American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

All images are screen grabs of background detail from GTAIV.

Aaron Garbut helped build a city, a big city, in three years. It’s filled with people, shops, cars, buses, crime, tragedy, death and violence. It would take you hours to walk all the way around it. Days and weeks to go down every street and look in every window, check out every alleyway, climb every staircase.

You could take a bus in this city, if you wanted to. But why would you want to, when you can take any car you think will be fun to drive, and smash, and jump, and somasualt, and flip through explosions. You like a car, you just open the door, drag out the driver, get in and drive away. Fast. As fast as you want. If you don’t like the look of someone you can pull over and kill them. Then kill the paramedics who come to clean up your carnage. Or you can walk, take your time, enjoy the atmosphere, stroll through the busy and quiet neighbourhoods.

The city is Liberty City.

In the next few days, millions of people across the planet will the streets of that city and start exploring. Tens of millions more will follow within a few months.

Aaron Garbut is art director for Rockstar, the makers of Grand Theft Auto IV. Garbutt explains what it’s like to build, and more importantly, to detail a city as big, as dense, and as alive as Liberty City :

“We have a broad cross-section of backgrounds on the art team, architects among them. But every artist has a great eye for both detail and the bigger picture. The same artists model the buildings, lay out the city and place the props. Everyone on the team has dedicated a large part of their lives over the past three years to create as detailed a city as possible, and every one of them has taken a great deal of pride in making their own part of the game as unique, crafted and beautiful as they could.

“…we flew the entire team out to spend some time in New York at the start of the project…,we take the research very seriously and I think we all have numerous stories of the weird or scary things that we end up seeing and experiencing or the bizarre places we end up.

“We took around a quarter of a million photos and a silly amount of video footage. We spent another year or so working up the city based on this research then about a year or so ago we flew a smaller group across for more research. We also had a full time research team based in New York to handle our numerous little requests for particular details – anything from ethnic breakdowns of particular areas to photos of certain interior types or videos of traffic patterns.

“I have 20 DVDs of traffic flows at random junctions at various times of the day sitting on my desk here as an example, and a few hours of footage of a night in a Russian supper club. They also sent across various reports, census data, even information on drainage, sewage, electrical and other infrastructure.

I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It’s too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It’s emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making.

“We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You’ll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you’ll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area.

There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands…

I love the cohesiveness of the entire experience. It feels to me like a real place. The “living, breathing city” phrase gets bandied about a lot, but I think this feels more vibrant and alive than anything I’ve experienced in a game.

When you have that feeling, and you are standing on top of a skyscraper with the world sprawled out beneath you and you know you can climb down and visit every inch that you can see and that it will all feel as vibrant, varied and detailed as the area you are in, I think that’s pretty special.

Read The Full Interview Here

Hollywood is cringing at the expected loss of tens of millions of dollars at cinemas all over the United States, plus Europe, China, Japan, Australia, Canada, and everywhere bought and bootlegged games keep youth away from cinemas, thanks to the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

The game is expected to do such extraordinary business ($200 million in sales in three or four days?) that major movie release dates are now being quietly re-scheduled so as not to clash with the release of other big game titles this year, and every year from now on. Hollywood film and TV audiences have been shearing away to video games for years now, and it’s starting to impact on the film industry. Most who pushed away their remotes and picked up a control pad will never go back to watching TV and hitting cinemas like they once did.

This weekend, next weekend, millions of people who would normally be buying a few tickets to the cinema will be, instead, in Liberty City, where you don’t even have to pay for fuel, let alone wallet-emptying popcorn and drinks.

Hollywood doesn’t just lose those millions of suddenly non-cinema going people for one weekend. Millions will get lost in Liberty City, that city in another reality, for three or four or more weekends.

And there will be others who will dedicate months to exploring every inch, driving every car, walking every street, jumping every truck, firing every weapon, completing every mission.

“We haven’t seen you for two months Doug, where the hell have you been?”

“I’ve been in Liberty City. On business. I like it there. You can do anything you want, and you never have to die.”