's former studio in
Edinburgh, Scotland, where
Grand Theft Auto IVs development was overseen|alt= Preliminary work on
Grand Theft Auto IV began in November 2004, a month after the release of
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Rockstar president
Sam Houser felt that following up
San Andreas was "a nightmare".
Rockstar North, the core 220-person team behind the game, co-opted studios owned by parent company Rockstar Games to facilitate development between a full team of over 1,000, including 50 employees at
Rockstar NYC, 40 at
Rockstar Lincoln, 10 at
Rockstar San Diego, and around 600–700 working part-time internally and externally. Some key members of the development team worked 12-hour days during production, often without holidays. The team decided to continue the numbering scheme absent from the previous two main games to represent the same leap in production as
Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999) to
Grand Theft Auto III (2001). Development of
Grand Theft Auto IV ceased by 21 April 2008 when the game was
submitted for manufacturing. Producer
Leslie Benzies estimated that the budget of the development efforts exceeded , making
Grand Theft Auto IV one of the
most expensive video games ever made.
Research and open world design The game's setting, Liberty City, is based on New York City. The team did not look at the previous renditions of Liberty City as inspiration, wanting it to retain the "general feel" but nothing else. The map is roughly three times the size of
Grand Theft Auto IIIs. The developers originally considered using the entire state of
New York, before restricting it to Manhattan, and then expanding it out again. They considered including more suburbs with woods, and would regularly vote on which areas to include. Art director Aaron Garbut said that the team chose the setting because of the detail and variety it provided, describing New York as "an amazing, diverse, vibrant, cinematic city". Writer
Dan Houser added that the team "wanted to be somewhere where we had a foothold" due to the amount of research required for the world; Rockstar Games's main headquarters are located in New York. The team consciously avoided a precise recreation of New York City to allow for more enjoyable game design, selecting the areas that they felt "characterised it the best". Garbut wanted to capture a caricature of the city as he felt that most people were familiar with "the highlights" from film or literature but did not need to know the areas precisely. The city was not built with specific missions in mind; the area was created first, and missions implemented later. To achieve a realistic environment, 60–70 employees from Rockstar North travelled to New York for research: first at the beginning of the project in March or April 2005 for a week and a half, and a smaller trip in 2007. Police officers who previously worked the
beat drove the team around
Washington Heights. A full-time research team based in New York handled further requests for information, such as the ethnic minority of a neighbourhood or videos of traffic patterns. Videos shot in New York were played on televisions at the Rockstar North offices "so while they worked they could look up and there was New York". Benzies claimed that the team took over 100,000 photographs on location in New York, though Garbut estimates that they took around 250,000. They also studied architectural plans for apartments, used satellite images to determine city block layout, researched sales figures for models of cars, and read books that detailed the city's infrastructure, including its
subways, sewers, and garbage disposal. Hove Beach is based on
Brighton Beach, which Sam Houser found "pretty incredible" and unusual; the name is based on the English city
Brighton and Hove, made up of the former neighbouring towns
Brighton and
Hove. Houser appreciated that Brighton Beach was home to several Eastern Europeans due to the nature of the game's characters. Dan Houser described Liberty City as "the biggest character" of the game. The
Grand Theft Auto IV rendition of Liberty City is more detailed and larger in size than most earlier entries in the series; although smaller than San Andreas, the setting of the previous main game, the developers considered it comparable in scope due to city's verticality, number of buildings, and level of detail. The team wanted less dead spots and irrelevant spaces, such as the wide open deserts in
San Andreas. They wanted the game to be "a more focused experience" than
San Andreas, and Dan Houser felt that the limited activities of New York allowed this. The team felt that the addition of Niko's
mobile phone added to the immersion of the world and represented society's shifted focus on phones. The in-game brands and products are designed over several years; the billboards were implemented in the game around six months prior to release.
Story and character development {{Multiple image |align=right |direction=horizontal |total_width=400 The game's script, written by Dan Houser and Rupert Humphries, is about 1,000 pages. Approximately 660 actors provided voices for the game over 80,000 lines of dialogue. After conceiving the character and setting, Dan Houser spoke with his brother Sam Houser and Leslie Benzies to bounce story ideas before writing a rough synopsis, a six-paged, detailed document. Once the synopsis was reworked, the designers broke it into missions, represented by a large flow document demonstrating each section. The writers then work on the introductions to the missions; the gameplay dialogue comes much later. Unlike previous
Grand Theft Auto games,
Grand Theft Auto IV does not have cinematic influences. "We were consciously trying to go, well, if video games are going to develop into the next stage, then the thing isn't to try and do a loving tribute or reference other stuff," said Dan Houser. He said that the writers wanted something "fresh and new and not something that was obviously derived from [a] movie". Dan Houser felt that the quality of the writing had to improve alongside the advancements in graphics and technology. He noted that the improvements in facial animation allowed for slower-paced cutscenes. The unique dialogue that plays when a mission is retried was to ensure that the gameplay felt "less canned and less like
Groundhog Day". Dan Houser described Niko Bellic as "a more rounded character" than those in previous games. He felt that his dual personality—often saving innocent people, while also being a "cold-hearted killer"—made him more relatable. He also felt that Niko's unfamiliarity with Liberty City allowed for the player to relate to him more, only driven by his vague past and relationship with Roman. When deciding on Niko's background, the writers felt that being an immigrant could lead to more dangerous situations, and therefore more enjoyable missions; after discussions with criminal experts, Dan Houser found that "the real scary characters are not born in America anymore". He felt that Niko's outsider view of
American culture was "fun". The team wanted Niko to be "more of an
anti hero than a hero, capable of making positive actions within his criminal world". They wanted his demeanour to reflect the weight of his past and choices. Niko's design underwent a few changes, but was finalised early in development. His outfit underwent several changes based on Eastern Europeans, particularly photographs of men fighting in winter wars in
Yugoslavia and
Chechnya. The primary motivation for the design was a face to convey the appropriate emotions and a body that could move nicely with the new animations. The in-game purchasable outfits were also designed to fit with the character. The team ensured that the
gameplay choices presented to the player were not too extensive, as they still had to make sense to the character, who is driven by the people around him. Dan Houser felt that the missions in
San Andreas had become too linear, and wanted to present choices to the player in
Grand Theft Auto IV. The writers found that Niko needed a motivation to come to America, so they created his cousin, Roman. Dan Houser felt that the two could not be brothers as there would be a deeper level of familiarity than necessary. He described the two as a
double act, with Roman's fantasist charm playing off Niko's tough cynicism. The team gave other
non-playable characters (NPCs) more definable behaviours and dialogue to make them feel more alive. The writers initially considered having a smaller group of characters, but found that the story became boring and that players were less likely to explore the world. The stranger characters found in the game world were based on the "crazy people" that populate New York, according to Dan Houser, which in previous games were only able to be captured through radio stations or mild pedestrian behaviours. The team based the ethnicities, clothing, and behaviours of the NPCs on the photographs and videos that they captured around New York, divided into different areas; they created
mood boards for each location. The NPCs also converse in different languages.
