Ten Years

Ten years. Wow. Grand Theft Auto IV will always remain as a game close to my heart - it has been the game that I've played with mostly over the years, and more recently, it's the game that got me into modding.

Where was I ten years ago today? In school. I didn't even know GTA IV was coming out - all I could contend with were PS2 copies of the 3D-era GTAs bought from the now-closed bargain shops up the road. I can still remember the mustiness of one of them - oh, 2008, how I wish I could go back and live then. Hell, I'll take the recession, I'll take the post-flood fears, I'll live with it all.

Anyway, I was introduced to GTA IV somewhere around about 2009-2010 by a neighbour's son. My first experiences were sat up in that very blue room, the smell of teenage odours that I never understood abundant, and I used to play on the Xbox 360 - a console I never had then - all the time there, most of the time, it was IV that I played. I never really took it in and was amazed by it, but by god, did I have lots of fun with it. I remember pinging cops off of the Alderney smokestacks, replacing the Infernus stored in the parking spaces with a blue Turismo and a Police Cruiser (I remember he wasn't too pleased), engaging in massive shootouts with police, all the roleplaying that I loved to do - including driving around casually and making up scenarios in my head, talking to myself a lot - and of course, the pre-teen 'raging' I did whenever I was killed. Always blaming the shotgun, always blaming the shotgun.

Then came the 17th of September 2013. GTA V was on the horizon - I was fresh into secondary school, and after watching all of the trailers for it, I was sure as hell hyped up. On this old PC in Year 6 that my hated teacher let me use at the end of the day, I could type what I wanted, and that included a wishlist of sorts for when GTA V came out - including driving around the later-cut police cars, doing the Jewellery heist, and a lot of things that I can't remember now. By that point in time, I had gotten both TLaD and TBoGT as downloadables on Xbox, and I had gained two favourite cars - a black Emperor, and a black Rancher. On the morning of the 17th, I drove them to Francis International Airport. And I filmed it, too - although I'm not sure if I can access that video anymore.

And in 2014, I eventually got my grubby hands on the PC version of the game, and inspired by all of the YouTube videos from ages ago that I watched, I began to invest in mods. If I remember correctly, the first ever mod I put into the game, even going back to using SparkIV to install it (ah, the nostalgia, I can remember the outdated UI already), was Lt. Caine's LCPD Esperanto. I fell in love with it, even a book that I read in school - specifically, 'Tribes' by Cathy MacPhail - triggered thoughts of it. And now with the opportunity to actually use it, I fell in love, started downloading more and more, including the flood mod that I loved watching videos of... then I eventually went overboard and turned to the piracy/illegal/mod theft sites to satisfy my itch.

But once I eventually got a new gaming PC this time two years ago, my tastes had... matured. I had scrubbed clean anything pirated, due to the fact that the 'gaming' PC, which ran 32bit Windows 7 for God-knows-why, was having issues with the adware and junk that had come with those mods, and I started again with GTA IV, after breaking the serials for a newly-bought copy of GTA V when trying to mod it a little too eagerly, and tried, before taking a holiday, to make a British Liberty City with a mixture of Double Doppler and lore-friendly police car mods - namely, a Met/COLP pack which I tried to make into a 'Greater Liberty' livery (the beginnings of the GLP) - but then, after trying so hard to get it installed, ELS never worked. Then I moved onto a 1980s Greater Liberty theme, now suggesting the British colonised Liberty City in some war or something a few years back... then 1.0.8.0 came about, and everything broke when I tried to downgrade back.

This series of events is what has shaped me today - from early beginnings of pinging off cops to being a part of the esteemed VanillaWorks team. Never would my six year old self have thought this would happen to him. But regarding GTA IV... it has aged well, despite the gutting of Vladivostok FM, but everyone has to move on. In January 2018, I negotiated and finally got the Steam edition of GTA V, and I had to keep up all night just to make sure it was installing right. The next morning, I played around, and very carefully tried to install mods - and it worked. I set the 1992 wheels in motion, started work on GTA V mods, and... well, it's the tenth anniversary of GTA IV now, and now I'm working on my first police car for GTA V.

I want to get something straight - everyone has to move on. Essentially, most of the GTA IV projects that I am still working on, especially those that have lost their source models, are now cancelled. This includes a London bus pack using Lt. Caine's bus, future ambitions to restore Lt. Caine's police Merit back to public release via zMod edits, uniform stuff that I never figured out, and so much else. But I am never going to abandon the game, oh no. I'll still pick it up from time to time, but once again, following the mantra: everyone has to move on.

All I'll say, though, is that GTA IV was a game that defined me. It was a game that helped me understand the meanings and concepts of the world that young me lived in, even though I misunderstood half the things that were said and even though I skipped all the cutscenes. It was a game that, according to my mother, helped me learn about things - I'm not sure what younger me learned, that New York isn't the best of places? It was a game that set the wheels in motion for my modding career. And it, ten years on, is still a very good game to mess around with.

Grand Theft Auto IV - Released on the 29th of April 2008.