Dan Houser of Grand Theft Auto

How Dan Houser helped turn Grand Theft Auto into a cultural phenomenon
Dan Houser and his brother Sam are responsible for some of the most fascinating (and controversial) video games ever
Keith Stuart
The Guardian, Sunday 18 November 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/18/dan-houser-grand-theft-auto

There isn't another video game firm in the world like Rockstar Games. Founded in 1998 by Dan Houser and his brother Sam, it has been responsible for some of the most fascinating, successful and controversial video games ever, including the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto series (120m sales and counting) and the vast wild west adventure, Red Dead Redemption.

Yet little is known about the inner workings of this multinational publisher and developer. The company does not attend industry events such as the huge E3 exhibition in Los Angeles, and unlike most execs in this industry, the Housers rarely court publicity for themselves.

I meet with Dan in New York, at an astounding Lower East Side apartment owned and rented out by the horror film director Marcus Nispel. Rockstar is in the process of introducing the press to its latest title Grand Theft Auto V, and clearly wants to make an impression – hence the venue, and hence the presence of Dan Houser for a handful of interviews. He is, it turns out, affable, passionate and hugely eloquent about game design and culture. He also looks tired. When I ask how far in advance the team starts planning its next games, he laughs wearily. "We don't start until the very end of a project. At the moment, the thought of even doing another Grand Theft Auto is so appalling – we've got so much work left to do to finish this one. It's overwhelming!"

It was Sam who kicked the Rockstar story off. In 1996 he was heading the interactive division of music label BMG, which was experimenting in the new-fangled games business. Sam had heard about developer DMA Design, based in Dundee, which was working on a crazy crime action game named Grand Theft Auto, in which players drove around a city, robbing banks and fighting cops. It had 2D graphics and looked dated compared to everything else. "What did I think when I first saw it?" says Dan. "Well to begin with I had the natural reaction – 'what is Sam talking about?'! The code would literally run for 10 seconds and crash. But when you started playing you understood the magic."

Released in 1997, Grand Theft Auto was a modest success, but BMG was losing money and desperate to get out of games, so it sold its interactive division to Take Two for a paltry $9m. Take Two invited Sam Houser to start up a new publishing arm in New York; Sam agreed, on the condition he could do it under his brand, Rockstar. The next release was the seminal Grand Theft Auto III, which switched to modern 3D polygonal graphics, added a licensed CD soundtrack and became the biggest game of 2001. Subsequent sequels, including the 80s-obsessed GTA: Vice City and the darker GTA IV, pushed boundaries of game design and structure.

Dan Houser is a lead writer on all Rockstar titles. He works with a small team, including Rupert Humphries (son of comedian Barry Humphries), to create the huge scripts and interlocking stories that give shape to the company's giant open-world titles. At first, the studio was hugely influenced by movies such as Brian de Palma's Scarface, Reservoir Dogs and Boyz N the Hood, but as the GTA series went on, Houser says they began to find their own voice.

"You know, with those first 3D games, we were trying to make something that had the aspirations to be like a movie," he says. "I don't want oversell this, but by GTA IV, we wanted to try to find something that could be better than movies in a way – more alive and more vibrant. It was time to move on and do our own thing."

GTA V, due out next spring, is the sprawling and impressively intricate realisation of that ambition. The game is set in Los Santos, Rockstar's Los Angeles, and features three very different criminals seeking to pull off a series of daring heists. The world is vast, taking in a whole city as well as mountain ranges, deserts and outback towns. Characters will have unprecedented freedom – flying helicopters, scuba diving, even playing sports. It is astonishingly ambitous. How does the team begin such a massive creative project? "For us, it starts with the characters," says Houser. "The story is always driven by the characters – it's always got to feel like someone you want to be propelled through the game world with. Then we'll find a cool, interesting and amusing cast to juxtapose them with, and make sure we've got a good range of types. If the process feels organic to us then we're heading in the right direction."

For Dan, the direction now is toward something entirely new. We talk a little about how, in the digital age, interactive and linear content are merging: families and couples now share games in the same way they once shared television. He sees GTA V as at the vanguard of a new entertainment era. "This game, if we get it right, will be a step toward some kind of organic living soap opera," says Houser. "You have these three characters and they're all living when you're not with them. What that means, we don't really know yet, we're only getting it working for the first time. But it feels to us something powerful."

