Something – a bag of rocks, an anvil – is heavy.

Heavy is (forgive me) a loaded word. There are obvious examples of heavy, when it comes to physical weight. IV excels when it comes to building something that is rare for open-world games: a thematically unified experience that works when it comes to telling a story while also respecting that the player is an autonomous inhabitant of that world instead of a passenger. The way that GTA IV does that is that it accentuates its heaviness. You can go here for my version of that if you want, but I want to focus on something different for this piece. You’ve probably read a hundred hot takes on Grand Theft Auto IV and The American Dream. I spent countless hours on a friend’s Xbox 360 to complete the game, eagerly playing through the sad tale of Niko Bellic. Head-down in books like The Great Gatsby and The Crying Of Lot 49, GTA IV’s somber take on finding yourself lost in the bleak tunnels of The American Dream as a poor person while the rich get stupider, crueler, and richer spoke to me. However, I still found myself drawn to IV, not because it was the next-gen version of GTA, but because so much of that game spoke to a thematic evolution that I was interested in. I wasn’t even playing games at that point anymore, having ditched my consoles when I went to college in 2007 in an effort to focus on my studies and become a world-renowned author™.

Grand Theft Auto IV came at a strange time. Grand Theft Auto wasn’t just a game to us but was a central part of our adolescence, the kind of all-caps MATURE thing we experienced as an act of rebellion as much as a fun doodad to pass the time. In 2003, my friends and I pitched in to buy a copy of Vice City and shared it amongst one another, out of the eyesight of our parents, who had all been worked into a fearful frenzy by articles in USA Today about the game’s prostitution and violent propensities. I grew up in the era when Grand Theft Auto was basically contraband.

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