10 More Facts About Grand Theft Auto IV's Development

you know it seemed like you guys really liked it the last time I did one of these videos so after a little Hiatus you're finally getting a sequel here's 10 more facts about the development of Grand Theft Auto 4 let's jump right into it with fact number one why is the game suddenly the fourth one even though like five games came between that and the third one might seem weird at first I mean they did GTA 1 2 in three then the next one after three was Vice City then San Andreas then two PSP games and only after all of that did we get four when technically it's like the eighth game so what gives well while they got into the habit of assigning the game a subtitle based on the setting they decide to assign this one with the Roman numeral 4 to represent the leap and technology that they were making within production the new technology behind it was a huge deal when it was revealed and when it came out it looked and felt so much different than anything that Rockstar had done prior to it and seeing is how the people making the game were obviously aware of this from the get-go they decided that giving it a brand new number for a title was the best way to represent the fact that this was going to be a step in a new and modern direction for the franchise but developing games is no small task and I bet you didn't know our second fact about a thousand people were responsible for getting this game finished and in a playable State and that in itself was not easy they were working with a brand new engine and the only other game that was made in that engine was basically a remake make of pong so they really had their work cut out for them with having to build a huge and detailed open world game out of it often times the developers were pulling 12-hour shifts and while none of the articles I read mentioned this because it was the 2000s it wouldn't surprise me at all if more than a few people were working seven days a week on this game so if you enjoyed playing it just remember the amount of hard work that was put into it for the sake of your enjoyment remember game development is not easy you have to think about the amount of work that was put into the game's playable World itself which leads us to the third fact which is about the order that they design the map and the story in when they're making an open world game that has a story mode to it they need to make sure that the story that they come up with is going to properly utilize the playable area to do this Rockstar first designed the map and then they came up with the story missions after now I'm sure that a few in-game locations were changed later on in development to work around what might be required to be there for the story say a certain building or an interior of some kind that they have to feature but overall the map was worked on first and foremost which makes sense they wanted to have a solid location down first as a foundation for them to work with afterwards and it would seem as though no story work was done until they had the map down kind of makes me wonder how would the story have turned out if they had stuck with the original idea of setting the game across three states what reason would Nico have to go to Connecticut or Niagara Falls for that matter other than to ride a speed boat off of it for fun fact number four how did they decide on what places in the New York area to include in the game the staff at Rockstar all got to participate in figuring out what areas from real life were going to be recreated they would regularly hold votes on what to include and what to ditch so if you live in New York City or Northern New Jersey and you're wondering why your neighborhood or town isn't in the game it's probably because it got voted out because somebody decided that Bay Ridge or go Park or East Orange just didn't need to be in the game Staten Island was a no-go from the start too apologies to any Staten Islanders out there evidently they thought that everything Staten Island has is already in New Jersey and they decided it was worth featuring Jersey more fact number five now even though a lot of Rockstar staff worked in New York not everybody who worked on the game lived there a good majority of the Thousand or so developers were in Scotland I mentioned in the last video how they had TV in their Edinburgh studio with footage of New York playing on a loop so that the developers could more accurately get a sense of how things should look and feel in the game but many still got a more up close view two research trips were made to New York in order to gain more insight on the location while making the game some of the developers even got to ride along with New York City police officers the first trip was made in March of 2005 still quite early in the game's development the second trip would have been made around 2007 likely in the earlier part of the year but still more than halfway through development at that time they probably thought the game was still going to be out later that same Year by the way I think some of the reference photos that they took ended up in the files of the game some look like they were used as textures outside of buildings others I'm not so sure about maybe they were part of the reflections on certain buildings but even going to New York and having cops take them on a tour wasn't the only way that they educated themselves on how to design Liberty City for fact number six it turns out that a lot of staff at Rockstar hit the books to do even more research on the inner workings of the city they read books on Urban infrastructure including the Subways sewers and garbage collection just to get an idea of how a city works and what critical infrastructure is needed and how that critical infrastructure is designed they also studied City Block layouts and Architectural plans for apartments it's actually really impressive how much effort went into designing Liberty City they wanted things to look and feel as realistic as it could for the Game World when it comes from how the subway tunnels look to how apartments are laid out to how the entire city itself is laid out it's kind of funny when you realize that this is the same Studio that made the second island in Vice City where there's a Runway bent at an angle and a ton of buildings are just plonked down everywhere with no Rhyme or Reason I mean look at this you got apartments in the middle of a back alley a building that has no door and a high-rise downtown that doesn't even have Street access but I guess that's what happens