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."

And His Social Policy Was Inspired by Grand Theft Auto...

If Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan sounds like a special deal for a crappy medium Godfather's Pizza and some hot wings, it's because it is:
http://www.godfatherspizzaschofield.com/pdf/Godfather%27s%20Menu%20%20Feb%202011.pdf

Still, Cain's Pizza Plan may have other inspirations behinds. As Joan d'Arc of Paranoia Magazine forwarded to The Konformist:

"In Herman Cain's America, the tax code would be very, very simple: The corporate income tax rate would be 9 percent, the personal income tax rate would be 9 percent and the national sales tax rate would be 9 percent. But there's already a 999 plan out there, in a land called SimCity... Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. "

Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/herman-cain-999-sim-city_n_1008952.html

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.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 said to break records

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10396593-52.html

November 12, 2009
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 said to break sales records
Daniel Terdiman

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is said to have broken the single-day sales record for an entertainment property. According to Activision, the game earned $310 million in North America and England alone in its first 24 hours.

So much for the supposedly unbreakable first-day sales record set last year by Grand Theft Auto IV.

On Thursday, Activision said that its brand-new Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare, which hit store shelves on Tuesday, had "shattered" the previous record for opening-day sales by an entertainment property, earning $310 million in North America and the U.K. alone. That equates to 4.7 million copies of the new game sold in those regions, and, if true, would eclipse the previous first-day sales record of $310 million globally, which GTA IV set in May of 2008.

Given that GTA IV had nearly doubled the previous record of $170 million, set by Halo 3, I wondered at the time whether its new mark was unassailable. Clearly, the new Call of Duty has answered that question, and loudly.

Now, we have to ask once again whether there could be another challenger for the crown. It would be foolish, it seems, to conclude that there won't be, given the dominance of franchises like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Grand Theft Auto itself, and, of course, Call of Duty.

A bigger question could be: Why do we care? That's especially true given how frequently these mega-records are broken. Still, it's hard not to get worked up about what it means for a single video game title to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in a single 24-hour period, particularly while we're still mired in a fairly deep recession.

There are all kinds of arguments to be made about why video games do well in tough economic times, and I've trotted a number of them out in this space. But most games don't come anywhere near selling $310 million worth of product in their entire lifetime, let alone on their first day, so Activision--and its Infinity Ward studio, which actually developed the new Call of Duty--seem entitled to a little bit of attention.

But at the rate these records are falling, I'm going to have to start thinking twice every time a new game sends me one of these announcements about breaking records. Sooner or later, it's not going to be all that noteworthy, no matter how much money is earned in a single day. Until then, though, watch this space for word on which game will be next in line for the throne.

Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between.

Joke of the Week: Funny People

"I'm really good at Guitar Hero, then I thought like maybe I should get a guitar. Then I thought like I'm really good at Grand Theft Auto, maybe I should start beating up hookers."
Seth Rogan in Judd Apatow's upcoming Funny People

MadWorld, Chinatown Wars showing poor sales

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/10482-madworld-chinatown-wars-showing-poor-sales/

MadWorld, Chinatown Wars showing poor sales
Sean Ridgeley
Friday, April 17th, 2009

Nintendo's adult audience not worth the trouble?

A criticism from many gamers of Nintendo is how tame they've been in what content they allow on their platforms, particularly the DS and Wii.

As with its predecessors, though, Nintendo has been willing to sneak at least a minority of "adult" titles in there, this being a particularly popular trend lately with the likes of high profile titles Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and MadWorld seeing release, and to great reviews.

Many gamers, especially with analyst predictions, have been hopeful sales would prove robust and "show Nintendo the light", so to speak, but unfortunately this has not been the case (at least not in the U.S.), with poor sales for both those titles -- House of the Dead, published along with MadWorld by Sega, suffered a similar fate at 45,000 first-month sales -- and the usual first-party "tame" releases still dominating the charts, an exception being Pokemon Platinum (great game, but doesn't help).

MadWorld came in with 66,000 units, having debuted March 10. Chinatown Wars, on the other end, reported 89,000 units (a significant difference from the estimated 200,000 - 450,000), and released March 17. Sega apparently is happy with both their titles, however, as we see from a recent interview with their vice president of marketing Sean Ratcliffe on VentureBeat:

"House of the Dead has done very well and has absolutely met our expectations. The first set of data for Mad World is very encouraging, as well.

