A Place

By: Damon Brown
Date: Wednesday, May 02, 2007

The war on the next Grand Theft Auto has already begun. Big Apple politicians aren’t happy with the setting of Grand Theft Auto IV. The controversy is based on the first and only GTA IV trailer, a 30-second cutscene depicting an Eastern European immigrant wandering around a New York-based city mumbling about his previous life selling people and the desire to make himself better. Relative to the amount of hype surrounding it, the trailer left gamers – well, me – frustrated by the lack of information, gameplay and general insight given for a game coming out later this year. However, using their special gift of clairvoyance, politicians were able to parser exactly what Rockstar intended to do with the game this fall. “Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland,” City Councilman Peter Vallone said to the New York Daily News. An insightful parallel, if Anaheim was in space. This would presumably make Mickey Mouse Master Chief.

To my knowledge, this is the first time a city has gotten up in arms about its depiction in a video game. A few years ago, recreating cities in a video game was actually a bigger trend (or, depending on your perspective, epidemic) than it is today. During one particular video game conference, approximately a day and a half of my three day experience was spent listening to public relations people tell me how long the development team spent filming, recording and documenting a particular city. “Our boys spent five years in London to document such and such. It is accurate within a square inch.” The results, ranging from True Crime: Streets of L.A. to The Getaway, were generally awful – not exactly a surprise when 85 percent of the total budget goes to measuring each stone in Big Ben.

What is shocking is that we haven’t had politicians pipe up about this before, something that could be a sign of video game’s rise in ranks – at least on the perceived influence hierarchy. The last memorable controversy regarding New York’s depiction was almost a decade ago when a string of Hollywood movies, such as Independence Day, Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow, showed the city under water, frozen solid or burning under cinders. New Yorker artists (and perhaps even some glib politicians) claimed Southern Californians were jealous of the city’s worldliness, which flamed Hollywood’s sudden desire to destroy their great city onscreen. Of course, this is laughable. First, most Angelinos wouldn’t be jealous of a city that required walking everywhere. Second, there are thousands of New Yorkers who want to destroy New York. Third, and most importantly, destroying New York in a film symbolizes the fall of American, if not international, culture, at least to the average egocentric patriot. A UFO melting the Empire State Building is movie shorthand for “These green men aren’t playing.” Perhaps New Yorkers should be flattered that their five boroughs represent something symbolic and utterly irreplaceable in our culture. Regardless of intention, the brouhaha over GTA IV shows how the video game is ascending to the level of other art forms.

The humorous twist, as any long-time “sandbox”/open-ended gamer would realize, is New York has been depicted in video games perhaps more often than any other real city. Recently re-released on the Wii and PS3, the Godfather game can be navigated using a map of Manhattan. The much-maligned True Crime: Streets of N.Y., also originally released in 2005, used real world-accurate boroughs as its setting. (In fact, The New Yorker magazine took real New York cabbies and asked them to test it for accuracy with expected hilarity. The short piece is at <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/19/051219ta_talk_radosh>). And of course Grand Theft Auto III, which many people consider to be the original GTA, took place in Liberty City, a New York City clone complete with a Lincoln Tunnel and a Jersey shoreline. It’s like dense politicians suddenly woke up and realized, a decade too late, that their city was being digitally hazed.

Beyond measuring our current politic, the New York fussing shows us the new level of attention video games have acquired. This can be partially blamed on technology. As with sexuality or violence, the newest game systems give us emotive faces, realistic bodies and in-depth environments. Released in 2001, Grand Theft Auto III had virtually blank heads, awkward bodies and squared-off skyscrapers. One scene in GTA IV shows the protagonist crossing a breathtaking Brooklyn Bridge, seagulls flying and water splashing, as well as the imposing Met Life building, which now reads “Get A Life,” and visually-accurate, gibberish-spewing NYSE tickers wrapping around Times Square storefronts.

It’s hard to take liberties with Liberty City when you’re working with such a powerful tool and, in Rockstar Games’ case, it didn’t have much of a choice but to go after New York. The company has been in the public eye more for its shady stock trading practices than its salacious content. Having a grimy criminal wandering around a picture-perfect New York was bound to garner some “positive” controversy and press towards its most-prized product. Gamers, picky group that we are, wouldn’t accept anything less than a digitally accurate representation of whatever city the next Grand Theft Auto would be set in.

Finally, despite the millions Rockstar Games has spent creating a respectable New York clone, it may actually be cheaper than creating a city from scratch. Big cities have complex economies, specialized accents and physical architecture based on centuries of influence. Making a fake metropolitan area as interesting and compelling as New York may require almost as much time as making the modern city itself. Picking the ripe apple may not have only given Rockstar Games much needed attention, but saved them a year or two of development time and money.

Mayor Bloomberg and other New York politicians complaining about the depiction of their city seem to be missing the point: they have a world worth parodying, one that a premier video game developers believes people will spend $70 or so to experience. Grand Theft Auto IV: Boise City Stories just wouldn’t be as exciting.


Damon Brown writes about technology, sex and music, and is author of the upcoming Pocket Idiot’s Guide to the iPhone. Read his blog at www.damonbrown.net.