Even Better Than The Real Thing

Activision’s new True Crime: New York City video game as reviewed by True Manhattan Tour Guides in the New Yorker:

To design True Crime’s virtual city, six location scouts walked the borough of Manhattan with maps and digital cameras, taking photographs of practically every intersection and major landmark. Through the use of proprietary 3-D imaging software, the resulting eleven thousand images were transformed into a coherent representation of the entire island. “We tried to make it a real living, breathing city,” Simon Ebejer, an Activision producer, said.

The question of whether the game’s designers succeeded was put, one recent afternoon, to two professional tour guides: Paul Rush, who leads independent sightseeing groups, and Seth Kamil, the founder of Big Onion Walking Tours.

. . .

The initial response of both licensed tour guides was pleasant surprise. “That’s not terrible,” Kamil said when he got his first glimpse of digitalized Stuyvesant Town. “The scaffolding is perfect. That’s as right as it gets.” Zipping from neighborhood to neighborhood (the absence of traffic is the most unrealistic aspect of the landscape), the guides were impressed by the attention paid to small details: the hexagonal paving stones in Central Park; the counterfeit-Rolex dealers along Broadway; the yellow sidewalk boxes of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and the way they all seemed to be stuffed with trash.

Some things were amiss, however:

Somehow, practically every statue in the city — George M. Cohan, in Duffy Square; the Maine Memorial, in Columbus Circle; Hans Christian Andersen, in Central Park — seemed to have become George Washington being sworn in on the steps of Federal Hall. The only place the guides couldn’t find him was on the steps of Federal Hall, because Federal Hall itself was missing. A quick check identified additional absentee landmarks, including the Apollo Theatre, the Intrepid, and New Jersey. (True Crime’s Battery Park City has fabulous views of the open ocean.)

But more often than not, the level of detail seemed just about right:

Kamil and Rush ended their virtual tour in Times Square, where Marcus came face to face with one final landmark: a long-haired man dressed only in a cowboy hat, boots, and tight white briefs, strumming a guitar. Suddenly, an obvious thought intruded on the afternoon’s experiment — the fun of a simulation like True Crime: New York City is not that it re-creates the city perfectly but that it re-creates the city just well enough to allow a player to have adventures that are forbidden in real life.

A few buttons on the controller were jabbed in rapid succession, and Marcus swung hard at the figure with the guitar. A few more jabs and a switch to Tae Kwon Do mode, and the Naked Cowboy was on his hands and knees, moaning and trying to crawl away. A final press of a button brought a hail of gunfire. “Now, that is a nice touch,” Rush declared.