If [MadWorld] resonates with the audience [...] we absolutely want to make that into a franchise. I think it’s unique, and there are many aspects of that game which are sort of pushing boundaries. And it’s just great fun."

Going by the Entertainment Software Rating Board's (ESRB) data, the DS currently hosts seven M-rated games out of over 1,000, with the Wii at 26 out of just under 1,000.

Are Nintendo's consoles best left to the younger generation?

GTA jacking DS in March

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6202333.html

GTA jacking DS in March
By Tor Thorsen, GameSpot
Dec 15, 2008

Chinatown Wars now set to rage on Nintendo's portable in US on 17th, EU on 20th.

Just over five months after it was revealed at Nintendo's E3 press conference, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars finally has a release date. In North America, the DS debut of Rockstar Games' multi-multiplatinum series will ship on March 17, St. Patrick's Day. In Europe, it will arrive in stores on March 20.

Chinatown Wars has not yet been rated in any territory. However, in a recent interview with Edge magazine, Rockstar's vice president, Sam Houser, said that Chinatown Wars will be courting an M for Mature rating in the US. "It can't be softened to make it family-friendly--that's not the game we're making," explained Houser. "[Nintendo] didn't want us to make a GTA for kids, and we weren't interested in making a game we wouldn't normally make."

By the sound of it, Chinatown Wars will be a hard M indeed. Though it sports cartoon-like cel-shaded graphics, Chinatown Wars will feature such age-unsuitable activities as drug peddling, carjacking, and armed mayhem. Unlike previous portable GTA offerings, it will include 3D isometric graphics and stylus-based minigames to let players hotwire cars and tattoo themselves. It will also re-create much of the same open-world Liberty City as its console cousin, Grand Theft Auto IV.

Playboy's Saints Row 2 Review

http://playboy.com/arts-entertainment/reviews/games/saints-row-2/saints-row-2.html

GAME Saints Row 2
Publisher THQ
Developer Volition
Genre Action/Adventure
Platform PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Price $59.99
ESRB Rating “M” for Mature

October 15, 2008
By Marc Saltzman

This follow-up to 2006 hit Saints Row is an over-the-top gangbanger paradise that drops you on the mean streets of Stilwater where you wreak all kinds of havoc on foot and behind the wheel. Unlike Grand Theft Auto you don’t need to unlock all of the boroughs in Saints Row 2; everything is accessible right from the get-go. While en route to take down the heads of three rival gangs, race your pimped-out ride through bustling streets and take down enemies and other obstacles in your way. Rob this truck, destroy that drug farm, hop on Jet Skis and ride through sewers under the city. It’s all in a day’s work.

A more significant distinction between Saints Row 2 and GTA lies in the degree of player customization, from your character’s voice and gang appearance (we recommend ninjas or 1970s pimps and hos), to fighting style, graffiti tags, taunts and vehicle types. Seriously, there are some major cosmetic and game-play options you can toy with, ensuring no two games play out the exact same way. Despite controls that take some getting used to (try the cruise control option), and production values not on par with Grand Theft Auto IV, players can tackle nearly 50 increasingly wacky missions and even indulge in co-op or head-to-head multiplayer modes for added replayability. On its surface Saints Row 2 might appear to be a rip-off of that “other” urban sandbox game, but once you play through a couple of missions you’ll see the differences that give THQ’s badass sequel its own legs.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=12853587

botticus
09-19-2008

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

- True GTA game - sandbox gameplay, open-world environment, gritty crime narrative.
- M-rating
- Isometric camera angle
- Cel-shaded polygons w/ black borders
- good touch-screen implementation - "tasteful" minigames, streamlining interface
- UI based on a PDA - hub for email, contacts, map, music player, GPS, stat-tracking
- stats uploaded to Rockstar Social Club website via Wi-Fi
- finger-sized icons
- missions designed for shorter periods of play, arcade quality
- aiming with control pad, auto targeting with R button
- subtle autosteer
- if you fail a mission, you can jump back to the action sequence
- chain gun, flamethrower
- good portion of Liberty City is modeled in the game (different routes than console games)
- no probems with load times, draw-in or frame rate
- lots of pedestrians, cars, etc on screen
- Wanted system - objective is to disable police cars any way possible
- real-time weather effects, 24-hour day/night cycle
- lots of radio stations to listen to (more instrumentals than vocals)
- 800,000 lines of hand-optimized source code (hey, the people like the info, right?)
- no details yet on multiplayer/Wi-Fi features

Yeah, they like it.

