Gaming: Any Remake Of Gta 4 Must Preserve Its Minigames And Misery 2026
Niko Bellic’s would-be redemption story is a dart to the heart.
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Grand Theft Auto has always thrived on an outsider’s perspective. There’s something sardonically Scottish about its trademark tone—the relentless skewering of American excess and absurdity, paired with a loving recreation of the country’s most iconic cities. You can feel the awe of a tourist in the way your field-of-view shifts as you stare up at the skyscrapers of Liberty City—a technical trick that induces a kind of grounded vertigo.
Yet Rockstar had never so explicitly embraced the outsider before GTA 4. Niko Bellic is quite literally fresh off the boat, propelled by his cousin’s fanciful promises of riches, as well as the horror of the Balkan wars behind him. "I had been living in New York for a few years," Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser told the Lex Fridman podcast two months ago. "I was single and miserable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America." This mood bled into GTA 4—reinforced by the aura of uncertainty and instability that the Hot Coffee controversy had brought to Rockstar’s door during the San Andreas years.
As a result, GTA 4 is often dour and grey—coloured the way Niko sees it, as a newcomer utterly unconvinced by the American dream. But the oppression induces its own kind of awe. Step out of your first safehouse in Hove Beach and you’ll find yourself directly under the railway, which blankets the street in shadow and the rattling roars of passing trains. Take a right and you’ll spot the ferris wheel of Firefly Island, its coloured lights only casting the surrounding sky into even deeper darkness.
This juxtaposition, of dazzling whites and abyssal blacks, appears to come straight from the ‘70s night movies of Walter Hill—The Driver and The Warriors, the latter of which Rockstar loved so much it released an adaptation for the PS2. The Warriors opens just as GTA 4 does, with the ferris wheel and the subway train, and the people too dangerous to be in bed.
Walter Hill, in turn, was inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. You’ll know Hopper’s most famous work, Nighthawks: the moody portrait of patrons in a New York d
Source: PC Gamer
