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The similarities between Los Santos and Los Angeles are well-documented—the GTA fansite GTAist offers perhaps the most definitive proof of this, in which a fan recreates 22 stills from the game, showing the painstaking detail the team at Rockstar Games put into rendering the virtual world. One of the highlights of any GTA is the vivid setting they take place in, but in previous games the host cities were smaller; more like Epcot replicas than the real thing. Even GTA IV, which rendered a New York full of shadows and grays, failed to recreate the part of Brooklyn I lived in, eschewing the hipster milieu of Brooklyn and Greenpoint and instead focusing on the drab industrial wasteland it had once been. (Though it's worth mentioning that some elements of Williamsburg were folded into BOABO, the game's version of BK's tech-y, hip DUMBO neighborhood.)When, six months ago, I moved from New York to Los Angeles, it was already like I knew the place. On one of my first days in the city, I drove from Venice to Santa Monica, and then to Beverly Hills, continuing upwards into the Hollywood Hills. I'd seen all of it before—the place in Venice (Vespucci in GTA V) where Michael vented to his mindless therapist; the Santa Monica (Del Perro) pier where Trevor snipes the crooked federal agent Steve Haines; Rodeo Drive (Portola Drive) where, as the gold-hearted gang-banger Franklin, I'd gone to buy myself some new clothes. I took in the Hollywood sign, rendered in the game as the Vinewood sign. It's sensations of familiarity that make a strange place feel more like home—even if I was seeing this stuff for the first time, I'd already been there virtually, and with few real friends to my name in the city, it was as close to a welcome as I was likely to get.
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