Rockstar Games has invited the webmasters from the oldest and most popular GTA fansites to New York City multiple times for different game releases, to let us experience the games first-hand before they come out, and to treat us like royalty the entire time we are there. Below are my personal accounts of the trips we've been on.

Jump to: The Lost and Damned or Episodes from Liberty City PS3/PC

During the last week of March, 2008 I received a phone call from Mike Torok of Rockstar Games. While this in itself was a surprise, what he was calling about was even better. Rockstar was inviting the webmasters from the major GTA fansites to New York City to experience Grand Theft Auto IV first-hand, a week before its release. Over the next few weeks our transportation was sorted out, and we were basically left in the dark on all other details besides the fact that we were going and when. I didn't plan on publishing this article until after GTAIV was released, but pretty much all of the other sites posted theirs already so this article may seem a bit rushed. I wasn't as much of a shutterbug as the other webmasters, however; living close to New York City myself I visit there quite a few times a year.

I took a train from Union Station in New Haven to Penn Station in Manhattan. A Lincoln Town Car was waiting for me outside to take me to the hotel. Keep in mind I still had no idea which hotel we were staying at. Prior to the trip I had looked up hotels in the area of Rockstar's office to see which was the cheapest and closest. I soon found out that cheap was not on the agenda.

After listening to my driver rant about how much I look like Sylvester Stallone ?! we finally pulled over and he said "here we are." I looked around for a hotel but saw nothing. I got out, he handed me my luggage, and I was then approached by two other men dressed in black and wearing earpieces, who asked if I was checking in. Still completely dumbfounded, I said yes, and they led me to a glass door, which, when opened, revealed the lobby to the Hotel On Rivington. Another person had come in just behind me, and followed me onto the elevator with me to check in on the second floor.

At the front desk, both myself and the then mystery person were greeted by two lovely ladies who went through the standard check-in procedure. After receiving a Rockstar Games embroidered shoulder bag, and realizing that the person next to me also received the same bag, he introduced himself as Andy from GTA4.net. The ladies behind the desk then handed us our bill and asked for our credit cards. Luckily Nathan Stewart from Rockstar intervened to inform the receptionists that Rockstar would be handling all of the charges, which was a relief since the rooms alone cost over $400 per night. We get on the elevator yet again and head up to our rooms, which looked like something out of an Apple commercial, with high-contrast contemporary styling, and very swank.

Opening up the Rockstar Games bag that was handed to me at check-in, I was greeted with a LCPD tshirt and sweatshirt, a Swingers baseball hat, a model of the Statue of Happiness, and a nice pack of stickers. I got myself acquainted with the room before heading back downstairs to meet everyone else. The webmasters who flew over from the UK were still out with Alison Brash, being shown some of the landmarks of the city. I met Casey (Zidane) from GTAGaming, who was waiting with Nathan and Andy. Eventually we were joined by Blair (illspirit) from GTA4.net, Jordan from PlanetGTA and Chess Hubbard, a Chicago DJ who also does work for Rockstar. We went down the street to Spitzer's Corner Restaurant to grab some lunch (and our bags of donuts, which we had to ask for numerous times and were NOT given to us by Joey). While we were eating, we were joined by Kyle (Kodo) from GTAGaming. Afterwards we went back to the hotel and met Chris from The GTA Place, Psy from GTA4.tv, and Adam and Jevon from GTA4.net. After hanging around for a bit we were told that the evenings "festivities" would begin at 6:00pm, on the 20th floor penthouse suite, which apparently cost $7500 per night.

Once the time arrived, we all made our way up to the top of the hotel and were greeted with (in addition to free food and Red Bull) four Xbox360 and six Playstation3 consoles which were hooked up to ten flat-screen televisions all with GTA4 loaded up and waiting for us to take over. After watching the opening sequence with the credits (which only plays when you load a new game - when you load a saved game, the Rockstar logos appear and the theme song plays over the load screen) we were unleashed into Liberty City, while simultaneously viewing the Manhattan skyline all around us. Unlike the magazine previews that we've reported on in the past months, we were not limited to specific features or areas of the game. I played from 6:00pm to 3:00am, but I could have possibly played until everyone else was kicked out at 4:30 had I drank a few more Red Bulls. As expected, the game is amazing. The level of detail, graphical and otherwise, is so immense. I don't want to elaborate much because I think it is a better experience to find out the little details on your own while you play it yourself. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take photos inside the penthouse because of GTAIV being visible on all of the televisions. I returned to my room to jump in the shower before going to sleep.