Throughout the 90s, the Grand Theft Auto titles were targeted by tabloids and rightwing pressure groups for their depiction of casual violence. It all exploded in 2005 with the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; Sam Houser and several members of the development team were interrogated by the Federal Trade Commission when an explicit sex scene, which had been cut from the game but left hidden in its source code, was discovered by hackers. A year later, the company was let off with a warning, but the experience left its mark.

"It was draining and upsetting – a tough time in the company," says Houser. And that's all he'll say, but the emotion is there – and in some ways this terrifying period seems to have shaped Rockstar's relationship with the press, and with the outside world. He sighs heavily.

"The massive social decay that we were supposed to induce hasn't happened. So in that regard, a lot of those debates that used to go on, they're not such a big deal now. We never felt that we were being attacked for the content, we were being attacked for the medium, which felt a little unfair. If all of this stuff had been put into a book or a movie, people wouldn't have blinked an eye. And there are far bigger issues to worry about in society than this."

But the brothers' reluctance to go in front of the media is about more than their past experiences, it's about how their company works. "Our skill has been in creating that environment where hundreds of people can flourish," Houser says. "It is far better than my ability or otherwise to write, or Sam's to tune games – creating the environment and working together is what makes us proud. Journalists are obsessed with biography stories, but it's not relevant to us. It's always been about the company. Every different person here has their own weaknesses, their own hang-ups but together we produce magic."

It sounds like company PR, but Houser is earnest and honest. The team is everything, Rockstar is a gang; and its relationship with the world is defined by that. He is also unexpectedly self-effacing. Towards the end of the interview I ask him what he'd be doing now if GTA had failed. He leans forward, opens another Coke and thinks for a second. "I can't answer your question because I've always done this," he jokes. "My family thought I was a loser, so my brother gave me a job and I've spent the last 15 years trying to justify it. I've done that to the best of my ability – and it's been enormous fun."

Duke Nukem, L.A. Noire Released

Fifteen years in the waiting, Duke Nukem Forever was finally released on June 14th, making it the Chinese Democracy of video games. And like the GnR album, the game hasn't lived up to the waiting time according to critics and fans alike. One noted flaw in the game is the ridiculously long loading times. Still, there is something to be said for anything that wallows so shamelessly in politically incorrect humor, and the usage of Billy Squier's "The Stroke" in commercials is the best use of the song this side of Will Ferrell figure-skating as Chazz Michael Michaels.

One game that has lived up to the hype: L.A. Noire, a game set in the city of angels during the '40s by Rockstar Games. No word yet on the follow-up to Grand Theft Auto IV...

Trailer Park: 'L.A. Noire'

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/11/trailer-park-la-noire/1

Nov 11, 2010
Trailer Park: 'L.A. Noire'
Brett Molina

Between their work on Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games has developed the knack for creating very interesting game trailers.

Their latest example: the first trailer for criminal drama L.A. Noire, which debuts in Spring 2011.

Players work as a detective in Los Angeles in the late-1940s, solving crimes "through a blend of classic action, clue-finding and interrogation," says Rockstar in a statement unveiling the video.

Rockstar also notes the trailer is comprised entirely of footage taken from within the game. L.A. Noire is being developed by Team Bondi, founded by the writer and director of The Getaway for PlayStation 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9IH8fWOwS4

A Fistful of Controller

http://www.slate.com/id/2255619
A Fistful of Controller
Rockstar's fantastic new Western Red Dead Redemption is even better than Grand Theft Auto.
By Chris Suellentrop
Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Red Dead Redemption, the new Western from Rockstar Games, is the best Grand Theft Auto game ever made. At the very least, it feels like the game Rockstar wanted Grand Theft Auto IV to be—a successful infusion of narrative (if not quite novelistic) fiction into an open-world environment. Red Dead Redemption does a better job than GTA IV did of grounding Rockstar's usual sendup of American culture in the story of a character reluctant to embrace all this violence. The transgressive thrill of Grand Theft Auto III (the game that many people call "the first" Grand Theft Auto) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was the opportunity to play a villain rather than a hero, and to experiment in a wide-open "sandbox" setting. (Ignore the plotline! Drive a taxi! Kill hookers!) Red Dead Redemption is more sedate, more subtle, and more of a straitjacket: It encourages you to inhabit a particular role inside a sprawling environment—to try to become John Marston, reformed outlaw and aspiring rancher, rather than just play as whomever you might want to be.