Art design Grand Theft Auto IV sees a shift in the series to a more realistic and detailed style and tone, partly a result of the transition to consoles which offered
high-definition graphics and the new and improved capabilities of such consoles. The development team worked to represent the upgrade in quality across all design aspects while maintaining the coherence of the previous games. The team took the game's development as an opportunity to "strip things back and start again", refining the art style without losing the style of the series; they distanced the game from the "cartoon-like style" of its predecessors while creating a new style that was consistent across all aspects of the game. Garbut found the increased demand of detail brought on by the advanced technology daunting. A technique used to make the visuals look real was to avoid harsh edges, instead blending surfaces together to make the world look dirty and lived-in. The
props department created multiple variations of different objects to make the world more interesting and unique.
Grand Theft Auto IV was the first contemporary game in the series since 2001's
Grand Theft Auto III; the team felt that enough time had passed to avoid feeling repetitive. The types of in-game vehicles were decided upon early in development, after which the vehicles department begin creating the designs. The vehicles are not based on specific real-life counterparts, but take elements from several, with some original ideas by the developers.
Technical and gameplay design data, (bottom) in-game characters, and the final scene in the game The proprietary
Rockstar Advanced Game Engine was used for
Grand Theft Auto IV. Garbut found the game's technical design similar to
Grand Theft Auto IIIs, with both being the first in the series released on their respective platforms. He claimed an operable
game engine was not finalised until late in development, at which point "there's still plenty of guesswork" until optimisation near release. The characters' physical performances were recorded using
motion capture. Up to eight actors, dressed in full suits, could perform on the motion capture stage at one time. The camera included a
teleprompter for actors to read their scripts. Over a hundred moves would be captured each day of production. The
voice acting performances were often recorded months later alongside facial reference capture, and an actor's voice could be composited over a different actor's physical performance. The in-game animations were crafted similarly, using a combination of different motion capture performances. For the gameplay and animations, the team redid a lot of the work from previous games, wanting
Grand Theft Auto IV to "feel next-generation". The
role-playing elements from
San Andreas were removed fairly early in development, partly due to the animation work it would have required, and because consistently needing to visit the gym felt antithetical to Niko's motivations. The game's targeting system was one of the first focuses of development due to the advanced technology; the team wanted it to feel realistic without being too technical. The cover system was a "natural addition" to the targeting. Benzies described the multiplayer as the hardest part of the game's development. The team wanted the multiplayer to feel like an extension of the cinematic single-player experience. Dan Houser described it as "a section of a film rather than the whole narrative". The developers considered adding co-operative multiplayer to the main story campaign, but decided it worked better as a single-player experience. When Sam Houser first showed interest in using the
Euphoria software in the game, he was told that it would be impossible or only limited to cutscenes, but some members of the team were able to make it work. Engineers from
NaturalMotion worked on-site at Rockstar North for several months at a time to incorporate Euphoria software into the game. Rockstar also worked with
Image Metrics for the game's facial animations. The facial rigs had around 100 joints, with a total of 300 minutes of facial animation. The scale of the project caused some issues for the animators, forcing them to have
rigs completed before animation began. They also faced difficulty in the direction of the actor's head—either straight on when looking at the teleprompter, or down when looking at a script. Image Metrics head of production David Barton noted that "having realistic eyes is 90 percent of the battle", as it allows the player to believe the character.
SpeedTree was used for in-game environment rendering.
Music production When selecting music for the in-game radio stations, music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich said "[we had] to pick the songs that make New York today what it is, but make sure they won't feel dated by the time the game comes out." The developers contacted over 2,000 people to obtain recording and publishing rights; they hired a private investigator to locate the relatives of late
Skatt Bros. member
Sean Delaney to license the band's song, "Walk the Night".
Billboard reported that Rockstar paid as much as $5,000 per composition and another $5,000 per master recording per track. Developers originally considered letting players purchase music in an in-game
record shop and for Niko to have an
MP3 player, but both ideas were cut.
DJ Green Lantern produced tracks exclusively for the game's hip-hop radio station The Beat 102.7. Record producer Bobby Konders, who owns the record label Massive B and hosts the in-game radio station Massive B Soundsystem 96.9, flew to
Jamaica to get
dancehall artists to re-record tracks to make references to the boroughs of Liberty City. The Housers's father, jazz musician Walter Houser, provided several classical music tracks for the game. == Release ==