Grand Theft Auto IV

• 1. Liberty City, 2008

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  Grand Theft Auto IV sold more than 3.6 million copies in the first twenty-four hours after its release in 2008. That worked out to roughly 310 million dollars in revenue. The game came from Rockstar North and Rockstar Games, and it centres on Niko Bellic, an Eastern European war veteran who arrives in a fictional version of New York called Liberty City. He wants to leave a violent past behind. The city has other plans for him.

  The game was a gamble from the start. It had to follow Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which its own studio head described as a nightmare to follow up. It set out to look and feel more realistic than anything the series had done before. This documentary asks how a few hundred developers turned a real city into a playable one, and why they refused to borrow from the movies. It also asks how a trailer for this game ended up creating one of the internet's best-known pranks, and why the same title drew both Game of the Year awards and angry public denunciations.

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• 2. A City From Photographs

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  In March or April 2005, between sixty and seventy Rockstar North employees flew to New York for a week and a half. Former beat officers drove them around Washington Heights. A smaller trip followed in 2007, and a full-time research team in New York answered later questions, such as which ethnic groups lived in a particular neighbourhood. Videos shot on location played on televisions around the Rockstar North offices, so New York was always in view while the staff worked.

  Producer Leslie Benzies claimed the team took over 100,000 photographs. Art director Aaron Garbut thought the real figure was closer to 250,000. They also studied apartment plans, satellite images of city blocks, and sales figures for car models. They read books about the city's subways, sewers and garbage disposal.

  The scope of the map changed more than once. The developers first considered using the whole state of New York, then narrowed it to Manhattan, then expanded again, voting on which areas made the cut. Garbut called New York an amazing, diverse, vibrant, cinematic city. Writer Dan Houser added that the team wanted a place where it already had a foothold, since Rockstar's main headquarters sit in New York. The result was a caricature rather than a copy. Garbut felt most people already knew the highlights from film and literature, so the team chose the areas that characterised the city best.

  The finished map has four boroughs on three islands. Broker stands in for Brooklyn, Dukes for Queens, Bohan for the Bronx and Algonquin for Manhattan. Across the water lies the state of Alderney, based on New Jersey. At the start, the story locks down the bridges because of a terrorist threat, and police chase anyone who crosses them. The barricades lift as the plot advances.

  One district came from a personal favourite. Sam Houser found Brighton Beach pretty incredible, partly because several Eastern Europeans lived there, which suited the game's characters. The in-game version, Hove Beach, takes its name from the English city of Brighton and Hove. The map is roughly three times the size of Grand Theft Auto III's. It is smaller than San Andreas, but the developers considered it comparable in scope because of its height, its buildings and its detail. They also wanted fewer empty stretches like San Andreas's wide deserts.

  Dan Houser called Liberty City the biggest character in the game. The team built the area first and added missions afterwards. Even the in-game brands and products took several years to design, and the billboards went into the game only about six months before release.

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• 3. Niko and Roman

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  The cargo ship Platypus carries Niko Bellic into Liberty City, where his cousin Roman has been promising riches and pretty women. The reality is a small, dirty apartment, an unprofitable taxi company, gambling debts and quarrels with loan sharks. Niko also has a private mission. He wants to find the man who betrayed his army unit to an ambush ten years earlier.

  Helping Roman drags him into the underworld. He befriends Little Jacob, the second-in-command of a Jamaican gang called the Yardies. He is forced to work for the Russian loan shark Vlad Glebov, and he kills Vlad on learning that Vlad slept with Roman's girlfriend Mallorie. That sets off a chain of revenge. Russian boss Mikhail Faustin first employs Niko as a hitman. Faustin's lieutenant Dimitri Rascalov then persuades Niko to kill Faustin, and betrays him afterwards.

  Later work comes from drug lords in Bohan, the Irish Mob, and the Pegorino crime family. Niko's romantic interest Michelle turns out to be an undercover government agent, and she entraps him into carrying out killings in exchange for a cleared record. The search for the traitor leads to Florian Cravic, who now calls himself Bernie Crane and denies the charge. The real betrayer was Darko Brevic, the only other survivor of the unit.

