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Heli Tours in Liberty City

Heli Tours (GTA IV) from VIP3Rz on Vimeo.

If you didn't have the 500 or so free hours necessary to explore the virtual architecture of the NYC doppelganger "Liberty City", you'll be pleased to know there's a quicker way to do it: by helicopter.

Watch the video of a virtual helicopter tour of the artfully rendered version of Manhattan where you can see the Chrysler's building spire from above.

Helicopter tours are part of the "Sightseer" achievement and presented in the form of a report from "Liberty City Sexy Action News". The experience really helps show off the expansiveness of Liberty City.

This one gives an alternative view and has a surprise ending!

Freefall (GTA IV) from VIP3Rz on Vimeo.

GTA: the numbers

As I continue my research into place and GTA continues I thought it would be interesting to aggregate and share some of the numbers. Financial and business metrics are easy to come by. Reliable statistical and numerical data on engagement and depth need to be sought out.

GTA Business / Financial Impact

• Take Two said that as of May 31, it has sold 11 million GTA IV units to retailers and around 8.5 million units to consumers [Next Gen]
• GTA IV released on April 29 for Xbox 360 and PS3 and sold 6 million units globally in its first week [Next Gen]
• GTA IV generated over $500 million at retail in it's first week [Next Gen]
• Take Two estimated more than 8.5m copies of 'GTA 4' were sold by the end of May [Next Gen]
  
• GTA: San Andreas from 2004 is the top-selling game in the U.S of all time with 9.43 million units sold [NextGen]
• The GTA franchise shows up on the top 10 selling games of all time three times [NextGen]
• The release of 'Grand Theft Auto 4' sent US sales of gaming hardware and software equipment up 47% in Apr, compared to the same month in 2007 [NPD]

Engagement

• In the first week, more than 2.3 million people played Grand Theft Auto IV on Xbox LIVE [Gamescore]
• Grand Theft Auto IV set a new record for time played, with the average gamer spending more than four hours playing the game on LIVE in the first week alone [Gamescore]

Liberty City

• In terms of pure landmass its Liberty City in GTA IV is roughly three times as big as the version in GTA III [GTA]
• Liberty City in GTA IV took three years to design and build [GTA]
• During the research phase of GTA IV the production team took around a quarter of a million photos of NYC [GTA]
• Every street in GTAIV has a name [GTA]

The Geography of Grand Thef Auto

Every spare moment since April 29th has been spent playing and thinking about GTA IV in anticipation of putting together a paper on the geography of Grand Theft Auto.

The latest instalment takes you back to Liberty City boasting an increased level of realism; so much so in fact that the design fanaticism involved in it's creation is already legendary.

Despite this apparent increase in credibility, these environments are not re-creations of real urban locales, but rather reixed, hybridized cities fashioned from popular culture's myths around American geography.

With GTA being one of the moist culturally significant video game franchises in history it begs some serious questions about whether or not the tools and philosophies we've developed for decoding real cities and space are applicable. Are there new ways of looking at 'half-real' spaces that will help us better understand the cultural impact of Liberty City and perhaps games more generally.

Still early days but I'm currently reading the following:

• Nate Garrelts' The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto (McFarland, 2006)
• Jesper Juul's Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (MIT Press, 2005)
• David J. Leonard's article Not a Hater, Just Keepin' It Real (Games and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, (2006)
• Soraya Murray's High Art/Low Life: The Art of Playing Grand Theft Auto (PAJ, Journal of Performance and Art, May 2005)
• Zimmerman and Salen's The Game Design Reader (MIT Press 2006)
• Le Gates and Stout's The City Reader (Routledge 2007)
• Henry Jenkins on Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?
• Kurt Squire's From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience

Any other suggestions or recommendations would be welcome.