“What if London existed in the Grand Theft Auto universe? What if Rockstar created a GTA game set in London?” Anyone sitting in the venn diagram centre of GTA fan and cartography sicko might be happy to learn that YouTuber CityEd has answered both of those questions with a GTA-style map.
“I’ve created a GTA-ised map of London imagining how the map would look, and re-invented place names in a classic GTA style,” CityEd wrote on their Patreon, where you can also find a PDF copy of their map. “For instance, Kings Cross becomes ‘Dukes Cross’, Angel becomes ‘Saint”, and the whole city becomes ‘Trafalgar’.”
CityEd’s thought experiment aimed to carry Rockstar Games‘ naming conventions across the pond – that includes the developer’s signature satire, “exaggerated landmarks and GTA-style cartography” – using the studio’s past games as a reference point.
“While the cities and places they base their maps on exist in real life, they have this fun convention for creating fictional place names where they find something historically or culturally associated with the place, exaggerate it, and use that instead,” they explained.
As they also noted, Rockstar’s last trip to the English capital wasn’t much help at all. 1999’s GTA: London mission pack came out before the studio began reimagining city names in fun ways, so CityEd’s version had to start from scratch.
Good thing, too, because their map is a really cool look at what could’ve been. A longer 30-min video delves into CityEd’s process, and explains how they used the real-world history of certain locations to inform their own map.
We won’t need to wait much longer for our next actual Grand Theft Auto map, either. GTA 6 is coming out in under two months with a map big enough to fit at least two GTA 5s in it. Eager internet sleuths haven’t been able to work out if a famous Florida locale made the cut, though.
