JUICED

Racing games are something I’ve enjoyed for about as long as I can remember, so at every magazine or website I’ve worked on I’ve either been “the driving game guy” or, in the case of GameSpot circa 2004, “one of two or three driving game guys.” It was in this capacity that I attended a memorable THQ press event for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of Juiced in Las Vegas, just a short flight from my then-home in San Francisco.

Bizarrely, one of the things I don’t remember about the Juiced event, at all, is playing the game. I’m sure I must’ve at some point, but my only recollection of playing a pre-release version of Juiced was sometime later at the GameSpot office where I alarmed one of the developers by turning the wrong way into a high-speed corner. My color-blindness rendered the red and green lights used to indicate the inside and outside of the track completely useless, and I recall him admitting that adding an option to change those colors would’ve been quite trivial if only they had identified a need for it earlier. 

When I and the other games press assembled at Las Vegas Motor Speedway weren’t probably playing Juiced and maybe chatting with members of the dev team, we had opportunities to definitely ride around a cone course in Swedish drifter Sam Hubinette’s rarely used passenger seat and to absolutely drive a couple of laps of the infield course in a lime green Mazda RX-8. Nothing too crazy or memorable about this event so far, right? Things got weird later.

After dinner, as I and a couple of other attendees settled in front of some low-stakes slot machines with our complimentary casino Budweisers, the PR guy ostensibly running the event announced that he had reserved the nightclub at Treasure Island for the evening. Attendance was more or less mandatory, but as persuasive as he was in the face of our protests that we’d rather just hang around the hotel, his arguments (and attempted bribes, iirc) didn’t make a dent when Treasure Island’s bouncers refused admission to those of us wearing trainers.

No worries, we’ll just head back to the hotel casino I thought. Not a chance. Determined to show us his idea of a THQ-sponsored good time, Mr. PR started calling every place that might conceivably be selling shoes after hours on the Las Vegas Strip, eventually settling on the Palms Hotel gift shop just a couple of miles in a hastily summoned limo away. 

Predictably, the gift shop in question sold exactly one style of men’s shoe aimed squarely at would-be club goers in our predicament, and even more predictably they were as overpriced as they were shit. In record time, the four or five of us in need of footwear found pairs that would fit, watched Mr. PR expense around $200 per person on his corporate card, and hurried back to the limo we’d left idling outside.

After strolling past the Treasure Island bouncers in the same shoes they’ve probably seen on out-of-town chumps hundreds of times, it quickly became apparent that the shoe money would’ve been better spent elsewhere. On almost anything. Emptying a hotel minibar, buying an instant collection of old casino-used playing cards, or backing red on a single roulette spin perhaps.

The corner of the club reserved for us was cordoned off with velvet ropes that prevented our escape. Their intended purpose was to keep other club goers from wandering into our mostly male, mostly nerdy area, which really wasn’t necessary until Mr. PR pulled out his corporate credit card again. A seemingly bottomless supply of Cristal and strawberries materialized, nearby females saw an opportunity to score free champagne by introducing themselves to members of our group, and I’m pretty sure I retreated into the corner of our corner with a no-doubt overpriced beer. I have no recollection of how the night ended, but that night definitely caught up with me the following week.

I was at work, minding my own business, possibly writing up preview coverage of Juiced based on the Vegas trip, when my manager asked me to accompany him into his manager’s office. We were all friends regardless of our respective job titles back then, so something about this definitely felt off. The gist of the uncomfortable conversation that followed was that Mr. PR, presumably in trouble for pissing away so much money in Vegas, had been in touch with my higher-ups and let them know that he bought a pair of shoes for me. Much of the context around this gift that I had accepted in breach of company policy hadn’t been shared until I pleaded my defense.

My managers’ tag-teamed assertions that I was right to attend the evening event but that under no circumstances should I have accepted the shoes necessary to get into it. I didn’t even own shoes like that at the time, and there was no forewarning that I’d need them for the event, so what should I have done? Apparently I should’ve paid for the overpriced gift shop shoes myself and submitted an expense report for them, which I’m confident would not have gone smoothly had I tried it. I never played Juiced or wore those cursed shoes again.