As the game begins, Marston has been dispatched by federal agents to "New Austin." While this place sounds like Texas, it's more akin to the fictional Texas that lives in Western movies than the actual old West. While Red Dead Redemption feels original, it's also self-consciously derivative, prodigiously quoting movies old and new: There's a place called Rio Bravo, an oil town called Plainview, and every time you start up the game you hear a harmonica riff that sounds like it was borrowed directly from Once Upon a Time in the West. (It's only the first suggestion that the game will be very Sergio Leone.) But after the almost 30 hours it took me to play through the game's story line, Red Dead Redemption felt like a lot more than a collection of cinematic references. Once again, Rockstar has excelled at creating a sense of place.

Red Dead Redemption is, in many ways, a role-playing game. When video gamers use that phrase, they have a particular meaning in mind: a descendant of tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons that allow players to shape their own characters, "level up," and in the process modify the game at least somewhat in line with their own preferences. Red Dead Redemption isn't a game like that. But when approached in the right spirit, it offers a kind of role-playing that is closer to improvisational theater. One of the tenets of improv (as I recall from my very brief, very lackluster days as an amateur, teenage ComedySportz performer) is to always "say yes," never rejecting any suggestion about your character or setting that is introduced by one of the other actors.

Again and again, Red Dead Redemption persuaded me to follow its lead. John Marston is not a video-game You. He's a particular kind of man with a particular set of values—he respects women, he's willing to kill but doesn't do it lightly, he doesn't like looting corpses for bullets and pocket change—that are revealed over time. While the writing in Red Dead Redemption is at times overly broad (the oversexed Mexican bandits who exclaim Andale! upon dying come to mind), it is also consistently smart, and the characterizations are surprisingly, and refreshingly, indirect. The game assumes its players are smart, too, and that they're paying attention. (The marital status of one early character is revealed merely by the use of the word Miss.) As a result, when Marston did something I found unexpected—like burning down a peasant village at the behest of the Mexican army, or procuring young women for a corrupt colonel, or spitting on a man, or beating another one in the face—I found myself thinking, I didn't realize he would do that, rather than, I wouldn't have done that.

Because Red Dead Redemption is a descendant of the Grand Theft Auto games—while not a literal GTA game, it is made by the same studio and it plays almost exactly like Grand Theft Auto IV—I suspect players are reluctant to embrace this style of play. The first time I ever saw Grand Theft Auto III was in a friend's apartment in the early years of the last decade. Rather than show me any of the missions that make up the game's storyline, he showed me how he liked to use the game to go on what he called "a rampage," looting and murdering and destroying everything that crossed his path until the police arrested him or, more often, killed him. There's a plot, he told me, but he didn't pay any attention to it.

I've certainly gone on my fair share of rampages. The setting of the Grand Theft Auto games encourages this—the entire point of GTA III and Vice City is to rise through criminal organizations—but so does the rhetoric surrounding the supposedly liberating "freedom" provided by an open world. Yeah, there's a story, we're told, but that's not the point. You have freedom! In Red Dead Redemption, you can spend all day riding your horse. You can kill everyone you come across. You can go hunting, or go pick flowers, or play poker. You can chase in-game "achievements" like "Dastardly," attained by tying a woman to the railroad tracks and letting her get run over by a train, or "Manifest Destiny," for driving the bison to extinction.

Fun as those activities might be, they aren't the most rewarding ways to play the game. In fact, here is a heretical suggestion: If you're playing Red Dead Redemption that way, you're playing it wrong. That's not to say that you should ignore the secondary elements of the game. Red Dead Redemption succeeds though an accretion of details, and my John Marston played some poker (something I have a previously disclosed weakness for) and went hunting or picked flowers along dusty roads on his way from vista to (jaw-dropping, sensationally scored) vista. But don't let the flower-picking and the poker-playing become the entire game for you, as part of a hamster-wheel process of leveling-up and achievement chasing. Doing that turns Red Dead Redemption into Farmville.

