I'm just gonna say it. There's no way that all of these utility poles in Grand Theft Auto 4 are actually connected by wires. I know it looks like they all are when you play it, but this map is gigantic and there have got to be thousands of these poles all over it. Connecting all of them, even for notoriously detail-oriented game studio Rockstar Games, seems like it would be a ridiculous waste of time.
So what I'd like to know is, where did they give up? How much of a local area is- actually connected by utility poles. And do these utility poles connect to buildings or other pieces of electrical infrastructure, or are they just connected to each other?
Is there a source for all of this theoretical power in the game? A power plant, perhaps? Yes, there is. There's a power plant. That's what we're going to find out, and we're going to start by picking a random utility pole in a random neighborhood, and then we'll get out a pen and paper, follow the power lines wherever they go, and create a diagram of how everything in that neighborhood is connected.
Okay? Great. The thing is, making those diagrams always works up an appetite. So let's go grab a hot dog from one of the hot dog stands in Liberty City before we get started.
Oh, thank you. Wow, that was easy. I sure wish eating in real life could be that easy and convenient.
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I know you'll understand. Now, like I said, the first thing we're going to do with this whole electricity thing, in case you forgot, is we're basically going to take this random neighborhood and map out every electrical connection that stems from this point. That point right there.
As we go along, we'll sort of build a little diagram map thing like we do with the rivers, only it will hopefully be significantly less complicated than the rivers. We'll see. Our little utility pole will look like this. If the wires lead to another pole, we'll mark it down like this. If it connects to a house or a building, we'll mark it down like this.
I'm going to try to keep the map oriented to the north as well, but it's sort of hard for my tiny brain to constantly be reorienting itself as we move around the game. So who knows? I might give up on that, but that's the goal.
Anyway, let's take a look. So first and foremost, we've got this power pole connected to this apartment complex. Now, it's connected to the apartment complex just by going directly into the brick on the corner of the building. I don't know if that's realistic or not. That's gonna be something for me to figure out later and tell you right now.
Okay, so we have this question of how power lines actually connect to buildings in real life. I think the easiest way to answer that will be for me to just go outside and look, so I'll do that in just a second. But I would also like to pay lip service to the fact that I think it's neat.
that Rockstar bothered to connect to buildings at all, even if the spot they connect isn't fleshed out or accurate. Because honestly, would we notice if it didn't connect at all? Probably not. Grand Theft Auto 3 doesn't have any utility poles at all, and no one seemed to care. So it's cool that they went the extra mile.
Okay, come here. Oh hey look, we're outside! So I found this big church building, which I figure is a decent stand-in for the apartment complex we were looking at in the game, at least in my neighborhood, and I began the task of trying to figure out where the heck it connected to the power grid. Funnily enough, I ended up having to do basically what I- I was doing in Grand Theft Auto, but in real life. And it only took a couple of minutes around the side of the building before I located this.
I think, and I'm gonna tell you now, I'm not an expert on this at all, so please give me some grace here as I learn alongside you. But I think what we're looking at here is that the wires actually enter the building like this, and that these four anchor points are just there to hold the wires in place. This whole thing is called a service drop, which just means it's a point at which electricity enters a customer's building or house or whatever. And it's generally designed like this to protect the wires and the inside of the building from inclement weather like rain and stuff.
Go look outside your house right now and you'll probably see something similar. Anyway, let's continue. And then we've got this power pole connecting to... Two more power poles down that way. It's got a nice little mattress in the corner here.
That's nice. And then it looks like this one on the left goes to this weird building back here. Three wires coming off of that building. Two of them are going across to that building and one of them's going to that building.
Okay, that's fine. What we're actually going to do with these buildings is just represent them like this. I don't think it's actually all that relevant informationally to literally put down every single wire here. So just representing that they're all connected is more than enough. I also really love how many small details there are in this game.
This is kind of a separate thing, but like that mattress. You know, I wish I could shake the hand of the person who put the mattress there because somebody did. There's a person who in a moment in time at their job at Rockstar said, Put that mattress in that alleyway.
