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" Remember when you finally beat (or tried to beat) Super Mario Brothers? All those late nights. The frustration. The secret warp levels. Those stupid Hammer Bros. The disappointing ending. And yet, when it was all over, the only thing you&amp;#039;d mastered was a lengthy button sequence. All you&amp;#039;d earned was a flimsy badge of honor: I have beaten Super Mario Brothers. And I will never play it again. Grand Theft Auto IV, with its wanton violence, expansive levels, and button sequences to master, could also be considered an empty confection. Like most videogame sequels, more is the same about GTA IV than is different. You are Niko Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant who comes to America and enters a criminal underworld. Your goal: Kill, car-jack, and rob your way through hundreds of short missions to rise to the top.  But unlike the Super Marios of the world, built to be played and then never again played, Rockstar Games has created an everlasting gobstopper of a game, whose depth and breadth pushes it closer to modern art than any game before it.  &amp;quot;The art form, the medium of videogames has evolved,&amp;quot; says Dan Houser, the slightly shy, unassuming Brit who co-founded Rockstar Games ten years ago. It is two weeks before the release of the game and Houser looks like a marathoner after a race, slumped into a leather couch, popping salted peanuts into his mouth. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m really nervous. Super excited, but of course, nervous. We threw ourselves into making this game.&amp;quot; Houser and his team spent three-and-a-half years making GTA IV. There are seven hours of animated cutscenes -- roughly five times longer than the original Toy Story. Four photo researchers and fifty programmers spent three years creating Liberty City, GTA IV&amp;#039;s photorealistic version of New York City. (In keeping with the realism, the designers passed over Staten Island and substituted New Jersey in its stead.) As a result, GTA IV achieves a true sense of scale and space. Time passes the way it does in real life, with sunlight and shadows and subtle weather changes creeping across the digital landscape -- no longer oversimplified into &amp;quot;morning&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;rainy.&amp;quot; Clothing gets wet and stays wet and broken windows stay broken.  The entire world is alive. There are places to go. Subways to ride on. Taxis to hail. Stores to shop in with familiar names, like &amp;quot;Jizzy Jim&amp;#039;s,&amp;quot; the game&amp;#039;s take on New York&amp;#039;s Jimmy Jazz sneaker chain. There are bars and pool halls where you can get drunk and play nine-ball. And thousands of people in the streets. People that look and move like people -- not a band of stiff, ludicrous Second Life avatars. Embittered housewives mutter under their breath and people in Chinatown speak Chinese. And if you meet the right person in the game, you can call them up and invite them to meet you at a strip club later, just for kicks. You can spend an entire day in Liberty City doing nothing. But that&amp;#039;s not to say it&amp;#039;s empty. GTA IV is a crass cultural commentary that mocks the American media&amp;#039;s obsession with sex and violence and money. Which is, of course, why so many people in the media and government are bothered by the Grand Theft Auto games. (Like how the Chicago Transit Authority pulled 385 ads for the game from its subways, when the CTA has no problem letting violent films advertise in the same places.) If these people actually played GTA IV, maybe they would realize that not all videogames are for kid and ultimately get the joke, that the game also rejects the violence, sexism, and consumerism it appears to embrace. &amp;quot;The idea for Grand Theft Auto came from TV news shows that used car chases as entertainment,&amp;quot; says Houser. &amp;quot;This world is what the world would be like if it existed the way it actually does in movies and TV. This is a gangster story in a world where it is not objectionable to be a gangster.&amp;quot; As a result, the game glorifies violence in the same way our world does, the way it&amp;#039;s eagerly recounted in sidewalk conversations yet decried in newspaper headlines. The game reacts, magnifies, then broadcasts your actions to the digital world. Blow up a bus full of nuns? Head to Times Square and watch your dastardly deed crawl across the ticker. There&amp;#039;s even an in-game Internet, with scores of fake websites you can look at, just for fun. &amp;quot;Everything in the game cross-references each other,&amp;quot; says Houser. &amp;quot;It has a fully-functioning media. No one&amp;#039;s ever created that before.&amp;quot; And therein lies the brilliance of GTA IV. It&amp;#039;s so meta, it&amp;#039;s the first game with the potential to transcend the genre&amp;#039;s emptiness. As a form of entertainment, videogames have been skim milk. GTA IV is half-and-half, the first step towards something more than empty entertainment, a sign the videogame industry might be entering puberty. Super Mario Brothers was childish fun, but GTA IV has a chance to last forever. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4495/grand-theft-auto-iv-review/>