We were told to meet again in the pool table area next to the front desk at 1:00pm, and after everybody had assembled (and Andy had returned from a terrifying incident involving his laptop battery dying during a news post) we went to Katz's Delicatessen for lunch, the first but not the last place where the look of utter confusion on the faces of those who had never been to New York before made me chuckle (although I will admit that the first time I was there I had no idea how the fuck to get my food either). After waiting in a line to get out longer than the lines to get serviced, we started back to the hotel. Two Cadillac Escalades were provided by Rockstar through the livery that had also transported us from the train station/airport to the hotel to take us anywhere we wanted to go, as long as we were back by 5:30pm. We stopped over in Central Park for a few hours, and on the way back we tried to get a glimpse of Rockstar's office building on Broadway but were limited to the very inconspicuous facade.

New York has been littered (no pun intended) with GTA IV advertisements and billboards for months; we couldn't go more than 2 blocks without seeing a reference to the game. We even saw a guy running down the sidewalk with plastic shopping bags attached to every square inch of his body. While not exactly a GTA IV reference, it was pretty amusing. I tried to take a photo but we were in a moving vehicle and it came out blurry. Anyone who has witnessed drivers in New York will understand, and cue the look of horror on the faces of those who haven't. Rockstar really went out of its way to make sure everybody is aware that this game is coming out and that it will be huge, especially since it is based off of the very city they are in.

When we returned to the hotel, we had an hour to rest up before a night of multiplayer mayhem. On the elevator ride up the penthouse, some uppity blonde chick got on the elevator a few floors above me (and asked if the elevator was going down...). The next stop was at Adam's floor. When he got on and we said hi to each other, the girl, noticing that the penthouse button was pressed, and Adam had not pushed a different floor, asked if we were in the penthouse, and how we got it. "Yes" and "we know people" were our answers. A sense of pure superiority came over me and I assume Adam as well, since we were dressed in tshirts and jeans, going up to a $7500 penthouse, while she was stuck riding up to the top floor with us only to go all the way back down. After sharing this story with a few others and grabbing enough Red Bull to keep us awake and alert, we were ready to see what GTA IV's multiplayer was really all about.

This time the Playstation3s had been replaced by Xbox360s so we could all play together. Almost all of the multiplayer modes were available to us. Our favorite seemed to be GTA Race using fire engines or ice cream trucks. A few people jacked some busses and made a blockade through a narrow road, but a quick drop of a grenade out of the driver's window cleared that up pretty quickly. We also played Car Jack City, Mafiya Work, Turf War, Deathmatch, and Cops N Crooks. If you can get your hands on a rocket launcher then you will pretty much dominate the entire game. Each mode is extremely fun and they provide a good variation of the tasks you need to complete. We played until about 4:00 am, and then hung out on the rooftop for another hour. I didn't get to sleep until it had already started getting light out again.

After 3 hours of sleep I decided to catch up on the happenings of the internet; not using it for more than 36 hours was making my blood itch. While eating all the candy in the mini-bar and watching re-runs of The Sopranos, I got a call in my room from Alison saying that there was going to be a short meeting in the penthouse before everyone checked out. On the roof, Rockstar informed us that the game had been leaked onto torrent sites at around midnight, and, like with when the map was leaked, to not allow any content to be posted on our sites. Thankfully around midnight we were all accounted for with our eyes and fingers glued to multiplayer. Myself and Casey were the first to leave. We said our goodbyes to everyone and thanked Rockstar for inviting us. This was an amazing opportunity, not only to play GTA IV before it was released, but to play it with other people who have the same passion for this video game series that I do.

• Adam, Andy, illspirit, & Jevon - GTA4.net
• Chris - The GTA Place
• Jordan - PlanetGTA
• Kodo & Zidane - GTAGaming
• Psy - GTA4.tv

Mike, Alison, and everyone else at R*,

I wanted to formally thank each of you for these past few days. As you probably are aware, I as well as everyone else had an amazing time. Being able to experience Grand Theft Auto IV first-hand a week before anyone else was in itself a great opportunity, but doing so in the atmosphere that you provided for us literally blew me away. I have always respected Rockstar Games and the hard work that everyone puts in, and I have always been grateful for the generous packages I've received over the years, but the level of hospitality that you showed us far exceeded my expectations. You continue to set the bar not only with your games but with the way you reach out to your fanbase and the people who support you the most. I am honored that you have allowed me to be a part of this occasion and proud to be such a long-time supporter of your work.

Please extend my thanks to everyone who was involved in making this such a fantastic event.

During the first week of February 2009, we were again contacted by Mike Torok inviting us back to New York to experience The Lost and Damned a week before it is released. Despite receiving only a week's advance notice, this time we at least knew ahead of time what hotel we were staying in and where we would be playing the game, but that doesn't mean they didn't have any surprises in store for us.