Video games aren't the only medium that offers you freedom, after all. Video games can actually be more restrictive of user freedom than other media. Even in an "open-world" Rockstar game, you basically have to unlock the plot in the order ordained by the designers. By contrast, you can choose to read the last chapter of a book first, or to read every sentence in reverse order. Instead of playing your position in a baseball game, you could just sit in the outfield and pick dandelions. And you can watch a movie with a sneering, cynical disregard for the characters and the story. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

"Good actions make you a good man," one character tells John Marston. His reply: "Then I'm doomed." My advice: Try to be like Marston, and struggle to be a good man, even though you're doomed. Red Dead Redemption is a gift to video gamers. We should accept it gratefully, rather than leaping to demonstrate that we can also light it on fire or throw it out a window.

Online Play Kicks Grand Theft Auto Into Overdrive

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/05/gamesfrontiers_0506

Online Play Kicks Grand Theft Auto IV Into Overdrive
Clive Thompson
05.06.08

Multiplayer missions provide unexpected and seemingly endless ways to experience Liberty City.

Liberty City has always been a strangely lonely place.

Sure, there have always been plenty of virtual citizens in the various Grand Theft Auto cities crafted by Rockstar Games. You were constantly running into caustic gangsters, cynical cops and old folks with walkers who dove out of the way when you rolled up on the sidewalk.

But there were never any other real people there -- no live humans. In meatspace terms, when you played GTA, you played alone. It was always a single-player game: no multiplayer mode, and not even an option to engage in co-op thuggery alongside a friend.

When you think about it, this is superweird. The first GTA debuted in 2001, right around the time that games were moving aggressively online. We were constantly told that artificial-intelligence characters were too stilted -- that the only way to have realistic, unpredictable play was to let gamers engage with other folks online. Hey, Halo proved that online play could extend the shelf life of a console game for, like, 19 years or something, right?

Yet GTA remained stubbornly, even defiantly, single-player. It was as if the Rockstar designers were so proud of their painstakingly crafted metropolises that they didn't want any other messy, mostly-big-bags-of-water humans in there screwing things up.

Until GTA IV arrived -- and Liberty City went online. So I duly logged in, wondering, What the heck is this going to be like? Do I need other people in here? Do I want other people in here?

It turns out that I do, and I do. For my first game, I headed into Hangman's Noose mode, where you team up with other players to accomplish a mission -- in this case, meeting up with a crime boss at the airport and keeping the cops away from him.

It felt like being in a Twilight Zone version of Grand Theft Auto. Everything was the same, but ... different. Much as aficionados of multiplayer gaming would have predicted, my teammates pulled off some hilariously unexpected moves: They'd drive in more spastic or more cunningly accurate patterns than I'd ever seen -- or attempted -- inside the game; they'd perform seemingly kamikaze moves with an AK-47 that the artificial intelligence would never have dared.

Better yet, multiplayer missions give you some subtle yet fascinating new ways to experience the city. At one point, two partners and I piled into a Ferrari while another of my teammates raced across the city. Since I didn't have to drive, I was able to enjoy some sightseeing -- zooming my camera around to different, Hollywood-like angles -- that was never possible when I was the one steering.

The sheer scale of Liberty City makes for online console play that's far more open-ended than anything I'd ever before seen. Most console multiplayer gaming takes place on fairly small maps. But with the mission modes of GTA IV, you're given a really big chunk of sandbox to play in, so there are seemingly zillions of different ways your teammates can accomplish a mission.

This leads to some quite funny incidents. During one mission, one of my partners and I arrived at a waterfront checkpoint -- him in a battered van, me in a sports car. We got out of our vehicles wondering, Hey, where's the third member of our team? So we stood around for two or three minutes, puzzled, admiring the morning sunshine. Suddenly, off in the distance, we saw a car racing toward us. It was a cop car -- and it was on fire. Our third team member emerged triumphantly. I'm still wondering what the hell happened to him.

There are 15 different modes of online play, most of which are pretty good. One clear winner is GTA Race, which blends car racing with combat: You can assault one another's vehicles, and even carjack one another. The result is exquisite madness, with drivers jumping out of wrecked compact cars and in 18-wheel trucks, then tearing off down crowded sidewalks while followed by lowriders hurling Molotov cocktails. If, like me, you're a subpar driver, you can simply abandon the goal and become a machine of revenge -- setting up a roadblock, waiting for other drivers to approach, then blasting them to pieces. This is food for the soul.

