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 t
