Page 2 of 3
The amount of reference material Rockstar gathered for Liberty City is a little absurd - producer Leslie Benzies has claimed the team shot over 100,000 photographs on location in New York, and art director Alexander Roger Garbut has put the figure closer to 250,000. They also reportedly played footage of New York streets on office TVs so the team could just glance up and see the real city while they worked.
A handful of GTA IV's mission titles are lifted straight from literature if you know what to look for. 'The Master and the Molotov' is a play on Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', and 'Crime and Punishment' borrows its name directly from the Dostoevsky classic. Little nods for anyone paying more attention to the mission list than the actual shooting.
The mission called 'I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots and Your Motorcycle' isn't Rockstar being random with grammar - it's a direct lift from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where the T-800 says almost exactly that line to a biker in a bar. Small reference, but once you've seen the movie you can't unhear it.
One of the multiplayer trophies/achievements in GTA IV is literally called 'Assassin's Greed,' which is obviously just a wordplay dig at Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Rockstar loves naming achievements after other media, and this one's about as on-the-nose as it gets.
The trophy/achievement title 'Dial B for Bomb' is a riff on Dial M for Murder, the 1954 Hitchcock thriller. It's the kind of joke that only really lands if you're a bit of a film nerd, which, fair enough, describes a lot of the writers at Rockstar.
Winning multiplayer races earns you trophies called 'Join the Midnight Club' and 'Top the Midnight Club' - a shout-out to Rockstar's own Midnight Club street racing series rather than anything to do with GTA's own lore.
Years later and hundreds of miles away, Niko's still floating around the GTA universe. If you look closely at Jimmy's laptop in GTA V, he's got Niko Bellic's LifeInvader profile pulled up, complete with Roman on his friends list. Jimmy also seems to be following Burger Shot on the page, which plays as a cheeky nod to how eating burgers was how you healed up back in Liberty City.
Get properly hammered while playing as Luis in The Ballad of Gay Tony and the game starts teleporting you to random spots around the map when you black out. One of the possible drop-off points is, of all places, the hidden heart chamber inside the Statue of Happiness - so a good night out can accidentally solve an Easter egg you'd otherwise need a helicopter for.
Pull up the map or grab a helicopter and look down at the lake in Middle Park (Liberty City's answer to Central Park) and, if you squint a bit, the shoreline actually forms the shape of an alien head. Whether it was deliberate or just a happy accident of level design, it's stuck around as one of those 'huh, never noticed that' moments for longtime players.
Ever driven an ice cream truck around Liberty City and noticed the tune speeding up? That jingle is actually a warped version of the game's own theme song, and the faster you drive, the faster it plays - a tiny detail Rockstar didn't need to bother with, but did anyway.
