The setting of every GTA game has been crucial in dictating the tone and the mood of the game experience -- why did you decide to base the game in Liberty City for GTA IV?
Aaron Garbut: Liberty City was our first attempt at a fully realized 3D city many years ago, at the time simply making an open world that can be interacted with in so many ways was a challenge. We had a lot to learn and we were making it all up as we went. I think [the original] Liberty City was a great world to play about in and it was a great experience for us to make, but it wasn't New York. While loosely based on New York it had elements of many other cities and was as much a generic American city with a Manhattan-esque skyline in the middle.
The city's bridges are closed down due to terrorist threats at the start of GTA IV.Rockstar is based in New York and over the years many of us have been over from Edinburgh numerous times. We all knew what an amazing, diverse, vibrant, cinematic city it is. And the guys in the New York office lived that every day. I think because we really felt that we had never properly based one of our GTA cities on New York it seemed like now would be a good time to do that. And since we were hoping to push the detail, variety and life, for lack of a better word, to such a degree it seemed that basing the game in a city so synonymous with these things was a great fit.
In GTA IV, Liberty City is much closer to New York than it was in GTA III. What prompted the decision to go for a more faithful representation?
"I think [the original] Liberty City was a great world to play about in and it was a great experience for us to make, but it wasn't New York. While loosely based on New York it had elements of many other cities and was as much a generic American city with a Manhattan-esque skyline in the middle."
Garbut: We've moved slowly in that direction through each Grand Theft Auto. In GTA III, Liberty City was very much its own place. It obviously had elements of New York along with other cities but there were no landmarks and nothing deliberately recognizable. In Vice City, and then more so in San Andreas, we started to take real landmarks and mix them in to our versions of the city. I think this is just us continuing down that path we had already started on. It's one of the reasons we felt comfortable redoing Liberty City. We spend years of our lives making these worlds we don't want to retread old ground and "up-res" something we had already done, that would be soul destroying. By going back to basics, throwing away the original Liberty City and building an entirely new city based on New York we were able to keep it fresh for ourselves and by extension for the people that will play it.
Apart from the name, was anything retained from the old version of Liberty City or did you start fresh?
Garbut: There's nothing that links them other than name and general feel. We started from scratch. Looking to New York itself as a basis and reference point, not to our old work. There might be a few references to GTAIII our artists have slipped in there but that's all they are, it's a completely reinvented, fresh take on Liberty City as New York, rather than Liberty City as an American metropolis. It's important to stress though that we never limited ourselves in keeping faithful to the real city. We treated Liberty as a separate place just as we had in the past. It's a distilled, exaggerated New York, a caricature of a city and not a brick for brick recreation. We exaggerated the best and worst bits, twisted the real city to suit our needs and left out whatever we felt wasn't necessary.
Subject: Some stuff I found about the new Liberty City 
Thu Apr 24, 2008 11:09 pm