when you make an open world game in record time they're not going to nail everything as awesome as Vice City was I'm not knocking the game but the map design was a little funky in hindsight but it just goes to show how far they advanced in just a few years and I think they knew after that not to rush map design let's talk about something else now with fact number seven this has more to do with the story in the main character evidently the reason that they did a story based around an immigrant from Eastern Europe is because they wanted to tell a different kind of tale than what you would typically seen in crime fiction that's said in New York most of the time back then when people would think of New York criminals they'd either think of the Italian mafia or street gangs Rockstar even said themselves that with the amount of movies and TV shows set in New York that were about the mafia they felt that the entire thing had become played out by the time they were writing this game and they wanted to do something entirely different than what people would have expected they didn't just want to make a game adaptation of The Sopranos as awesome as that would have been and I'm sure they would have done a fantastic job compared to what we got with the actual Sopranos game whatever happened there so they came up with Nico Bellic a former soldier from Serbia that inadvertently falls into a life of crime he still interacts with the mafia and street gangs in Liberty City but he's more of a contract worker instead of actually belonging to any organization as a full member the writers also reached out to criminal experts in order to help them out with coming up with these characters most likely to flesh out their backgrounds and make their motivations a little bit more realistic Maybe fact number eight if you ever failed a mission in GTA 4 you might have noticed a couple of things for one there's no such thing as checkpoints because this is a game from 2008 so you better get used to driving back and forth a lot of you screw up but during these drives we often get to hear dialogue between the characters if someone is riding along with you most of these drives have at least two sets of dialogue but you'll only hear the second set of dialogue if you failed the mission the first time and have to repeat it AIA control was management plan you [ __ ] guessed it it's an ancelot operation you hang out in some strange places first you take me to a fish market to now a waste plant they did this because they knew that if people failed a mission they didn't want to have the entire thing to feel like Groundhog Day where the same script is repeating over and over again with just slight variations with the main character's actions so rather than doing that they decided to treat you to a brand new conversation between the characters it's kind of cool even though it almost ins incentivizes you to fail but you don't have to do that if you want to hear all the possible dialogue that's in the game I'd highly recommend checking out the all possibilities series by whatever 57010 it's actually really interesting to watch and if you're a fan of this game story and you like these characters you're going to get to hear a lot of dialogue that you may not have even heard before let's go into fact number nine and talk about the radio now it turns out it was really hard to license a lot of the songs that we hear in the game sound track supervisor Ivan pavlovich talked about this in an interview with MTV from May of 2008 Rockstar had to reach out to over 2,000 people to obtain the publishing rights for all of the songs featured on the soundtrack up to $10,000 was spent per song and there's 214 songs total in the game so yeah a good chunk of change was spent on licensing and getting some of these songs turned out to be nothing short of a real pain in the rear end especially walk the Night by the scat Brothers which can be heard on k19 evidently they had to hire a private investigator to find the surviving relatives of the members of this band just to be able to get their permission to feature that song and I don't even know what they did to license the music on vladas stock FM but whatever they did it obviously did not turn out so well by the time the 10th anniversary of the game rolled out because they had to remove every single song except for the one that was made for the game I guess you can consider that a bonus fact if you play the game today and you listen to vladas stock FM it is not not going to be the same playlist that we had in 2008 at the risk of sounding like one of those guys that says everything in the past was better honestly I do think that the original soundtrack was better I've never even listened to Russian music before or after but they managed to pick really catchy songs back then I got to say and finally let's go on to our last fact for the video the game was originally meant to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive industry Insider Michael paor had an interview with Euro gamer back in 2010 according to to him originally there were plans for GTA 4 to be exclusive on the PS3 or at the very least it would have been a timed exclusive kind of like how the original trilogy was they all came out first on the PS2 and then it took about a year or two after for them to come out on Xbox and PC but according to pactor Microsoft apparently paid Rockstar and take 2 $75 million in order to make it non-exclusive and a big part of this deal included the two DLC Packs being exclusive to Xbox for a period of time it's kind of crazy to think about the fact that if this dude was for real GTA 4 could have been a PS3 game only or at the very least it would have been known for being a PS3 game more than anything it obviously would have been built for that system in mind first and foremost but if it remained an exclusive I have a feeling that it would end up like Metal Gear Solid 4 where it's just stuck on that platform completely so in away I guess I'm really glad that that didn't happen I never had a PS3 anyway so yeah if you want to know more more I actually did a whole video about this a few years ago so be sure to check that out and that concludes this video on 10 more facts about GTA4 hope you found them all interesting thank you for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Badger Goodger

Views: 66,281

Keywords: Grand Theft Auto IV, GTA IV, GTA, Development, Production, 2004, 2008, beta, pre-release, Rockstar Games, 10 facts

Id: SBEnTwFt4j0

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2024