But also, maybe even cooler, take a look at this leaning utility pole. This is a real thing that does happen. Honestly, unless you live in a particularly well-run city or suburb, you can probably walk outside for less than 20 minutes and find one of these in your neighborhood. And the fact that someone at Rockstar decided not to just copy-paste the same utility pole across the whole city is super cool. Another thing about this leaning utility pole is that the sign hanging off of it is slightly offset from the utility pole, but also...
slightly offset with the ground, which makes it seem like the pole leaned a little bit, then they hung the sign to align with the ground, and then the pole continued to lean, meaning that the sign was no longer aligned with the pole or the ground, which is a crazy detail, and I possibly just made it up and I'm just seeing things, but it looks like that to me. Now, is a leaning utility pole, is that a bad thing? I mean, it's an eyesore.
I'm sure whether it's a safety risk is dependent on the specific situation. You know, maybe they should install one of those anchor points to straighten it out, you know, those things that, uh, from the utility poles that you thought if you touched them as a kid you would get electrocuted even though they were just there to like hold the pole in place. Now this set of utility poles continues onward from this area out towards the circumference road of the island connecting to one other building and then splitting off in two directions.
Just like every video we make, at this point I immediately realized that this was not going to be as simple an undertaking as I initially thought. I've already run out of room on my goddamn paper. However, check this out. Heading south along the road, just a few more poles in the line and we run into Boom. A utility pole that simply does not connect to anything.
Could they have connected this utility pole to the one that's less than 100 yards down the street? Probably. Would it have made an appreciable difference on the quality of Grand Theft Auto 4?
Probably not. There are actually a variety of these standalone, unconnected utility poles heading further to the south, and if you play GTA 4 for any amount of time, you'll see them scattered around the city in ways that don't end up making a ton of realistic sense. at least as far as I can tell. Now is probably a good time to tell you that I am neither an electrician nor a city planner nor an engineer. I dropped out of college.
I had a pretty bad GPA in high school. So, you know, grain of salt. I try to get at least 80% of my facts right.
And you can see the sources I used in the description. But if you know better than me, or if I say something wrong, please leave a high quality comment down below so we can upvote it and learn. Uh, the truth, together.
Heading back to that place we split off and now going north instead of south, the path splits into two directions once more. Taking the left path, we find our first commercial building on the line. Rusty Shit Salvage. That is not a curse word.
So to the guy who DM'd me saying, can you please not curse so I can show these videos to my students, it's not a curse word. Read the letters. Rusty Shit Salvage connects in much the same way as the other buildings, just by having the line go straight through the brick. There is one small point of confusion here though.
I guess one thing that's a little confusing to me about this is the fact that like, these power lines split off here, and then you've got one, two, three, like power poles, just to get power to this building. When it feels like it would be easier just to connect that right to the building, but I don't know. I'm not an electrical infrastructure engineer. I'm sure some of you nerds are. I love you guys, by the way.
You guys are my favorite. This will definitely be a common theme going forward, and there are some really pretty funny examples of this that I can show you later, but maybe there's a world where this situation doesn't necessarily make sense, but it is still realistic. I think anyone who spent any amount of time interacting with infrastructure in a serious way can vouch for the fact that it often isn't constructed in the most efficient way.
for a whole lot of reasons. So it's sometimes funny how video games can mirror that because they themselves are also a complicated team-based effort that require a myriad compromises to make into a reality, resulting in some head-scratching implementations. That is how, that's how life works, okay? Big mess. Anyway, sorry, I get so sidetracked.
I have so much to show you, I need to stay focused, okay? Do you wanna know how this local power grid ends? It goes like this, this, this.
and then this what's that you ask for some reason these power lines connect directly to one of those big construction site lighting rigs via the top of the fixture which does seem kind of weird to me you know maybe this is how these things work but i would have assumed like anything you plug these lights into some kind of outlet rather than directly rigging the high voltage line into the top of it but you know who know i don't know anything continuing beyond this lighting fixture not too far we have one two three four more utility poles and then nothing just like the path to the south it all ends uh right here with no explanation, no fanfare, No special modeling, just a lonely utility pole with nowhere to go. So at least as far as this area is concerned, let's take a look at the full electrical map. It's a thing of beauty, you know, it really is.