Other modes, however, are more of a letdown. I found the death-match games underwhelming, in part because GTA's targeting system isn't very fluid, but also because the maps weren't well designed. They possess few of the nooks and crannies you get in a great Call of Duty or Halo map.

Overall, though, GTA IV will make you glad that Rockstar finally let other people into Grand Theft Auto's world. This city's big enough for the both of us.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

Grand Theft Auto grows up

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2008/04/28/DD6810D46H.DTL

Grand Theft Auto grows up
Peter Hartlaub
Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV: Action game. Publisher: Rockstar Games. Developer: Rockstar North. (For Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. $59.99. ESRB Rating: Mature.)

Cultural revolution often comes from seemingly imperfect people and unpopular places.

The most influential athlete was labeled a draft dodger. The man who helped bring rock 'n' roll to the mainstream grew a huge gut, wore sequined jumpsuits and then died in the bathroom. One of this country's greatest defenders of free speech was dismissed as just a pornographer. But Muhammad Ali, Elvis and even Larry Flynt are remembered for their contributions - just as one day, the makers of Grand Theft Auto will be known as more than peddlers of video game sex and violence.

The latest entry in the series, Grand Theft Auto IV, isn't just a fun piece of entertainment. The game, which will be released today, is a step forward for the industry - doing almost as much for storytelling in video games as Grand Theft Auto III did to spark an era of free-roaming, nonlinear gameplay.

GTA IV is visually sharp, with a level of detail that makes New York stand-in Liberty City more fully realized than any other video game world I've seen. But it's the surprising amount of pathos that makes the game such a ground-breaking title. Just as Clint Eastwood did with the Western "Unforgiven," the developers at Rockstar Games North immerse the audience in their familiar world of violence and depravity and then turn the tables, adding an element of cold reality to a genre that had been previously entrenched in fantasy.

The previous two entries in the series - GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas - were smirking, action-packed hybrids of films by Michael Mann and Quentin Tarantino, combining gritty violence with a knowing hipness. GTA IV still has a lot of humor, but the plot seems more like a good Martin Scorsese epic - sort of a modern-day "Gangs of New York," with elements of "The Departed" and "Taxi Driver" mixed in.

You're Niko Bellic, an immigrant from a war-torn Eastern European country, who arrives in America to find that his cousin Roman's tales of owning sports cars and condos and dating gorgeous women are lies. Niko settles into Roman's dumpy crash pad next to the subway, and gets drawn into an underworld of organized crime.

Falstaffian overtones

From the beginning, GTA IV has an edgy, unsettling tone that was mostly missing from previous games. The cousin character, who would have been a goofball played for laughs in an earlier Grand Theft Auto, has a pathetic vibe, with a false confidence that doesn't hide the fact that he's a tragedy waiting to happen. He's somewhere between the Falstaff character from Shakespeare and Namond from the fourth season of "The Wire."

The game reveals its true motivations a few hours into the action, on a dock at the edge of Liberty City, after a brutal (but deserved) murder. Niko gives a powerful soliloquy that reveals a large chunk of his past, and some previously unknown reasons for his coming to America. The scene is cut cinematically, lit by the moon, with the city's vast skyline looming ghostlike in the background. From there, it's clear where the game is going: Niko may have a dead soul, but his experiences have heightened his sense of right and wrong. He's a modern-day Tom Joad.

The amount of mayhem and carnage in GTA IV is about the same as in the two previous games, but it seems as if there's less - in part because Niko isn't just a mindless instigator, and in part because there's so much more to do in this game.

When the pedestrians, cars and buildings became repetitive in GTA: Vice City, released in 2002, it was always tempting to get bored, steal a cop car and end up in your own North Hollywood shootout. There are 10 times as many distractions in GTA IV, including working cell phones, televisions that can flip channels and the Liberty City version of the Internet. This time, the mundane is just as interesting as the more unsavory elements of the game.

