Exploring a fake city’s fake history
Granted, Grand Theft Auto V‘s city of Los Santos doesn’t actually have a history. It didn’t exist before September 2013, after all, despite Rockstar’s painstaking attempt to convince you otherwise through their trademark detailed world design. While it’s obviously based on the real-life Los Angeles, it comes with a centuries-long invented history all its own, ostensibly shaping the city into the state it’s presented to the player in.
I find that immensely fascinating — and so does professional games analyzer Any Austin, who has about the closest thing to a dream job I can imagine. He’s been featured on this site before for his deep dives into world design in big-budget games, putting these handcrafted worlds to the test in a variety of ways naturally appealing to gaming nerds like me. This time around, he’s taking a long look at the history of Los Santos and the city itself to try and find the oldest building on the map.
…Granted, every building is actually exactly as old as every other building (September 2013, remember?), but it’s about the fantasy here. As someone who lives in the real Los Angeles, I can already tell this is going to make the simple act of walking down the street that much more engrossing.
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