  The ending branches. Niko can accept a heroin deal with Dimitri or take revenge on him. Either way, an assassin's bullet meant for Niko at Roman's wedding strikes someone else. In one version Roman dies, and in the other Kate McReary, Packie McReary's sister, whom Niko had been dating. In both endings Niko learns that Mallorie is pregnant.

  Dan Houser said the writers gave Niko a dual personality, often saving innocent people while also being a cold-hearted killer, and that this made him more rounded. They chose an immigrant hero on purpose. After talking to criminal experts, Houser concluded that the real scary characters are not born in America anymore. Niko's outfit drew on photographs of men fighting winter wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya. Roman exists to give him a reason to cross the ocean. The writers made them cousins rather than brothers because brothers would share a deeper familiarity than the story needed. Houser described the pair as a double act, with Roman's fantasist charm set against Niko's tough cynicism.

  The script, written by Dan Houser and Rupert Humphries, runs to about 1,000 pages. Roughly 660 actors voiced some 80,000 lines of dialogue. It began as a detailed six-page synopsis, which the designers then broke into missions on a large flow chart. The writers deliberately avoided homage. Houser said that if video games are going to develop into the next stage, the answer is not a loving tribute to other works. A separate set of unique lines plays when a player retries a mission, so the game feels less like Groundhog Day. Michael Hollick played Niko, and Jason Zumwalt played Roman.

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• 4. Under the Hood

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  Preliminary work on the game began in November 2004, just a month after San Andreas came out. Sam Houser called following that game a nightmare. The core team at Rockstar North numbered 220 people. By borrowing from sister studios, the project reached a full team of over 1,000. That total included 50 people at Rockstar NYC, 40 at Rockstar Lincoln, 10 at Rockstar San Diego, and around 600-700 working part-time inside and outside the company. Some key members put in 12-hour days, often without holidays. The numbering reflects the ambition. The team saw the jump as equal to the leap from Grand Theft Auto 2 in 1999 to Grand Theft Auto III in 2001. Development ended by the 21st of April 2008, when the game went to manufacturing. Benzies estimated the budget made it one of the most expensive video games ever.

  The game ran on Rockstar's proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine. Garbut said a workable engine did not exist until late in development, followed by plenty of guesswork until optimisation near release. Actors performed on a motion capture stage where up to eight could work at once, and over a hundred moves were captured each day. A teleprompter let them read their scripts. Voices were often recorded months later, and one actor's voice could be laid over another actor's physical performance.

  Sam Houser pushed for the Euphoria animation software. He was told it would be impossible or limited to cutscenes, but some team members made it work. Engineers from NaturalMotion lived on site at Rockstar North for months at a time. Facial animation came from Image Metrics. The rigs had around 100 joints and the game holds 300 minutes of facial animation. Image Metrics production head David Barton said having realistic eyes is 90 percent of the battle.

  The role-playing elements from San Andreas were removed early. They would have demanded extra animation work, and constant gym visits did not suit Niko. In their place, friendships carry rewards. Hanging out with a friend raises that friend's respect, and Roman will send a free cab anywhere Niko wants to go. Niko's mobile phone makes the calls, and it also opens the online mode and the cheat codes. Players can bowl, play darts, and send emails from Internet cafés.

  The police system rates trouble with a wanted meter capped at six stars. Benzies called the online mode the hardest part of the whole project. The developers briefly considered co-operative play in the story campaign but decided it worked better alone. Dan Houser described the multiplayer as a section of a film rather than the whole narrative. On Windows, that multiplayer mode was discontinued in 2020.

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• 5. The Radio Dial

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  Music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich set himself a tricky goal. He wanted songs that make New York today what it is, but that would not feel dated by the time the game came out. To clear rights, the developers contacted over 2,000 people. One case required a private investigator to find the relatives of the late Sean Delaney of the Skatt Bros, so the band's song "Walk the Night" could be licensed. Billboard reported that Rockstar paid as much as 5,000 dollars per composition and another 5,000 dollars per master recording.

