Grand Theft Auto IV: the blockbuster game that dared to be truly political

For fellow developer Florent Maurin, it was just as seminal. Maurin is the founder of games developer The Pixel Hunt, a Paris-based studio responsible for Bury Me, My Love, a game that cleverly immerses players in the heart of a desperate Whatsapp conversation between a Syrian refugee on the move to Germany and her husband back in their home country. He points out just how abrupt a shift GTA IV was in tone from its predecessor, 2004’s GTA: San Andreas. “In GTA IV, everything seems more weighted and grounded, from the colour palette to the way the cars actually drive, to the character’s animations,” he opines.

“This makes for a surprisingly heavy and dark experience, to the point that when you encounter the unavoidable silly missions every GTA has to offer, they feel out of place. Niko looks terribly depressed, and you really had to be GTA to ‘sell’ a hero like that.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by John Wills, a professor of American Studies at the University of Kent, who senses GTA IV was a deliberate effort from Rockstar to subvert the cartoonish vibrancy that had previously defined the series and make a story apt for a world that in 2008 was freefalling into a bleak global recession. “The grey tone of the city is such a contrast to the solar flare of Los Santos/Los Angeles [the setting for GTA: San Andreas], with a real focus on debt, the hard life, and realism,” he says. “In GTA games there are enduring themes of the attraction of criminality, the pressure of personal failure, a sense of broader masculine crisis, and an America that consistently disappoints. But the futility of American uplift is more conspicuous and serious in GTA IV.”

A comment on the time

Both Maurin and Wills believe this tonal shift was driven by the real world GTA IV was mirroring. In 2005, when the game’s development started to take shape, the US migrant population (consisting of legal and illegal immigrants) reached a new record of 35 million, according to Census Bureau data. And in response to the growth in unauthorised migration and the backlash around it, the US government initiated a heightened militarisation of its borders, with the recently-formed Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (now know as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) becoming increasingly powerful. In fact, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, 570 pieces of legislation dealing with legal and illegal immigrants were introduced in the US in 2006 and at least 1,562 in 2007.

When Niko is chased by helicopters in GTA IV after committing one too many crimes, the choppers are branded with a “‘Patriotism and Immigration Authority” logo, with their pilots shouting phrases including: “Let’s tighten the noose!” The clear suggestion is that Bellic is being hunted by a blood-thirsty border control, rather than the cops.

“Americans were starting to take helicopters to hunt Mexican illegals, and they were aggressively putting barbed wire at their borders [when GTA IV was being made],” Hobmeier says. “The European borders were militarised too. In the UK, in the mid-2000s, you had people sneaking in through lorries and [shipping] containers. The world of GTA IV mirrors all of this. In the game Niko is literally being hunted by the government.”

Rockstar is famously secretive, and declined to take part in this feature, but in comments from a 2008 interview with its co-founder Dan Houser, he confirmed the idea for GTA IV was to make Niko feel like an illegal alien. “We wanted someone who felt tough but also like an alien,” he commented. “The idea of this immigrant story began to seem fun and interesting and he was a good character. On the one hand he’s innocent, on the other he’s battle-hardened and world-weary. Right now, a modern ‘arriving in America’ story feels very interesting to us.”

Yet it would be disingenuous to say Rockstar got absolutely everything right about Niko Bellic’s portrayal. The character frequently mispronounces Serbo-Croatian phrases, a by-product of the fact that voice actor Michael Hollick was an American putting on an exaggerated accent, and the game forces him into tiresome “assimilation” quests in which he has to take his friends out bowling and drinking to settle him into the US. Above all, critics have argued that Niko is merely a generalisation of Eastern European immigrants, which perpetuates harmful stereotypes about this demographic being more susceptible to criminal activity. For Dr Jess Rowan Marcotte, a consultant for Refugee Engagement with Video Games for the United Nations, it was good to see GTA IV centre its narrative around an immigrant story, but it still didn’t go far enough.