How detailed is Liberty City? Bump into a sedan in the nice part of town, and a car alarm will go off. Go on a date wearing the same clothes you wore the last time you took a girlfriend out, and she'll make a snide comment about your wardrobe choice. Pick up a pot-smoking Jamaican friend, and small wisps of smoke will filter out the window as you drive around. Flies buzz convincingly around garbage bins, and food wrappers dance in the wind. The subway works, and the radio gives you almost as many choices as you'll get in real life, with each broadcast specific to the goings-on in Liberty City.

The new technology within the game adds to the depth of the story. The cell phones don't just make accepting new missions quicker - chatting on them during a drive through traffic can quietly flush out a character's backstory. When you go on a date to a nightclub, you get to see a real performance. (Reportedly there are acts by Ricky Gervais and Katt Williams, which we haven't discovered yet.) And the more time you spend with certain inhabitants of Liberty City, the more they're likely to help you in the future - whether it's a friend who has access to guns or a love interest with talents in other areas. (Most of the "romance" that we saw happened offscreen, except for the moaning.)

If there's a problem with the GTA IV, it's the new combat controls, which make fighting, shooting and driving a little more complicated and challenging than in previous games. The fisticuffs in particular are kind of wonky, and something as simple as climbing a ladder might take a minute to figure out. But a new in-game engine that makes your computer-controlled enemies much smarter more than makes up for the learning curve. GTA IV also has a new online multiplayer mode, which we didn't have time to sample before deadline.

Only for the mature

As for the controversies, all the consumer really needs to know is that this game has a Mature rating, and should no more end up in the hands of your 10-year-old than a triple feature of "Mean Streets," "Showgirls" and "Last House on the Left."

But take solace, parents and grandparents of gamers - no matter what you hear on the cable talk shows in the next few days, Grand Theft Auto IV is not a sign of the apocalypse.

It was once annoying to hear the more extreme detractors blather about Grand Theft Auto, speaking with authority when they so clearly had never played the game. (As it was with previous GTA franchises, critics this time around are hyper-focusing on one new feature - the ability to drive drunk - as if that's the sole purpose of the game, instead of one tiny detail that contributes to the overall realism.)

Now it's almost fun to hear the criticism. This is one of the better crime dramas that you're going to experience in any media - movies, TV and theater included. Someday pretty much everyone is going to figure that out.

'Grand Theft Auto IV' is exhilarating adventure

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/marcsaltzman/2008-04-28-grand-theft-auto-iv_N.htm

'Grand Theft Auto IV' is exhilarating adventure

Let's cut right to the chase: Grand Theft Auto IV is not a video game for kids, tweens or even young teenagers. As with its controversial predecessors, the latest in the 70 million unit-selling series is a Mature-rated adventure, created for players 17 years of age and older as it gives you a virtual taste of the criminal underworld. Think of it as an interactive episode of The Sopranos, if you will.

Because of its tremendous following and the fact it's available on both high-definition consoles, the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3, Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV will likely be the best-selling game of 2008. It also helps that it's the first game in the series to offer online multiplayer modes. Having spent the better part of 10 days living this dangerous alternate life, rest assured this GTA sequel more than lives up to the hype.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, you play as Niko Bellic, a tough-looking character who arrives in the U.S. from somewhere in Eastern Europe, expecting the streets to be paved with gold. It seems Niko's American cousin, Roman, lied about his extravagant lifestyle: Instead of being wealthy and living in a mansion, Roman is indebted to loan sharks and lives in a cockroach-infested apartment the size of a walk-in closet.

Nevertheless, Niko decides to help Roman with his rundown cabstand and keep thugs off his back until he can figure out how to make money and connections in Liberty City, the same city as 2001's Grand Theft Auto III, modeled after New York City and New Jersey. If you're questioning how Niko could forgive his scheming cousin, you'll discover a few hours into the game that there are other reasons why Niko left his homeland.

Grand Theft Auto games offer "sandbox" play, meaning you can virtually go anywhere and do anything in this fully realized 3-D city with pedestrians, traffic and storefronts. This play from a third-person perspective includes carjacking any vehicle, listening to more than a hundred songs on car radios and playing minigames such as billiards, darts, bowling or arcade games. Niko can go on dates, swim, surf the Internet and buy clothing and weapons.

But it's the seedy missions that unravel the lengthy single-player story. In person or via his cellphone, Niko will be asked to perform missions that include escorting someone, taking out drug dealers, evading police cruisers, racing to one end of the city before someone else, flying a helicopter, retrieving stolen money or looking up an informant's address. In many cases you'll have three offers at once and will be forced to make decisions, which will affect the storyline and your friendships.