We stayed at The Standard, a fairly new luxury hotel in Manhattan's Meat Packing District, built over the High Line. Rockstar was already proving to us that last year's epicness was not a fluke. This place was amazing.

After checking into the hotel and gathering with Adam, Casey, Kyle, Jevon, Blair, Chris, and Simon, we all got into a huge van which took us to Don Hill's, a bar on Greenwich Street which was closed for our private event for three days. The setup was very similar to the penthouse in Rivington last year: 8 networked consoles connected to 8 plasma televisions, but in an atmosphere that fit in with the theme of The Lost and Damned. We played a little bit of single player, during which time I noticed the missions are much more varied than the missions in Niko's story. I actually would have liked to see Johnny as the main character of GTA4 and Niko be the add-on. We played the new multiplayer modes for the next three hours. Some are similar to the current modes but with a biker twist, and some are completely new.

When 6:00 came and it was time to drop the controllers, we were told to line up by the back door. Mike Torok emerged from the darkness of a storage room with a pile of squarish cardboard boxes and began opening them. Inside were Xbox360 Elite consoles, each custom painted glossy black with The Lost and Damned box art on both sides, and serial numbered out of 190 units, one for each of us. We also received a very sturdy Rockstar Games tote bag (which made lugging the Elites around the streets of New York a bit easier), a few more t-shirts, a Rockstar logo sweatshirt, a shit-ton of stickers, and a GTA IV pool cue complete with Rockstar Games pool cue chalk (no detail is spared). We piled into the same van we had arrived in, but less half the cubic feet than before thanks to our mound of goodies, and went back to the hotel.


We dropped off the swag in our rooms and met back in the lobby at 7:30 to go to dinner. Kat and Mike (a different Mike, we met like five of them) from Rockstar brought us to Hill Country Barbecue for dinner. After eating we listened to Mike tell us what it's like to work with the team at Rockstar for a little bit, then we left and walked a few blocks to the Empire State Building to go up to the observation deck. Thankfully there were no lines since it was late at night (do not ever go during the day unless you have more than 3 hours to kill...I learned this the hard way the first time I went there). After that we needed a way back to the hotel. Our options were either to split up into 3 separate taxi cabs and pay $10 for each fare, or pay a guy with a limousine $30 to take us all back at once. We opted for the equally priced limo.

Our second trip to New York concluded with a visit inside Rockstar's fifth-floor offices on Broadway. The Americans (myself, Casey, Blair, and Kyle) arrived around noon, just as the others were leaving. We were brought up to the fifth floor and led to a conference room adorned with framed San Andreas artworks on the walls and Nintendo DSlites on the table. After being shown a demo of some of the new features in Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars on Rockstar's custom-built giant DS with laptop-sized screens, we were allowed to play a 4-mission build of the game for ourselves to experience how using the stylus is incorporated into the mini-games that you've all read about in reviews. Assembling a sniper rifle and filling glass bottles with gasoline to make molotov cocktails were just two examples, but browsing through the stats screen we knew there were dozens more: planting bombs on car engines, tossing coins into a slot to pay a toll, and hotwiring cars just to name a few. You can even use the DS's WiFi to upload your stats onto the Social Club, and even trade money, weapons, and drugs with other players, essentially becoming a medium for buying and selling in-game equipment outside of the game.

The entire world is in 3-D, and unlike any top-down GTA of the past. The city is modeled after GTA4's Liberty City, minus Alderney. The use of the dual screen is very handy, with the GPS and stats on the bottom screen, leaving the entire top screen unobstructed for roaming around the city. The wanted system is completely different than any other GTA game as well. Instead of using the search radius system like in GTA4, you must disable a certain number of chasing police cars in order to remove stars from your wanted level. Disable is not the same as destroy, which would kill the cop inside the car and just add more stars instead. Once you get down to one star you can avoid causing further trouble and it will eventually go away. Our time actually playing Chinatown Wars was slightly limited, and there were only four missions to try, so I can't give a full-blown review, but I will say that this brief experience with Chinatown Wars - a game I initially had no intentions of buying or even covering - has made me purchase a Nintendo DS and eagerly await March 17.

After slight disappointment that there would be no fansite event in October for the initial release of The Ballad of Gay Tony for Xbox360, the invitation to an event for the release of Episodes from Liberty City on PS3 and PC came as a very nice surprise. This time, we stayed at Ink48, a botique hotel on 11th Avenue, right next to the USS Intrepid. Myself and Casey arrived around 5:00 after a long car ride with a very entertaining woman chauffeur who, by the end of the trip, was trying to sell us a $50 million mansion. We checked in, brought our stuff up to our rooms, and within minutes received an email from Mike Torok that we should meet in the lobby around 6:30. After nearly throwing the in-room umbrella out of the bathroom window, we headed downstairs and met some familiar faces, as well as a new one.

