The ‘GTA’ that was exclusive to Nintendo and caused monumental controversy in 2009

On November 19, nobody on the Internet is going to talk about anything else. It will be little short of an event that cuts across generations, tastes, hobbies, and countries: I’m talking, of course, about the launch of GTA 6, which comes just in time to distract from the anger at Sony and its decision to release games only digitally. Of course, the game will have launch problems, bugs that’ll be fixed with a patch and, as is typical of the series, absurd controversies. It’s not as if the franchise is exactly new to public outrage (right, Hot Coffee?), but perhaps the highest and most absurd moment in this symphony of controversy came in 2009, when on Nintendo DS they were determined to have their own GTA… and it got a pretty meh reception.

Won’t somebody think of the children!?

Although the first two GTA games got Game Boy Color versions (hard to believe) and Game Boy Advance had its own (mediocre) title, the truth is that Nintendo has mostly stayed away from the series. Not even GTA V, which has appeared on every Sony and Microsoft home console since PS3 and Xbox 360, has even made a passing appearance on Switch. But of course: in 2009, the Big N also wanted its own game that would sell like hotcakes for the hottest handheld around, the DS. And of course Rockstar got to work on it: after all, they’d already put out titles for PSP and they knew what they were up against.

That’s how Chinatown Wars was born, a game that spent two years in development and to bolster the lineup of mature games on the Nintendo DS. You more or less knew what you were going to get: a couple of shootings here, a robbery there, the police chasing you… Up to that point, all perfectly normal. Even American parents, always fearful about what their children might consume, were calm about it. There was just one problem: in its more or less sordid plot, they’d introduced a drug-dealing minigame!

“Molotov cocktails? Perfect. Violent deaths? Of course. Drug dealing? How dare you pervert our poor children!”. That’s what the people who started the protests against Chinatown Wars because of that minigame in which you could deal heroin, ecstasy, acid, marijuana, cocaine, and tranquilizers must have said. Drugsline, the nonprofit association against drug abuse, stated that “Glamorization doesn’t help our work trying to educate children on the problems with substances”. Hardly anybody did much, and years later, with the controversy already forgotten, VICE magazine did something incredible: ask a real dealer whether the game was realistic enough.

The truth is, it was simple: you bought at one price, sold at another, made more money, and depending on the neighborhood the price varied. And the dealer in question said that, well, yes, it was realistic enough: “Dealing drugs is easy, really, and despite being a black market, it’s a market. If someone offers you a deal too good to be true, there’s always a reason”. It’s possible, though, that not even Rockstar were thinking about the realism of their game about being an ecstasy dealer.

That said, Rockstar had a response for everyone who complained: “We wanted to have a drug-dealing minigame in many of the GTA games. It works well with what GTA is, with driving around the map, and it gives you something else to think about, another layer or piece of the puzzle to keep you motivated. It can’t be softened to make it family-friendly, that’s not the game we’re making”. Back then, Singapore’s parliament even debated whether the sale of GTA IV should be legal, after a murder was linked to the video game. Basically, they seemed to stir up a new controversy every day.

By the way, Chinatown Wars bombed in sales (at the time they said it was because of piracy) and shortly afterward it appeared on PSP with revamped graphics, as well as on mobile. Curiously, it remains one of the few titles that hasn’t been re-released on home consoles. Maybe once things die down around GTA 6 it’ll be time to look again at whether that minigame really was so terrible for kids?