“The golden twilight of Western civilization” – Grand Theft Auto IV

**Grand Theft Auto IV** (Rockstar, Xbox 360, 2008)

On release, Grand Theft Auto IV sold nearly a million copies in the UK in five days, making it the fastest-selling game here ever. That was no surprise. It took the record from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which managed that without releasing on more than one console or having the added selling point of working with a hardware upgrade since the previous games. It was destined to be a massive blockbuster almost by definition. That gave Rockstar a lot of freedom in what to do with it, besides the obvious of making it more detailed. Where they chose to go would help set the direction for many blockbusters to follow.

The expansive life simulation aspects of San Andreas left them without so much space to go further still, and they largely just swapped those for a different set of experiences. The map didn’t get bigger either, but there is an incredible level of detail within it, and a nearly never-ending supply of things to do. New types of activities – deliveries, car thefts, tracking down people from hacking into the police database – are neatly introduced through missions and then left up to you to follow, without any of the forced points-collecting of Saints Row. But instead of expansion, it’s a renewed focus on the core of the experience which comes through.

That means plenty of little tweaks and improvements. Aiming and taking cover is built up a lot more, resulting in combat which is a lot more considered and a lot less random. You get a helpful mobile phone for arranging your social links, and the mission-restarting magic taxi of the PSP games is re-invented as a magic text. The magic text both drops you into the thick of the mission in a more helpful way and makes for a more natural fit. Not everything works perfectly, but sometimes unpredictability is part of the fun. I was amused that when I was exploring a mini golf course as part of a first date and accidentally stepped into one of the waterways going through it, my date plunged straight in after me without comment.

The visual look of the game finds a nice balance as far as realism and the move to high definition goes too, evening out its level of visual detail via a slight fuzzy haze. There are no more spectacular neon sunsets, but washes of soft golden light over everything make for their own, less showy beauty.

The big change along with that series of small changes is an increased ambition in storytelling. This had been slowly building across previous games anyway, but is made more stark in going back to Liberty City, the site of Grand Theft Auto III and its barebones narrative in which to plug jokes and references. Grand Theft Auto IV has plenty of both too, and a cast with its own share of laughable grotesques, but there is a lot more to it, starting with its main character actually having some kind of character.

Niko Bellic has just reached the US from an unnamed “corner of Eastern Europe” which by implication is clearly Serbia or Croatia, inspired by his cousin feeding him “the best line in bullshit you ever heard”. He is stubborn and taciturn and not a massive departure in personality, but the game’s story actually explores the reasons and consequences. Namely, he has both trauma and unfinished business from fighting in a war, and doesn’t really know how to be anything but a dispassionate killing machine.

That helps the typical Grand Theft Auto progression of the story, and its expansion across the city, to feel more driven by narrative and less by game structural demands than predecessors. Beyond that, there is a very effective thematic throughline to the cycles of missions and their givers. The story starts off with Niko’s cousin Roman in debt, and suffering all kinds of indignities as a result. Niko steps in to help with this at several levels over the course of the story, generally by doing jobs for the person responsible, then becoming all too effective as a killer and taking out one person too far. Often the one he’s been taking orders from. The result is always to land them in ever bigger and more dangerous forms of debt.

The way that the starting point and Niko’s character add up to the inevitable throughout is brutally effective storytelling. More than that, with this being early 2008, the credit crunch was in full swing and for Grand Theft Auto IV to cast predatory debt as the biggest bad guy was a move with a lot of resonance even before the perspective of playing it after things got worse still. Turn on the TV and you hear updates from a declining stock market; key scenes in the plot play out in front of an abandoned carnival bought out by big business. Its satire is not so much the lurid heightened reality of previous games as a slightly decayed reality. The emotional register of the game feels like it doesn’t even have the energy for nihilism.

The sadness and futility plays out in its take on the immigrant experience too. That idea of being sold a bullshit idea of the prospect of America is front and centre, and there’s a bit more to it as well. There’s a long period at the start of the game when pretty much every person you deal with is a fellow immigrant; when you eventually meet someone with a straightforward American accent it comes off as jarring. Different backgrounds get highlighted in some cases and plastered over by commonality in others.

There is a constant push-pull of love-hate relationships with both America and their own backgrounds. Niko gets constantly mocked as a yokel; Roman likes to drive around listening to Vladivostok FM; the partner of one of your more overbearing bosses complains that he doesn’t let her serve tea from an urn because it makes them look uncivilised, “like immigrants”. The driving force is sharpened to the idea that the American dream is a disease, as characters explicitly say. Taking the piss out of America has always been a big part of Grand Theft Auto, but this is a much more crafted and grounded version of pisstaking.

I don’t want to oversell the seriousness of the game, mind. There is only so serious a game can be which places your character’s home opposite somewhere called Jizzy Jim’s, and which arranges its bowling alley logo into a pin-and-balls cock-and-balls. And I don’t want to oversell its storytelling strength, either. Much of it is still functional procedural at best, with few opportunities for lazy jokes missed. These developers and this series are not who you would want to choose to be the vanguard of anything in video game storytelling. When the alternative of their previous games was juvenile edgelording, though, even an uneven attempt at something serious comes as a blessed relief by contrast.

The reverse effect of this is that the worst moments come off as even worse. I found my favourite radio station to travel around with in The Journey, a mix of Aphex Twin and Jean Michel Jarre ambient with muddled new age philosophy delivered in a robotic female voice. Its surreal pleasures felt like a new direction for what could be achieved in the always Grand Theft Auto radio stations that are such a central part of the games… right up to the point where a philosophical point was delivered through a misogynistic fat joke. Much like its characters, the game can’t quite escape where it has come from.