Before I Knew New York, I Knew Liberty City: A Retrospective on GTA IV's Setting

Grand Theft Auto IV is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, April 29, 2023. Below, a New Yorker recalls how Rockstar’s imaginary version of Manhattan helped him connect with his home.

Ask anyone I’ve ever shown around New York and they’d tell you that I refer to myself as “the worst New Yorker.” That’s because, for the longest time in my life, I just didn’t know it. I knew the city as a skyline I could see from my window and maps I could reference online, but I rarely went out and explored my own home. I couldn’t tell you up from down on the Manhattan grid and I certainly couldn’t point you to any specific locale. Early in life, this flaw was easy to chalk up to having a busy immigrant family that couldn’t afford to take me out as a kid. Later in life, though, when opportunities arose as a teenager, it was social anxieties and unfortunately learned behavior that kept me indoors and playing games instead. And so for the longest time in my life, I had no intimate knowledge of or connection to the only place I’ve ever called home. That was, at least, until Grand Theft Auto IV came into my life.

15 years ago, GTA IV upended my relationship with New York City by providing me with one. Before I knew the sights and sounds of my own home, I knew Liberty City like the back of my hand. Around the time of GTA IV’s launch, Rockstar went all in on increasingly detailed and realistic simulations of people and places. To its credit, GTA IV felt like enough of a simulacrum of New York (for the time) that I treated it as a substitute for the real thing. So, yes, reader, I first mapped out my home of New York City via Liberty City. In turn, I learned to love a place I had never given a proper shot.

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