.
The unseen voice behind the light declaims about bicycles while the other man, silent, plays the game for me. I can’t even remember if I was allowed to play it myself - but I do remember I was sent out each time a new area was loaded. It seemed a little… protective. And when it’s all over, snap! We warp back to off-duty. There’s more coffee. Jokes. Biscuits. Rockstar probably enjoy living up to their name (they ‘do’ controversy almost as well as the newspapers) but I really got the sense it’s not just cynical. They’re just not like other games companies. Not at all. And hooray for that.
