Before I Knew New York, I Knew Liberty City: A Retrospective on GTA IV’s Setting

Grand Theft Auto IV is celebrating its 15-year anniversary at the moment, April 29, 2023. Under, a New Yorker remembers how Rockstar’s imaginary model of Manhattan helped him join together with his house.

Ask anybody I’ve ever proven round New York they usually’d let you know that I consult with myself as “the worst New Yorker.” That is as a result of, for the longest time in my life, I simply did not understand it. I knew town as a skyline I might see from my window and maps I might reference on-line, however I not often went out and explored my own residence. I could not let you know up from down on the Manhattan grid and I definitely could not level you to any particular locale. Early in life, this flaw was straightforward to chalk as much as having a busy immigrant household that could not afford to take me out as a child. Later in life, although, when alternatives arose as an adolescent, it was social anxieties and sadly discovered habits that saved me indoors and taking part in video games as a substitute. And so for the longest time in my life, I had no intimate data of or connection to the one place I’ve ever referred to as house. That was, a minimum of, till Grand Theft Auto IV got here into my life.

15 years in the past, GTA IV upended my relationship with New York Metropolis by offering me with one. Earlier than I knew the sights and sounds of my own residence, I knew Liberty Metropolis just like the again of my hand. Across the time of GTA IV’s launch, Rockstar went all in on more and more detailed and real looking simulations of individuals and locations. To its credit score, GTA IV felt like sufficient of a simulacrum of New York (for the time) that I handled it as an alternative to the true factor. So, sure, reader, I first mapped out my house of New York Metropolis by way of Liberty Metropolis. In flip, I discovered to like a spot I had by no means given a correct shot.

As a child, town scared me. A few of my earliest recollections of it embody partitions of pedestrians slamming into one another at crosswalks simply due to the sheer density of individuals current. Others include me trying up on the impossibly tall skyscrapers and despairing at how small I used to be by comparison–or imagining the terrifying sight of town beneath me from its highest factors. Dashing automobiles have been and stay a risk, and in a metropolis of infinitely tall buildings and lengthy streets, my largest fear as a child was getting misplaced. One in every of my earliest solo expeditions into town noticed that actual nightmare manifest. By comparability, I might afford to be fearless and thorough in my explorations of Liberty Metropolis from the protection of my cousins’ bed room, which I frequented sufficient to play GTA IV typically.

Apparent points come up while you begin to consider my mapping out New York, although, since Liberty Metropolis will not be as one-to-one as future Rockstar settings would end up. Bohan, GTA IV’s analog for The Bronx, is criminally small for starters and Flatbush, recognized in-game as Beechwood Metropolis, is within the fully improper a part of the sport’s rendition of Brooklyn. Entire neighborhoods are truncated down to some blocks or put in tough approximation to the place they’d be, and but a lot of New York remains to be there not directly that I made do. BOABO, Liberty Metropolis’s equal of DUMBO, is simply due north of Downtown, a stand-in for the industrious Downtown Brooklyn, which tracks in actuality. I discovered the place to position neighborhoods like Crimson Hook, which you start the sport in, and have become acquainted with components of city I would not discover until school and maturity. Previous to my later high-school years, I not often stepped foot in Manhattan, however I used to be an everyday in Algonquin storefronts and eating places in GTA IV. And in contrast to different components of the map, it is largely laid out virtually precisely like its inspiration, although Center Park is a bit too far uptown to be a real alternative for Central Park.

Most significantly to me, I noticed undertaking buildings all through GTA IV’s metropolis simply months after me and my household moved into one ourselves. It is one of many first occasions I can keep in mind ever seeing undertaking buildings in a recreation. Whereas no singular illustration of New York will ever be more true than one other, most media had led me to grasp my house because the glamor of the massive metropolis, quite than the grime of the fact in most different locations or the juxtaposition of the 2. Previous to GTA IV and the wave of gentrification that’d quickly change town, a lot of New York exterior of Manhattan was an afterthought to of us trying from the skin in. However in GTA IV’s eyes, we have been equally worthy of being part of the larger image. It was an outline that felt trustworthy, and that meant one thing to me–and it nonetheless does. And alongside the best way, my efforts labored and GTA IV demystified town for me, or a minimum of made sufficient sense of it for me to confidently discover it and uncover its different secrets and techniques and delights.

What’s most attention-grabbing to me in my reflection of GTA IV is not how a lot of town I do know and confidently discover lately because of it, however how a lot it is now a snapshot of a spot that does not fully exist anymore. As a lot as the sport knowledgeable me of the New York Metropolis of the mid-to-late aughts, it is unrecognizable in spots now. DUMBO, then a relative piece of crap attributable to its varied deserted industrial buildings, has been closely developed since, first housing a burgeoning artwork scene earlier than transitioning to tech startups and high-end residentials which might be fully at odds with the rundown feeling of GTA IV’s equal. That is as a result of so many deserted buildings and warehouses of the time received retrofitted into high-end residing across the flip of the last decade to satisfy the calls for of gentrifiers within the 2010s. Equally, East Island Metropolis would not replicate how astronomically upscale Lengthy Island Metropolis has change into within the final decade, to the purpose that Amazon was banking on constructing a headquarters there some years in the past that might’ve pushed out no matter low-income households have been left within the space. Because of this, GTA IV is that this odd glimpse at a pre-recession and gentrification New York Metropolis, a spot I’ve received a faint reminiscence of lately.

What’s even funnier to me about how dated GTA IV’s metropolis feels is what would not make the minimize in its model of Liberty Metropolis and the way clearly it factors to the period wherein this recreation was made. Williamsburg, the neighborhood I grew up in most of my life, is nowhere within the recreation, an oversight that might solely be made earlier than the 2010s and the explosion of change that’d rework the neighborhood right into a parody of itself and the hub of Brooklyn. GTA has by no means been shy about who and what it satirizes, with GTA V taking explicit goal at hipsters and techies on the opposite coast again in 2013. On the identical time, although, each of these teams have been additionally encroaching on Williamsburg and components of Bushwick, the latter of which a minimum of exists in components of Schottler in-game. One imagines a contemporary Liberty Metropolis making them the most important respective part of Dealer, filling the streets with oddly dressed hipsters saying probably the most pretentious stuff you have ever heard on the best way to the closest cafe as a form of toothless jab on the populace, however because it stands, it is nowhere in sight. That is not to sentence Rockstar for not being prescient sufficient to write down them in, however a humorous remark contemplating the meteoric rise of both neighborhood within the ensuing years. A lot of what I’ve grown to learn about New York within the years since GTA IV stuffed within the blanks is not accounted for, making it an odd tribute to a spot I solely fleetingly knew simply earlier than it slipped away from me.

Nonetheless, probably the most rewarding factor about this journey down reminiscence lane although has been coming again to the sport all these years later and selecting it aside in a approach not motivated by spite however out of affection. Like how I am unable to go to Grand Military Plaza within the recreation with out lamenting that the Central Library is on the fully improper facet of the arch, or the dearth of the Japanese Parkway, the place I’ve loved many refreshing walks and seen joggers and their cute canines over time. Whereas I do not owe all my data of town to GTA IV, it is arduous to disclaim its function as a foundational side for why I do know it in addition to I do now. And although there is a bitterness to how a lot of this recreation’s setting has slipped away from me, I am glad it a minimum of exists as a time capsule of it. In order I forge forward in life, and because the world round me continues to alter, I intend to maintain holding onto GTA IV as a memento of the primary place I ever beloved.