GTA IV Is Today 13 Years Old

On this day, exactly thirteen years ago, Rockstar brought us back to Liberty City alongside the fourth part of the GTA series, the first on the seventh generation of consoles.

GTA 4/Niko Belic

At the beginning of the century, three years apart, we got three GTA series games. San Andreas was followed by a break that lasted four years, and the main reason for such a break was technical – the series was to make the transition to a new generation of consoles. The Rockstar team saw it as an opportunity to advance the physics and animation segments based on the RAGE engine that had its debut title in Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. Two years after that game, on this very day, Grand Theft Auto 4 for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles followed.

GTA 4 brought us back to Liberty City, a virtual version of New York in a more realistic view than ever before. The map was smaller than the previous San Andreas, but there were fewer empty spaces and more buildings to enter, etc.

We played in the role of the immigrant Niko Bellić, a character who is a native of Balkan region. Rockstar never explicitly said where Niko was from, but it is clear that he was born in the former Yugoslavia and that he participated in the war on that territory. According to a speech in the game, it can be concluded that Niko comes from Serbia. In any case, Niko came to Liberty City with his cousin Roman, who promised him a villa and a fortune. However, it turned out that the path to this wealth for Niko Belić is very thorny and difficult.

GTA 4 was played for the most part as well as previous games in the series. The difference was that the dumping was more based on the use of cover, and opportunities to develop character skills like in San Andreas were omitted. The game instead received a number of side activities and opportunities. No one could have gone bowling, a strip club and stuff. He could get behind the wheel drunk, but also surf the internet in search of business opportunities.

Niko negotiated a good part of the interactions using a cell phone that was a novelty for the GTA series. With the help of mobile phones, there was also a network multiplayer in which races, deathmach modes, etc. could be played.

GTA 4 was one of the biggest games of the last decade. More than a thousand people worked on it and the production itself reportedly cost over 100 million US dollars. The effort paid off because the game only made five times that much in the first week of sales. The PC version came half a year later, and by 2013 GTA 4 had played more than 25 million players.

A total of two extensions were launched for the game, which were later released for sale and separately as Episodes From Liberty City. We've never seen Niko Belić's adventures in remastered release, but the Xbox 360 version became compatible with the Xbox One console two years ago and runs on Xbox Series X and S consoles at 60 frames per second.