GRAND THEFT AMERICA

The most American story of our time was told by a video game.

In 1997, a handful of outsiders in a cramped Scottish office shipped a crude little game about stealing cars. A quarter of a century later, Grand Theft Auto is the most profitable entertainment franchise in history -- and the sharpest, most savage mirror America has ever been handed.

Grand Theft America is the full story of how that happened. It follows the outlaws who built the game, the politicians and crusaders who tried to destroy it, the courtrooms where it was put on trial all the way to the Supreme Court, the billion-dollar launch days that left Hollywood behind, and the human cost of building worlds this big. And it asks the uncomfortable question at the center of it all: how did a satire of America become more popular -- and more revealing -- than almost anything the country has made about itself?

Drawn entirely from the public record -- published interviews, court documents, financial filings, and decades of journalism -- this is a clear-eyed, fast-moving cultural history of the game the world could never stop arguing about. Written on the eve of the most anticipated entertainment launch ever made, it is a book about not just Grand Theft Auto, but what it says about all of us.

An unauthorized, independent work of commentary and cultural history. Not affiliated with, endorsed, or sponsored by Take-Two Interactive or Rockstar Games.