After being introduced to Jesse from IGN's GTA Hood and catching up with everyone for about an hour, Bill and Amelise from Rockstar showed up to bring us to the Old Homestead Steakhouse, New York's oldest. Upon arrival, the place was packed, but after a few minutes we were led upstairs to a private dining room. After a fabulous meal including a Jenga tower of garlic bread sitting atop a pool of melted cheese, which was used as dipping sauce for basically everything else that evening, we were told that tomorrow our minds would be blown. What could possibly top tonight?



After ordering some $40 eggs from room service, I met everyone downstairs around 11:30 to be taken to Rockstar's office once again. While we ultimately ended up in the same fifth-floor conference room as last year's Chinatown Wars experience, this time we were given a quick tour of the fourth floor, the walls of which were lined with arcade-style "games from companies [Rockstar] put out of business." The environment of Rockstar's offices is unlike that of any other business setting I've seen. It has such a laid-back and relaxed atmosphere while still maintaining the feel of professionalism. Our task today was to play around with Episodes from Liberty City for both PC and PS3. The games appear very similar on PS3 to their Xbox360 equivalents, however the PC version offers superior graphics (granted you have a system capable of running it). After a few hours of gaming and pizza (sorry New York, but New Haven's is still the best), most of us were pretty exhausted. Myself, Jesse, and Simon gathered around a PS3 and were messing around with the swingset glitch. We managed to spawn a boat in just the right spot and were able to get into the boat before the swingset launched it halfway across the island. Jesse's turn wasn't as successful though, as the swingset launched the boat into him as he was walking towards it. When it was time to leave the office, we were given promises of speed boat racing, which turned out to be Rockstar slang for something totally different.

7:30 came and we loaded into a huge passenger van outside of the hotel. After a 30-minute ride into Brooklyn we pulled up in front of some place near Radegast Biergarten. We immediately saw the custom-painted Red Dead Redemption van outside, so we knew, for the most part, what was in store for us. Inside of whichever building we actually walked into was a big empty warehouse which Rockstar had personally set up to replicate a saloon from the time in which Red Dead Redemption was set. There was a guy playing the piano, girls in wild west saloon outfits serving up booze, and all of the flat screen televisions and Xbox360's were attached to hand-made gallows, each complete with a hangman's noose. This was the portion of the trip which everyone most wanted to take pictures to capture the level of detail of the environment, but since the game isn't out yet and was visible on the television screens, we were made well aware that photography was prohibited (which didn't stop me inside the US Capitol building a few years ago, but I respect Rockstar much more than the government).

We were shown a quick demo of the single player mode on the second-floor loft, but my and Kyle's attentions were turned mostly to the waitresses, who kept in character throughout most of the evening, almost like that episode of South Park in Pioneer Village. After grabbing some down home cooking, we headed downstairs and jumped on multiplayer. This was insanely fun. The modes which I can remember were free roam, and deathmatch and capture-the-bag (both individual and team modes). The map is massive and wide open. The animations and the level of graphical detail surpass that of GTA4, and what we were playing wasn't even the final build of the game. If this is any indication of what is to come in future Rockstar titles, "mind-blowing" would be an understatement. In short, when May 18th rolls around I expect everyone to be playing Red Dead Redemption. I lost track of time, and I think most of us started to leave around 2:00. It was at this point Mike Torok discovered I was a New England Patriots fan, which, based on his reaction, I don't think is a good thing. We were assured that swag would be mailed to us, since last year Chris's Lost and Damned Xbox360 got lost at customs on the way home. Myself and Casey, since we were the only ones who did not take a plane, were given Red Dead Redemption candles, shaped like a bundle of dynamite. Can you imagine trying to get that through airport security?

The next day, everyone checked out of the hotel and we hung out in the lobby until our rides arrived. Kyle, who seems to get the crappiest itinerary out of all of us every single time, was gone before I got dowstairs. Half of the group decided to take a quick trip to the Apple Store with Simon, who wanted to buy an iPad since they were less expensive here. The rest of us stayed behind and watched Andy nurse his hangover. The other half returned iPadless, just in time for the first couple of cars to arrive. Andy, myself, and Casey were the first to leave, and the rest of the Americans left shortly thereafter. Everyone said their goodbyes and thanked Rockstar for having us come out again. I don't know of any other game company who goes through this much to luxuriate their strongest supporters.