GRAND THEFT AUTO IV
The Grand Theft Auto series has sold 70 million copies worldwide and racked up
as many tabloid inches as Heather Mills. ShortList’s Matt Hill delves behind the
headlines for an inside look at the latest chapter in the gaming phenomenon
ll employers, take note of
the date ‘29 April’. For this
is the day that men of all
ages, all over the world,
will be ‘pulling sickies’,
organising ‘out of office
meetings’ or simply going AWOL with a
loaded weapon or two on an away day in
Liberty City. But you won’t find the city in any
Lonely Planet guide – it’s the fictionalised,
crime-ridden recreation of New York that is
the setting for developer Rockstar Games’
Grand Theft Auto IV. There will be blood.
There will also be lots and lots of cash.
Originally scheduled for release last
October, and three and a half years in the
making, it is the most eagerly awaited video
game in history. Online forums currently pore
over every last scrap of leaked info, their
anticipation stoked by a clever viral marketing
campaign. Entertainment retailer Play.com
sold out of its pre-order allocation weeks ago,
while US financial analyst Wedbush Morgan
is predicting GTA IV will shift six-million copies
worldwide in its first week alone. Which, at
an estimated average international price of
£35 a pop, would make a cool £210m in seven
A
It took over two years
to turn a reconstructed
New York map…
28 / www.ShortList.com
days. When you consider that the biggest
US box-office opening weekend of 2008 so
far has been Horton Hears A Who’s $45m
(£22.8m), you can see why video games – in
both sales and production budgets – are
quickly becoming the new cinema.
“Creatively, gaming is in a really great
place,” Dan Houser, vice-president of creative
at Rockstar Games, tells ShortList at his
west-London office. “It’s starting to challenge
the scope of movies and the storytelling of
“GTA IV is a new start. We had to make
sure no one thought, ‘I could have
played this on my old machine’”
other media because of the leaps in
technology and the fact that it’s interactive.
With movies it’s just an agreed structure;
in games you always have to innovate.”
Thirty-four-year-old Dan is the Londonborn
brother of Rockstar president Sam
Houser, 36. They founded their fledgling
organisation with friend Terry Donovan under
…into GTA IV’s
fully fleshed-out
Liberty City
the wing of gaming company Take-Two
Interactive in 1998, from the remnants of
record label BMG’s gaming division. The
original Grand Theft Auto had already made
waves upon its release on PC and the original
PlayStation, its bird’s eye-view car-jacking
simulation selling over a million. But it wasn’t
until the now Rockstar-helmed Grand Theft
Auto III turned its world into three dimensions
on the PS2 in 2001 – shifting 14.5 million
copies in the process – that things ignited.
GTA III, and its later evolutions GTA: Vice
City (2002) and GTA: San Andreas (2004),
were a feast for culturally literate males,
paying homage to classic gangster films
and cop shows such as Scarface and Miami
Vice through their stylised visuals, expertly
selected soundtracks and, of course, their
no-holds-barred brew of car crashes and gun
The new Euphoria physics
engine means if you get shot,
your character visibly feels it
violence. It was something never seen
before: an intelligent and funny open-world
environment that you could explore at your
own pace; a title that adults – and, crucially,
non-gamers – could relate to, a ‘star in your
own movie’ experience that riffed off
mainstream pop culture rather than the geeky
connotations of computer games. It made
an impact that Rockstar is keen to repeat.
IT’S ALL IN THE DETAIL
“Grand Theft Auto IV will change the way
people think about video games,” says
Houser. “The shift from Part 2 to Part 3
was visually obvious with the upgrade to
3D, and Vice City and San Andreas were
a continuation of that world. But this is a line
in the sand, a new start. Consumers are so
savvy and easily bored. We had to make sure
no one thought, ‘It’s just like the previous one,
I could have played this on my old machine.’”
But how exactly do you go about
reinventing one of the most successful
gaming series in history, especially
when you’ve used up all your allotted
dimensions already?
“The fourth dimension is detail,” says
Houser. “There are about 40 new things in
GTA IV, from the new motion physics of the
main character to the firearm targeting to the
interaction with pedestrians. The overall goal
was to make the world feel more alive. Every
little detail was researched, analysed and
broken down. We spoke to cops about
how they behave, we spoke to guys who
handle guns so they look proper and not
too ‘Hollywood’, we even had fashion
To view a Ceros magazine you need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser and have the flash player 8 or higher installed. To install the latest flash player, click the icon above, install the flash plugin and then click here to refresh this page.