GTA IV: The Real New York Behind Liberty City

Niko Bellic reaches Liberty City in 2008 aboard the cargo ship Platypus, and the city's best-known landmark sits on an island the game calls Happiness Island: the Statue of Happiness, holding a coffee cup where a torch should be. The real Liberty Island holds the Statue of Liberty, a copper-clad gift from the people of France, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi with a metal framework by Gustave Eiffel. Since 2019 the island has also had a museum that keeps the statue's original torch — the very thing the game's statue gives up.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, which the game calls Happiness Island.

Visitor guidance: The statue and the museum are on the same small island, 1.6 miles from the Battery in Lower Manhattan.

Lift your eyes in Broker, the game's Brooklyn, and there is a triumphal arch: the real Grand Army Plaza, the main entrance to Prospect Park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed it in 1867 as a grand entrance meant to separate the noisy city from the calm nature of the park. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch, the Bailey Fountain and a John F. Kennedy monument share the space, and the plaza took its present name in 1926, sixty years after the Grand Army of the Republic was founded.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Grand Army Plaza at the main entrance to Prospect Park, in the game's Broker.

Visitor guidance: The plaza is the main entrance to Prospect Park.

The game's Coney Island is Brooklyn's, wooden coaster and all: the Cyclone is the real one, opened on 26 June 1927 to a design by Vernon Keenan and still running 2,640 feet of track at up to 60 miles per hour, 75 feet up at the high point. The structure standing there is the historic one — a New York City designated landmark since 1988 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991 — and Luna Park runs it today, a short walk in from the sand.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Cyclone in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the coaster the game copied.

Visitor guidance: The coaster runs inside Luna Park at Coney Island.

Liberty City starts sealed: in the story the bridges are locked down because of a terrorist threat, and crossing one brings the police down on you. Among the crossings is the Algonquin Bridge, which is the real Manhattan Bridge — a suspension span of 6,855 feet designed by Leon Moisseiff, linking Lower Manhattan at Canal Street with Downtown Brooklyn at the Flatbush Avenue Extension. Traffic first crossed on 31 December 1909, streetcars followed in 1912, and subway trains have run beneath it since 1915.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Manhattan Bridge, which the game renames the Algonquin Bridge.

Sam Houser found the real Brighton Beach "pretty incredible", and Liberty City's Hove Beach is it: a Brooklyn neighbourhood on the Atlantic, long known as Little Odessa, or Little Russia, for its high population of Russian-speaking immigrants. The game's name is a joke of the same kind, stitched together from the English towns Brighton and Hove. The real place took its name in the 1870s as an allusion to the English resort city, and it is still a summer destination, with the beach and the Coney Island amusement parks on its doorstep.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks real Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, which the game calls Hove Beach.

Visitor guidance: A neighbourhood on the Atlantic beach, next to the Coney Island amusement parks.

Rockstar took in the standing remains of the 1964 New York World's Fair, in Liberty City's Dukes borough — Queens. The real site is Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, a public park built for the 1939 fair and used again in 1964, now the fourth-largest park in the city at 897 acres. Enough survives to be worth the trip: the Unisphere, the New York State Pavilion, the New York Hall of Science and the Queens Museum, with the US Open tennis centre and Citi Field in the same park.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, where the 1964 World's Fair remains stand.

Visitor guidance: The Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion are a short walk apart; the park also hosts the US Open.

Rockstar pushed New York's great green rectangle a little to one side and renamed it Middle Park, keeping it in the middle of Algonquin. The real Central Park runs 843 acres between the Upper West and Upper East Sides: the sixth-largest park in the city, the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors in 2016. Its shape is the Greensward Plan, the 1858 design competition that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won together.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Central Park, which the game sets back and calls Middle Park.

Liberty City's loudest intersection is Star Junction, and it is Times Square: the junction of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. The square was Longacre Square until 1904, when The New York Times moved its headquarters into the then new Times Building, now One Times Square, and the name stuck. Roughly 330,000 people pass through on an ordinary day and an estimated 50 million visit in a year.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Times Square, which the game calls Star Junction.

Visitor guidance: The New Year's Eve ball drops here every 31 December.

The Empire State Building appears as the Rotterdam Tower, and it is the tallest building in the game. The real tower was designed in the Art Deco style by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and constructed between 1930 and 1931; it stands 1,454 feet from the street to the tip of its antenna, and it was the world's tallest building until the North Tower of the World Trade Center was topped out in 1970. It has been in more than 250 television series and films since King Kong took it over in 1933, and around four million visitors a year ride up to its observatories.

Location precision: Liberty City is fictional; the pin marks the real Empire State Building, the Rotterdam Tower of Liberty City.

Visitor guidance: The 86th- and 102nd-floor observatories draw millions a year; the views start above Midtown.