Nintendo Power details Chinatown Wars

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/207172/nintendo-power-details-grand-theft-auto-chinatown-wars/

Nintendo Power details Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
By Blake Snow
September 19, 2008

Two months after the controversial franchise was announced for Nintendo DS, gamers finally have more than a just a logo and name to digest.

According to a NeoGAF forum goer, transcribing the November issue of Nintendo Power, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is being billed as a "true GTA game," specifically for its sandbox gameplay, open-world environment, and gritty, mature rating.

Unlike console versions of the series, Chinatown wars will feature an isometric camera angle with 3D cel-shaded graphics and "tasteful" minigames, says the report. Additionally, the still-unnamed playable character will use a smart phone for email and missions, much like Niko from Grand Theft Auto IV.

What's more, missions are optimized for play on the go (read: they're shorter) and can quickly be restarted on failure, unlike GTA IV. The Wi-Fi enabled Chinatown Wars takes place in scaled-down version of Liberty City, but will still feature plenty of pedestrians and cars to mow down, says Nintendo Power.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is scheduled for release on Nintendo DS next February.

A Strange City Called Home

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/nyregion/thecity/04gran.html

May 4, 2008
A Strange City Called Home
By DAVE ITZKOFF

IN the opening moments of Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest chapter of the cinematically styled video game franchise, two men are standing at the side of a boat, watching a familiar sight drift into view. Through their eyes, we see a digitized, 21st-century retelling of a scene that greeted numerous generations of new arrivals to an unknown country: the eastern end of a long, narrow island, with a towering metal spire emerging from its belly, and a diminutive green statue beckoning from a tiny point off the island’s southern tip.

We think we know what we are seeing, until one of the game’s characters identifies the land mass for us.

“Liberty City,” he says to his shipmate in a vaguely East European accent. “You ever been?”

And before I even sat down to play the game, I could honestly say that I had.

Liberty City, the pixilated playground where the action of Grand Theft Auto IV occurs, is New York City, and it is not. Like previous installments of the game, which has sold more than 70 million copies in the last decade — abbreviated G.T.A., in the same sanitized way that Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC — this newest edition (released on Tuesday for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems) sets players loose in an environment closely modeled on a real American metropolis, usually at some notorious time in its history.

The environs of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, released in 2002, were inspired by 1980s-era Miami, the pastel-hued setting for crime dramas like “Scarface” and “Miami Vice.” For a 2004 sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the game relocated to three interconnected cities based on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, against a 1990s backdrop of gangsta rap and gang violence.

While moving its story forward to the present day, G.T.A. IV largely restricts itself to a single city — one at the height of its prosperity and during an ebb in crime. The game makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it is designed to look, sound and feel like the city I have lived in for nearly all 32 years of my life.

As many others have already noted, Liberty City is a dead ringer for New York: It’s divided into boroughs with distinct populations and architectural styles; it has most of the same suspension bridges and historic landmarks in the places you’d expect to find them; and its streets are always teeming with traffic and unruly pedestrians.

This game is hardly the first to try to replicate some portion of the New York experience — programmers have been trying to do this for decades. But Grand Theft Auto IV is the most contemporary attempt at this experiment, and may be the most realistic made available to a mass audience.

It’s also a game that has an extra layer of resonance for indigenous New Yorkers. With all the knowledge, confidence, predispositions and prejudices we possess, we’re not only better equipped to detect the many references and insider jokes, we may even come out of the game thinking differently about the real-life New York we’ve always known.

For a native New Yorker, the game is both comfortingly routine and eerily disorienting; you find yourself playing because it is a limitless escape and a consequence-free confinement. Liberty City is like nowhere I’ve ever visited, even as it tries with all its heart and soul to remind me of a place with which I’m already intimately acquainted.

MY initiation into Liberty City came a few days before G.T.A. IV went on sale, in the downtown loft offices of the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games. As I tooled around the electronic streets for a few hours under the supervision of two Rockstar employees, I was sometimes playing the game myself, and sometimes watching as someone else played it for me. I generally played by the rules, but for the purposes of this story, I occasionally made use of a special cheat feature to travel through the game in ways that a typical player cannot.

When that boat from the game’s opening scene finally docked at Liberty City, my character, a rugged-looking immigrant named Niko, found himself on the docks of a Dumbo-like neighborhood, in a borough the game calls Broker.