Grand Theft Auto IV offers high-definition graphics that trump 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, including impressive lip-synching, non-interactive story sequences that were motion-captured for added realism, varying weather and a new physics engine that models everything authentically. This sequel also adds more hand-to-hand combat and optional in-car GPS to help you better navigate the city.

Without question, though, the biggest new feature is something gamers have been asking about for years: multiplayer modes. In Grand Theft Auto IV, up to 16 gamers can play online in a host of cooperative and competitive games including "Deathmatch" (every person for himself), "Team Deathmatch" and "Cops & Crooks" (a racing game). Because we reviewed the game before launch, however, this online component was disabled.

Xbox 360 gamers will also be able to download bonus missions and other content later this year, via the Xbox Live service.

Controversy is unavoidable with this game. As with past GTA titles you can shoot at cops, drive into pedestrians and request "services" from a prostitute. This sequel is also laced with foul language, plus you can drink and drive and watch pole dancers at a strip club. Again, take heed to the "M" rating.

Aside from a slightly choppy frame rate at times, when the action stutters a bit, and hard-to-read green GPS directions on your map, there is little to complain about with Grand Theft Auto IV. Adult gamers will find a single-player story that can easily last a month, not to mention the ability to hop online and play with friends anywhere, anytime. Expect a lot of bang for your buck in this highly polished sequel.

Rockstar Unveils New GTA IV Trailer

http://us.i1.yimg.com/videogames.yahoo.com/events/grand-theft-auto-iv/rockstar-unveils-new-gta-iv-trailer/1174740

Rockstar Unveils New GTA IV Trailer
We catch another glimpse at Liberty City in action. Will the Internet survive?
by YVG Staff
6 Dec 2007

Following the somewhat muted unveiling of Grand Theft Auto IV's official packaging, game developer Rockstar Games has released the third official trailer for their long-awaited blockbuster. For most games that's hardly newsworthy, but then again, most games aren't as massive, controversial and, well, newsworthy as GTA IV.

Clocking in at a hefty two minutes, it's nearly twice as long as the last trailer, which you might remember as the one that nearly crippled the Internet, bringing down the game's official site and almost every alternate download source. That behemoth lent insight into the overall look and feel of Liberty City; this one, however, focuses much more on protagonist Niko Bellic by showing off the game's dialogue and story through gorgeous cut scenes and absurdly lifelike animations.

At least that's what you take home after one viewing. If the response to the last trailer is any indication, the gaming community will treat this lengthier video as it would a frog in science class, poring over every detail in an effort to glean new insight into the dozens of as yet unannounced features. Two minutes of new GTA IV footage is like two hours to the millions of dedicated fans.

They've certainly been patient. After nearly ruining everyone's Christmas by delaying GTA IV until next year (the exact ship date is still unknown), Rockstar suffered a bout of deja vu when their controversial action game Manhunt 2 was banned in several countries due to excessive violence. GTA IV will also likely meet some resistance, though the franchise's high pedigree and tremendous pop culture impact pretty much guarantees success at retail.

Will this new trailer help their cause? Check it out and you decide.

'Manhunt 2' Receives Mature Rating

http://wii.themanroom.com/news.php?id=1588

'Manhunt 2' Receives Mature Rating; October Release
August 24, 2007

Rockstar Games today announced 'Manhunt 2' has received a Mature rating from the ESRB and will be released in North America October 31 on Playstation 2, PSP, and Nintendo Wii.

The ESRB had originally slapped 'Manhunt 2' with an AO (Adults Only) rating in June, forcing Rockstar and Take Two Interactive to delay the game's original July 9 launch date.

In order to achieve the new Mature rating, Rockstar was forced to tone down several unspecified aspects of the game. Whether the original Adults Only version of 'Manhunt 2' will be available later on remains to be seen.

"Manhunt 2 is important to us, and we're glad it can finally be appreciated as a gaming experience," said Sam Houser, founder and executive producer of Rockstar Games. "We love the horror genre. Manhunt 2 is a powerful piece of interactive story telling that is a unique video game experience. We think horror fans will love it."