  Some ideas were abandoned. The developers had considered an in-game record shop where players could buy tracks, and an MP3 player for Niko. Both were cut.

  Several stations carried special material. DJ Green Lantern produced tracks exclusively for the hip-hop station The Beat 102.7. Record producer Bobby Konders hosts Massive B Soundsystem 96.9, and he flew to Jamaica to persuade dancehall artists to re-record songs that name the boroughs of Liberty City. The Housers' father, the jazz musician Walter Houser, supplied several classical tracks.

  Critics noticed the care. Hilary Goldstein of IGN praised the actors and the licensed music. Reviewers at GameSpot and GamesRadar also admired the songs, and the latter enjoyed the humour of the talk stations. Michael Pinson of The Pro Audio Files singled out how the city's ambiance, music, dialogue and vehicle and weapon effects were united into one soundscape. The talk stations later gave one critic a yardstick for judging the loudest complaints against the game.

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• 6. Delays and Rickrolls

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  At E3 2006, Microsoft's Peter Moore announced the game by rolling up his sleeve to show a temporary tattoo of its logo. The game became widely anticipated. Its planned release date was the 16th of October 2007. Analyst Michael Pachter suggested Take-Two might delay the title to improve its 2008 financial results and avoid competition from games like Halo 3. Rockstar said it was still on track for late October. In August 2007, Take-Two announced a delay, blaming technical difficulties with the PlayStation 3 version. On the 24th of January 2008, Rockstar set the release for the 29th of April 2008. Capcom published the game in Japan on the 30th of October 2008.

  The first trailer arrived on the 29th of March 2007. Niko narrated it over music by Philip Glass, originally written for the documentary Koyaanisqatsi. The trailer is credited with starting the Rickrolling meme. High viewership crashed Rockstar's website, and several users re-posted the trailer. Some of them misleadingly played Rick Astley's music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead.

  A second trailer followed on the 28th of June and showed off the physics engine. The cover art was unveiled through a mural that artists painted on a wall at a secluded warehouse, shown in a video on the 28th of November 2007. A third trailer on the 6th of December introduced Roman and Michelle, set to a song by the Russian rapper Seryoga, which Rockstar felt captured the melting pot of Liberty City. Industry analysts found the marketing more subtle than Microsoft's campaign for Halo 3, and they read it as Rockstar's wish to control the message.

  The viral campaign included wanted posters across New York City, murals on buildings, and ads on public transport. The Chicago Transit Authority removed advertisements for the game in April 2008, and Take-Two sued, claiming a contract violation. Visitors to the website of the in-game station WKTT Talk Radio could leave a voice mail about their problems, and the terms revealed that some messages might appear in the game. Pre-order buyers could get a special edition with a metal safe deposit box, an art book and the soundtrack CD. Sony and Rockstar also released a 40 GB PlayStation 3 bundle. GameStop held midnight launch events at over 3,500 American stores.

  The Windows version followed on the 18th of November 2008 in North America and the 21st in Europe, with extra work by Rockstar Toronto. Two downloadable episodes came to Xbox 360, The Lost and Damned on the 17th of February 2009 and The Ballad of Gay Tony on the 29th of October 2009. They were bundled as Episodes from Liberty City in April 2010 and sold again with the main game in The Complete Edition in October 2010. In 2026, a 2007 beta build from an Xbox 360 development kit was bought at a car boot sale in Edinburgh. Its files, posted online, revealed unfinished and cut material.

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• 7. Acclaim and Records

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  Metacritic summed up critical opinion as universal acclaim. It ranked the game as the second-highest-rated on the site and the highest-rated on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Goldstein of IGN wrote that it sets a new benchmark for open-world games. Andrew Reiner of Game Informer wrote that it completely changes the landscape of gaming. Seth Schiesel of The New York Times called the city the real star. Jesse Costantino of GameRevolution dissented, saying the game lacked important features common elsewhere in the genre.