Indeed, much of Liberty City’s map is made up of direct analogues of real New York neighborhoods and locations, often renamed with winking, sophomoric monikers that could have come from Mad magazine: Manhattan is Algonquin and Queens is Dukes; the giant neon Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City advertises a beverage called Sprunk; and the MetLife skyscraper on Park Avenue has been replaced with the Getalife Building.

Even if I didn’t recognize this computer-generated tribute to Dumbo from its hilly terrain and its array of converted red-brick factories and dilapidated loft spaces, I might have known it from the disoriented feelings gathering in my gut. In real life, I have hardly spent enough time in Dumbo to know my way around it; if I were abandoned there as part of some urban Outward Bound adventure, I probably couldn’t find the nearest subway station without the help of a G.P.S.

On my television screen, I could see the silhouette of Manhattan on the horizon, but I had no idea how to get there. My digital discomfort was just as palpable as it would be if I were experiencing this world in three dimensions.

Following the game’s directions, I drove my character to the neighborhood that is Liberty City’s equivalent of Brighton Beach, where, true to its inspiration, all the shop signs were in Cyrillic lettering, and the few passers-by could be heard, in snatches, speaking Russian and Ukrainian. Niko, my alter ego, did not yet have his own apartment — for starters, he would have to sleep on someone else’s foldout couch in a ratty tenement with walls covered in graffiti inspired (so I am told) by tags that the game’s designers had seen and photographed in Brooklyn.

There was something amusingly authentic about Niko’s predicament. The game’s British creators seemed to know that given the choice, most players would probably run or drive straight into Manhattan — the version of the city they know from their own travels, or any number of films and television shows — and ignore the other boroughs. Here, as in the real world, entry into the heart of the city would have to be won through patience and hard work.

A few steps outside Niko’s temporary lodging, I found myself in Firefly Island, the game’s answer to Coney Island, complete with a giant Ferris wheel and a rickety wooden roller coaster; both attractions were closed and the area was devoid of pedestrians.

The scene was familiar in more ways than one: it reminded me of The Warriors, a video game that Rockstar created just three years ago, based largely on the 1979 Walter Hill movie of the same name. (You know, the one with the crazy-costumed New York gangs fighting their way from the Bronx to Brooklyn — “Can you dig it?” “Come out and plaa-aaay!”)

THAT game was also nominally set in New York, though I never genuinely felt transported there for one moment. That city seemed a grimy parody of someone else’s grimy parody of the city, one that looked as if our town had been struck by a giant mirror ball full of plutonium.

But I wanted to see more than the few chubby, backpack-toting tourists who were ambling around the Boardwalk. So I had my flesh-and-blood chaperons turn on a hidden feature within their version of the game that allowed me to fly anywhere on the G.T.A. map. And I mean, literally, fly: my virtual self disappeared, and the camera began to hover off the ground, swooping and soaring from the Brooklyn Bridge (er, I mean the Broker Bridge) to the Statue of Happiness, which resembles a wide-eyed Hillary Rodham Clinton hoisting a cup of coffee aloft.

Eventually I touched down in a Times Square that was appropriately cluttered with hypnotic neon advertisements for things I could not really buy, and populated, sparsely, with pedestrians who carried on cellphone conversations, sketched portraits of passers-by and played the saxophone in return for loose change. When I walked into a greasy all-night burger joint, a cashier greeted me with an appropriately indifferent “What?” But when I crossed the street against the light upon exiting, cars actually stopped for me (though they honked their horns).

Having been lulled into believing that I really was in New York, I made the mistake of trying to find my own Alphabet City apartment within the game. I walked down to Chinatown — that took only a few seconds — found what I thought was Houston Street, and made my way to where Avenue A (and my apartment) should have been. But after traversing only a block or two of bodegas and backward-hatted hipsters bobbing their heads to the beats of miniature iPods, I somehow found myself at the southern entrance to Grand Central Terminal.

It was as if some unknown natural disaster had recently touched down and attacked only the portions of New York that I cared for most deeply. My city — at least, the parts of it that I thought of as my city — no longer existed.

So I regrouped and tried to find the high-rise apartment building on East 40th Street where I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. I started at the United Nations, made my way west through a perfect simulacrum of Tudor City (with another saxophone player performing in the park) and within a few short steps had gone all the way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Foiled again!

It seemed a perfectly logical and human impulse, to prove to myself that I was somewhere recognizable by finding the one place in it that was most recognizable to me. Yet there was no way that the game could satisfy this impulse: like a comic-book superhero drawn by the legendary artist Jack Kirby, whose characters’ fists grew larger and feet grew smaller as they flew up out of their panels, the proportions of this version of Manhattan were an optical illusion. The parts that everybody would notice were blown up larger than life; the parts that virtually no one would care about were shrunk to nothingness.

