When the BBC announced it was making a drama about the British computer pioneers behind the world’s biggest video game, the broadcaster hailed Grand Theft Auto, the game the programmers created, as “arguably the greatest British coding success story since Bletchley Park”.
And we are inclined to agree with them: Grand Theft Auto – a series of games created by a team of Brits headed by two public-school educated brothers from Surrey – is the fastest-selling entertainment product on the planet. The most recent version of GTA earned $1 billion in its first three days. Compare that to the fastest-selling movie ever, Jurassic World, which managed just a fifth of that amount over its opening weekend.
But what BBC’s real-life drama asks is: Is this worldwide phenomenon really a source of national pride? After all, Grand Theft Auto – or GTA as it is known to its legion of fans – is no Space Invaders or Pac-Man. A bloodthirsty adventure set in urban America, you play a criminal. Your mission: to steal what you see, torture the people who get in your way, murder passers-by – even rape women. This is a place – depicted in hyper-real graphics – with the look of a movie, where you don’t merely escape punishment for killing a police officer, but where you are positively rewarded for doing so. From its first iteration in 1997, Grand Theft Auto has courted controversy for its extreme and graphic levels of violence.
But can a video game, no matter how vicious, provoke a young man to commit murder?
This uncomfortable question lies at the heart of The Gamechangers, which is being shown on BBC2 tonight. Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser, the creative genius behind GTA, in his first BBC role since before Harry Potter, the drama takes place in 2002, five years after the game’s first release, when video game company Rockstar Games became caught up in a three-year legal battle with Christian lawyer Jack Thompson (Bill Paxton).
What followed was a three-year period of war as Thompson battled to stop the relentless rise of the game. With the fallout dramatically taking over everyone’s lives.
Radcliffe said his own interest in this role came from playing the video game intensely as a child. It was ” a huge part of my life growing up”, he told Radio Times – the 26-year-old admitting he still plays GTA and Call of Duty.
He also has a lot in common with Sam Houser: “We’re from very similar backgrounds – he grew up one postcode away and also has one parent who is an actor, and grew up around the entertainment industry. Our schools played each other at football – that’s how close we were.
“In New York, we live in a very similar area so I’ve since been walking around feeling like I going to bump into him and if I see him I won’t be able to resist saying hello. I’m coming at this film as someone who loved the games and who thinks they’re really cool,” he said.
You can catch the entire drama unfold tonight (September 15th) from 9pm over on BBC Two. We wouldn’t miss it.
