Pierce Mattie Public Relations New York

As most have heard, Grand Theft Auto 4 was released to the public last week and has already exceeded expectations by making over 600 million dollars in its first week. Despite being part “4”, Grand Theft Auto 4 is actually the 9th grand theft auto game in the series. The locales in all the games have been inspired by real life areas such as London, Miami, and Los Angeles, but this time around, the development team chose New York City as their canvas. The game is loved by fans and critics, but is being grilled by parents and news organizations for its content. While it’s true that the game contains tons of violence, graphic language, drugs, and sexual references, when one actually sits down with GTA (and video games in general), you may actually realize there may be more to it than that.

In this game one takes the role of an Eastern-European immigrant by the name of Niko Bellic, who has just come to America in search of the “American Dream.” The game consists of Niko doing favors and jobs for a number of different seedy characters, until one reaches the “top”. Violence and drugs aside, the game has amazing writing, is smart and humorous, and parodies politics, the media, and current events. Many news organizations who have bad mouthed the game have later come out and said they didn’t play it for more than 10 minutes, and some even admitted that they didn’t play at all, but are basing their negative thoughts of GTA on what they’ve heard.