Faced with this catastrophic revelation, I turned to a life of crime. I hijacked cars and crashed them into traffic poles; I raced a motorcycle through Central Park and dismounted just before the bike plunged into the lake (my way of letting the boathouse know I won’t be holding my wedding reception there). I jumped off the observation deck of the Empire State Building, just because I could, though I took no pleasure from the sickening scream my character let out, nor the sound of his jacket flapping in the wind, 86 stories to the ground.

At the urging of my human confederates, I even attempted one of Grand Theft Auto’s missions — tasks I was supposed to be completing to progress through the game properly — that required me to shoot my way through a gang of drug smugglers and steal their truckload of contraband. I did as I was instructed, but my heart just wasn’t in it. If I truly believed in Liberty City as a functioning community, how could I open fire on my fellow simulated citizens (even if they shot at me first)? How could I tread all over the social contract in a ripped-off truck full of bootleg prescription medication?

THE answer, of course, is that I couldn’t, and here is where the paradoxical nature of Grand Theft Auto once again rears its head. Unlike the missions, objectives and narrative elements of a traditional video game, which constitute the game itself — the things you’re supposed to be participating in and following along with in order to actually play — these same aspects of G.T.A. are more like sophisticated distractions to keep you from immersing yourself too deeply in its fictional city environment.

Except that the problem with G.T.A. — one that will in no way dissuade me from playing the game until my digits are raw and aching — is that the more fully you are pulled into Liberty City and the more closely you inspect it, the more you are reminded that it isn’t a city at all.

The neighborhoods do not blend into one another so much as sit next to one another. The traffic varies just enough from one area to the next to convince you that a place is inhabited, but eavesdrop on a pedestrian long enough, and you’ll find that he doesn’t eventually go home to his wife and kids — he just keeps walking and talking in a continuous loop.

It’s not the game’s fault that it can’t perfectly replicate the infinite variety of New York. But it sometimes comes so close to pulling off the illusion that it invites you to look for the imperfections.

When my two hours of game time were over, I left the Rockstar Games offices and stepped out into SoHo at midafternoon on one of warmest spring days of the year. The sun worshipers were out in full force, each of them as distinct as snowflakes: guys wearing oversized earphones and baseball caps tilted at every angle, women wearing minimalist skirts and shorts that gave them only the illusion of being clothed. An amorous couple making their way north hardly noticed me as they nearly crosschecked me into a streetside table of $6 sunglasses.

There was so much uniqueness and so much variety that there was no room to move, and I knew I was home.

Grand Theft Auto IV video game tops $500M

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hVLnDu3OLPfL9gVGgA4ybW_EuIsQD90GT84G0

Grand Theft Auto IV video game tops $500M in 1st-week sales
5-7-8

NEW YORK (AP) — Video-game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said Wednesday that sales of its popular and eagerly anticipated title "Grand Theft Auto IV" reached more than $500 million in its first week of availability.

The company said it has sold more than 6 million units globally since the game was released April 29.

The New York-based company said it sold 3.6 million units on its opening day alone, worth a retail value of $310 million worldwide.

"Grand Theft Auto IV" follows the criminal exploits of protagonist Niko Bellic, an immigrant-turned-gangster who travels from Eastern Europe to Liberty City, the game's fictional locale based on New York City. As Bellic, players can hijack cars, earn cash for criminal activities, shoot innocent bystanders and visit strip clubs.

Critics say the extreme violence in "Grand Theft Auto" video games could be harmful to children, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving has complained that the latest version includes the ability to drive while intoxicated.

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.

GTA IV May Have Cost $100 Million to Make

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/gta-iv-may-have-cost-100-million-to-make/

GTA IV May Have Cost $100 Million to Make

Was Grand Theft Auto IV the most expensive game ever made? It sure seems that way, as Rockstar has guessed that it cost around $100 million. Good thing they will make that back and then some.
Posted by James Brightman on Wednesday, April 30, 2008

It's been well documented how costly it can be to make high-end video games for the current consoles, particularly the Xbox 360 and PS3. Game budgets of $20 million - $30 million or more are becoming more frequent as consumers demand bigger and bigger production values. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV certainly has the production values, and the game may have literally been the most expensive ever made.

