The Good - GTAing in Secrecy
Back in the 6th grade, me and Jon, from the Symphonia story, were still a ways off before we would get a Gamecube and Xbox, respectively, for Christmas. We still went to each other’s house every so often to play video games, but we still yearned for the opportunity to play some of the new systems. One of Jon’s friends in his neighborhood, Brian, dropped by unannounced with a surprise, a PS2.
We were elated at first, but then he showed us his only game, Grand Theft Auto III. It wasn’t the game that was the problem (who wouldn’t want to play GTA III?) but where we were at. Jon’s mom was very much against violent games. Though religion and upbringing played a role, it was mainly because Jon’s younger brother at the time was 5-6 years old and she didn’t want him to be negatively affected by being exposed to such things.
To make matters worse, we played video games in the basement while she was often directly above us either using the coffee table as a desk or watching TV.
We went ahead and played it anyway, but we devised a plan to be in the clear. Jon and his brothers had all of their video game systems in a jumbled mess in the basement. What we did was boot up the Dreamcast and put a match of Power Stone up and pause it. Then, we would change the channel and boot up the PS2 with GTA III. His TV had two input channels that allowed for that to happen.
When we got to playing GTA III, we would each take turns wrecking as much havoc as we could and try and stave off the police and whatever they threw at us until we were gunned down or busted. We didn’t keep it on mute, neither was it incredibly loud, but we were hollering and such each time we witnessed or did something awesome. Each time Jon’s mom came down to check what was going, we would hear her open the basement door, so that gave us the heads-up to change the channel and pick up the Dreamcast controllers and play Power Stone for a bit until she went back upstairs.
Because Jon and I didn’t live close together, we couldn’t do this all the time, but it was something we always did every few weekends until Brian moved away later that school year.
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