Q: Liberty City in GTA IV seems more realistic than past GTA games. What kind of challenges did that present?

A: We wanted to make a city that buzzes with life, with the personality and the energy of a real metropolis. Creating a believable and alive virtual world was one of our major goals with this game. In terms of challenge, creating a city that both looks and acts more realistically is exponentially more complicated than making something less alive. All of the details in the buildings and nuances in behavior have been lovingly crafted by the team. The realism is one of the reasons the game has taken three years to make, but for people with new consoles, we were determined to give them a game that would not have been possible to make on a previous machine -- and this means, among other things, added detail and fidelity.