  Critics warmed to Niko in particular. Jon Hicks of Official Xbox Magazine and Andy Robinson of Computer and Video Games both called him charismatic and likeable. Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb said Niko was the only thing that mattered to him as he progressed through the story. The new cover system, the vehicle handling and the morality choices all earned praise. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer judged the choices a fair substitute for bosses with large health bars.

  The Windows release also drew universal acclaim, with extras such as a video editor and a customisable radio station. Its online mode allowed 32 players, double the console version's 16. Reviewers also complained that the demanding system requirements made the best-looking version annoyingly fiddly to run.

  Awards followed. Game of the Year honours came from Digital Spy, the Entertainment Merchants Association, GameTrailers, Giant Bomb, IGN Australia, Kotaku, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Time. The game led the 2008 Spike Video Game Awards with eight nominations and won three, including Game of the Year and Best Performance by a Human Male for Michael Hollick. It received seven nominations at the 5th British Academy Games Awards, tying Modern Warfare for the most. At IGN's Best of 2008 it won eleven awards.

  The sales numbers were as dramatic. Within a week it earned over 500 million dollars worldwide, about 6 million copies for Take-Two. After a month it had sold over 8.5 million copies. On the 13th of May 2008, it broke three Guinness World Records, covering the highest-grossing video game in 24 hours, the highest revenue from an entertainment product in 24 hours, and the fastest-selling video game in 24 hours.

  In the United Kingdom it sold over 631,000 copies in a day, beating the 501,000 set by San Andreas. In the United States it sold 2.85 million units in five days. In Japan, 133,000 PlayStation 3 copies and 34,000 Xbox 360 copies sold in four days. By the 11th of March 2011, sales passed 20 million, and by July 2013 they topped 25 million. Every record it set was eventually broken by its own successor.

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• 8. Lightning Rods

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  In 2007, the Florida lawyer Jack Thompson, long known for campaigns against the series, said he would try to stop sales to minors. On the 14th of March, Take-Two sued him pre-emptively. Thompson countersued, accusing the company of violating federal RICO statutes, perjury and obstruction of justice. The two sides settled on the 20th of April. Thompson was barred from suing to ban Take-Two's games, though he could still act as counsel for other parties.

  Thompson returned in September 2007 with a court filing that claimed a mission target was a lawyer character based on himself. In April 2008, he wrote a letter to the mother of Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, calling the series a murder simulator. He later claimed it was a parody meant to induce shame.

  New York officials objected after the first trailer. Peter Vallone Jr., chairman of the council's public safety committee, compared it to setting Halo in Disneyland. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly called it despicable to glamorize violence in games. Jason Della Rocca of the International Game Developers Association accused them of a double standard, since books, films and television series set in the city faced no such outcry.

  In April 2008, Mothers Against Drunk Driving objected to drunk driving in the game. The group asked the Entertainment Software Rating Board to raise the rating to Adults Only, which would effectively remove it from sale. Rockstar replied that its audience is sophisticated enough to understand the game's material, and that you cannot judge the game by one small aspect.

  In May 2008, radio host Glenn Beck said games like this one train kids to be killers. He wrongly stated that players can attack police officers with a chainsaw. Critics pushed back. Robinson of Computer and Video Games compared Beck's rant to the game's own satirical radio shows.

  Real crimes were also linked to the game. In June 2008, six teenagers arrested for robbery in New Hyde Park, New York, said it inspired them, according to the Nassau County Police Department. In August 2008, an 18-year-old student was arrested in Bangkok for killing a taxi driver. A police captain said the student wanted to find out if robbing a taxi was as easy in real life as in the game. Thailand then banned it. In August 2013, an eight-year-old boy in Slaughter, Louisiana, shot and killed his 87-year-old grandmother, Marie Smothers, after playing the game.

  The world Niko built has not been abandoned. The timeline Rockstar started here, called the HD Universe, carries on through Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online. Even the handheld game Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars reuses this Liberty City map, minus Alderney.

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