Rockstar Games are certainly giving us alot of news for IV last week, especially with Trailer #3 being released. But recently, a very interesting Article was posted by Yahoo! a few days ago and you can read it here.  

Here is the full Article:

"Rockstar's goal with Grand Theft Auto IV has always been to make a true high definition gaming experience. In doing so, they decided to do something that had never been done before - accurately capture the essence of New York, so that the city where the company is headquartered would also be the place they were depicting in their game. The aim was to make a startlingly detailed digital recreation of New York that hummed with life and whose environment had a sense of having been lived in. This interactive experience needed to take place in a world that felt alive like no other.

The art team at Rockstar North in Scotland along with a full time research team in New York set about condensing and defining the essence of the city for the game - it would not be a block by block recreation of New York, but instead a spiritually faithful re-imagining that turned New York into the perfect digital environment for the gangster epic that was going to unfold in it - and this town would be called Liberty City. It has an unprecedented amount of visual detail for a video game world and teams with life. From the gleaming skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan all the way down to the divots on a sidewalk in Queens, the utmost care was taken to make sure no detail, large or small, slipped through the cracks. For the game to be engaging, players have to believe in both the characters and the world they inhabit.

The world of Liberty City was to not only look alive, but also feel alive. This was achieved both by visual cues such as the dirt and decay that make it feel so lived in, the effects of years of use and misuse, and also by putting into that environment its own weather systems, day and night time ambiences, a population who respond to both, along with all of the human scale modifications to the built environment - thousands of advertisements from billboards to fly posters, for hundreds of brands, a full media system including radio and a functioning internet that people can use to discover things to do in the world in their down time. For the beauty of the world to have any meaning, people would have to have fun when they visited. New York is the most fun city on the planet, so it was felt that Liberty City would have to be the most fun digital city ever created, so it is full of distractions for the visitor looking for a good time.

In order to create a city at once so visually detailed and full of life, it was necessary to undertake research on a scale never previously seen before. Along with multiple research trips by the art team from Rockstar North, and the expertise of the members from years of living in New York, Rockstar utilized a full-time research team to photograph and video every aspect of the city. Not only building fronts, fire hydrants, roads and sidewalks, but also lighting changes across day and night, vehicle and pedestrian patterns throughout the day, the racial and social make-up of different neighborhoods and boroughs, the sounds of specific foghorns in the harbor, all combined to make a completely integrated world that continuously seems alive and natural in a way that was not possible in previous games. Local experts were interviewed and consulted on every detail to make sure Liberty City feels real to the player.

All of this was necessary, not to merely recreate a view of New York but to capture its spirit and energy in a three-dimensional world that people can explore as the character they play in the game, Niko Bellic, an immigrant, as he navigates the land of opportunity for the first time. From the top of a penthouse to the inside of a Russian supper club, players will be immersed in the world of Liberty City in a way that they would never have thought possible."

There are also pages where most of the screenshots are with their real life counter part. That can be found here.

Link: Yahoo! Article