In a recent Sunday Times report, Leslie Benzies, Rockstar North's president and the producer of GTA IV, said he didn't know exactly how much the game ultimately cost, but he guessed that it was in the range of $100 million. Roughly 1,000 people were involved in putting the whole game together. "It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," he said.

In addition to roughly 1,000 pages of script, acting, voice work, animation, music, and so on, in order to recreate a virtual New York (called Liberty City in the game), Rockstar took over 100,000 photographs on location and even used time-lapse cameras set on rooftops in New York to capture the correct intensity of the rain. This kind of detail alone no doubt shot the budget way up.

Normally, investing this kind of cash into a video game project would be a very risky endeavor, but GTA is one of those surefire hits. Even if it cost over $100 million, Take-Two is expected to rake in $400 million in the first week alone. That's quite a profit.

Mothers against GTAIV's drunk driving

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6190213.html

Mothers against GTAIV's drunk driving
MADD asks ESRB to rerate Rockstar's game Adults Only over inebriation simulation.
By Brendan Sinclair
Apr 30, 2008

Much like its unfortunate series of protagonists, the Grand Theft Auto series seems to be continually under fire. The latest parental interest group to put the game in its crosshairs is Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which commemorated Grand Theft Auto IV's release yesterday with its own official statement decrying the game.

Noting that drunk driving claims nearly 13,500 lives each year, MADD said that it is "extremely disappointed" that the game lets users get virtually drunk and then get behind the wheel of an equally virtual automobile.

"Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke," MADD said. "Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime, and it is also 100 percent preventable."

MADD is asking the Entertainment Software Rating Board to bump Grand Theft Auto IV's rating up to AO for Adults Only from M for Mature. The ESRB's content descriptors for the game currently include "use of drugs and alcohol." The parental group also said that it is asking the game's "manufacturer" (presumably Take-Two Interactive) to consider stopping distribution out of a sense of social responsibility, or out of respect for those who've been hurt or killed by drunk drivers.

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' meets expectations

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9085714

Review: 'Grand Theft Aut IV' ets expectations - vulgar, violent, fun
By Mike Antonucci
Mercury News
04/28/2008

I was able to start playing the game over the weekend, and after my first six-to-seven hours of virtual mayhem and sleazy behavior, this much is clear:

• The game, as expected, revels in being hyper-violent, vulgar and offensive. But the context is sometimes so tongue-in-cheek that players are treated to clever, though extremely crude, parodies of American culture.

One example: Much of the game involves driving around the incredibly detailed environment of Liberty City (sort of an alternate world New York City). When you're in a vehicle, including those you've stolen, you control the game's rich soundtrack by changing stations on the car radio. When you get conservative talk radio, you get a near-brilliant example of sardonic political commentary.

• Most of the hype about the game's cinematic qualities and writing is just that, hype. There is a veneer of character development in the story of an Eastern European, Niko Bellic, who arrives in the United States as a refugee from a war-torn past. But it's hard to accept that anything literary will unfold over the rest of the game, partly because the dialogue is so cliche ridden and partly because the violence is so over-the-top that Bellic can't be taken seriously as a character with any human subtlety.

• The depth and interactivity of the gameplay is extraordinary. The size and complexity of Liberty City - particularly if you have Bellic walk instead of drive - sets up a fascinating virtual experience. Bellic's interactions with other characters, including when he "scored" (audibly but not visually) on his second date with a woman named Michelle, seem to be either trite or brutal. But the choice-and-consequence scenarios, such as using your acquired knowledge of the city to outrun the police, is even more compelling than in previous "Grand Theft Auto" games.

The $60 game, rated Mature (17 and older), is available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. I'm playing the 360 edition and as yet haven't been able to compare it to the PS3 version.

Reviewers are finding as much as 50 to 100 hours of gameplay in the game's single-player mode (before even considering the online multiplayer option). Much depends on each player's skills, as well as how focused a player is about following the story line.

After about six hours of weekend play, which includes watching the non-interactive story segments (called cutscenes), I've completed only 5.58 percent of the game. The game's stat tracker tells me that, as Bellic, I've driven 30.30 miles, walked 5.33 miles, stolen 13 cars, killed 15 people and been shooting with 77 percent accuracy.

Based on clips released on the Web from deeper portions of the game, it's clear that I haven't encountered the most salacious portions. It also seems clear, just from the content so far, that the game represents another milestone in its singular combination of creativity and crudity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Mike Antonucci at mantonucci@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5690.

'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.