Not many of you will have remembered this, but yes, today is the 1st birthday of GTA IV. However, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, I’ve always been a little bit ‘on the fence’ about GTA IV. I appreciate that some like it and some don’t, but I just can’t quite make up my mind either way.
I’m sorry, I can’t keep that up with a straight face.
Who am I kidding? I’m a fan. A huge fan. A massive super giganto-fan. How much of a fan? Perhaps this will show you how much I like this game:
Yep, it’s a real birthday cake baked and decorated entirely by me to celebrate GTA IV’s first birthday. And this is no Photoshop job or me stealing others’ glory via Google Images, this is actually the real thing: a sponge cake with chocolate butter icing covered in real chocolate. (My colleagues will get to eat most of this cake, and who knows, many of them may even survive).
I still remember what I was doing exactly one year ago today, on April 29th 2008. It was a Tuesday, a normal work day – for some – but for me it was the long awaited and once delayed GTA IV day, and I had a day booked off work just to sit and play it to my heart’s content. What me and my friend Matt – who had travelled all the way across London to play it – found was an amazing, beautiful game, brimming with a million details and on a scale that virtually no-one (except Rockstar) had ever tried before.
I was blown away. Little did I realise, though, just how long my amazement would last. I loved the thirty-five hours it took me to complete the single player, and then I peeled off another layer of the GTA onion and discovered the amazing multiplayer modes.That was a year ago, and even now I find new and interesting details in the game.
Two weeks into playing I discovered you could pop the tyres of a rear wheel drive car by wheel-spinning it continuously for a couple of minutes. Eight months into playing I managed to break off the tail off a helicopter and careen wildly through the air with no control – that had never happened to me before, even in hundreds and hundreds of hours of play. One week ago I discovered a bubble gum machine outside of a gas station in the game, and was stunned to find that when you shoot it all of the bubble gum balls burst out of the broken machine and fall to the floor.
When the game was originally delayed, I was annoyed. Now I fully understand why it took longer than planned. Have you ever built a real, breathing city? Was it on time?
Rome Liberty City wasn’t built in a day
For me GTA was already the game that kept on giving, beating even Burnout Revenge for the title of game I’ve spent the most hours on, and then it just got bigger, with The Lost and Damned expansion pack.
Sure, it was set in the same city, and some had wanted more real estate – but in a masterful stroke of genius, it managed to show off parts of the city that I had never seen before, and get across an entirely different feel to the whole place which made the game feel almost new again. And, as some of the other writers and forum members will tell you, it also added a few brilliant new multiplayer modes, Witness Protection, Chopper vs Chopper and Lone Wolf Biker which I personally think are worth the price of entry alone.
And it’s not just me getting some pretty amazing mileage from this game – far from it. Our Ready Up GTA nights on Monday nights have never been so popular, with us having to turn people away at the door even now, after a whole year, which might as well be a decade in the hyper-fast play-em-and-move-on world of videogames.
Happy Birthday GTA IV, and thanks for a great year. I’m sure I’ll still be going back to it for quite some time yet, so there are guaranteed to be many happy returns for me, too.
A few shots of my culinary wizardy…
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