We go for that full range of classic New York archetypes. After 30 seconds of this guy’s life, we both thought - he’s brilliant! you meet freaky characters, and then you can do little random interactive things with them. Sam and I were walking home and we just met this absolutely crazy homeless guy, who was telling us how he recently killed someone, and drifted into insanity. I think one of the things we try to capture in the game is that New York is the world leader in walking around meeting insane people. 80,000 lines of dialogue, it’s ridiculous.Ĭan you give us an example of something in the game we wouldn’t notice right away? Here’s a simple example: pedestrians, the guys that walk around, it’s a massive-scale production to do that. We’re doing things in this that other people would think is insane. It seemed we’d set a high bar in the past and wanted to take it to a new place, where you feel less like a video game and more like this weird digital fantasy world. The can go up and speak to each other now, so we got them speaking Russian, Spanish, Chinese. We had guys looking at Census data this part of Queens should be more Chinese. We had people out photographing on rooftops on time-lapse cameras so we could get the lighting as close as we can. It’s not just getting the roads laid out sensibly, which we do, or picking all the landmarks - it’s also the more subtle details of dirt, or lighting.

When it comes to designing New York, where do you even start? With the map? We felt you could make a good game and have it be about something we could actually relate to. They’re gonna be about themes that interest us whatever the medium, instead of the weird, special video game–only themes that too many people make - orcs and elves, or monsters, or space.

They’re going to have the production values of movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. We’re hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. So the gaming industry has changed a lot since the last GTA … Dan Houser, Vice President of Rockstar Games and co-writer of GTA IV, spoke to Vulture about building a nuttier, dirtier Gotham. This time, the action is set in Liberty City, a living, breathing replica of New York. As we’re sure you’re aware, this week sees the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, the highly anticipated latest iteration of the popular violence-based, sandbox-style video game series.

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