Worth every minute that I spent on it. But wait until you see the second one. That one's worth every hour that I spent on it.
Unfortunately, unlike the river maps, we don't actually have any way of noting the direction of flow here, because there's no actual source for any of this power. Power usually would come from a power plant. But these power lines, they just are.
They simply... be. I'm not even sure there's any proof that they're successfully bringing electricity to any of these buildings. Do these construction lines even work?
Except there is a power plant in Grand Theft Auto 4. If you've played the game through, you'll know that all the way on the westernmost island of Alderney, there is a very prominent nuclear power plant on the south end of the island called the Actor Nuclear Power Plant, which introduces a new confusion. We know that Actor Power Plant doesn't connect directly to the grid we've already mapped out, because nothing connects to that grid. But Actor Power Plant must connect to something. right?
Now when I tell you I spent a long, long time trying to figure this out. After doing laps around the power plant looking for any kind of connecting wires to the building, I gave up and just decided to look up how power plants connect to the grid in real life. Maybe that would give me some sort of a clue.
Coincidentally, I actually have a nuclear power plant, a sort of small one, pretty close to where I live in New Orleans, and what I learned from that, as well as from other local power plants, is that power plants are usually paired up with Substations. If you've ever seen one of those intimidating, death trap looking things in your city, these things here with loads of weird structures and wires, that's a substation. Usually power flows from power plant through a substation before it makes its way to the regular lines in the neighborhood.
What a substa- is gonna do is take the power from a power plant and increase the voltage a ton because higher voltage electricity travels better over distances apparently, I don't know why. You know, I'm not that guy. So I figure, you know, substations, pretty recognizable structures.
Maybe what I'll do is I'll steal a helicopter and go substation hunting in Minecraft, in Grand Theft Auto. So that's what I did. Okay, we're looking for some kind of electrical infrastructure. Sorry about the beeping. I'm really not seeing a lot.
Like, are there even any transmission lines coming off of the island is the question. This looks like some kind of prison. What is that? Oh, that's prison.
Now, all of this isn't to say that Liberty City doesn't have substations. The game has substations. The Grand Theft Auto wiki literally has an entire page dedicated to substations in every GTA game, which is amazing.
There just isn't one near the power plant, which is the first and perhaps most important place to have a substation. The closest substation to the power plant is all the way over here. Still on the same island, but in no way close enough to be the primary pass-through for all of the generated electricity heading towards the rest of the city.
Let's zoom in for a second and see what a GTA substation looks like. To the untrained eye, it actually looks pretty good. I myself have admired a variety of substations from afar, and aside from being a little smaller than the ones I normally see, this is pretty much how they look. That said, I am far from an expert on this topic, and it would, you know, it would obviously be awesome if we could get an expert. you know, like say Grady from the legendary YouTube channel Practical Engineering to take a look at it.
You know, unfortunately that's not going to happen. Anyway, here's Grady from the legendary YouTube channel Practical Engineering to tell us about the substations in Grand Theft Auto 4. You have some of the basic pieces of a distribution substation. Bus work, transformers, disconnects, scary sparking noises, but there are a lot of things missing too. For one, there's no connection to any part of the power system. Maybe it comes into the substation underground.
I don't think so given that the transformers aren't connected with any fidelity to basic principles of electrical engineering. In fact, if you follow the conductors you can see that all six bushings on each transformer are shorted together. Just to be clear, when you do this in the real world it breaks the transformer.
Presumably it's getting power from somewhere since you can hear that nice hum. I checked and the frequency is actually 60 hertz so they got that right at least. These disconnect switches between the two buses are kind of realistic, except again all three phases are connected to only one phase of the bus work on either end. The center phase of the bus work is sparking, but that's the only conductor in this whole facility that doesn't seem to be attached to anything.
This is kind of like the engineering equivalent of those paintings of cats by people who had never actually seen a cat before. Looks okay at first, but it doesn't hold up after much scrutiny. Okay, so to the untrained eye this looks pretty good.
To the trained eye... This would literally not even function. That's why it's important to defer to the experts, folks.
If you want to learn something, you should go to school for a long time, because your brain will fill up. I actually purchased Grady's book, Engineering in Plain Sight, to help me with this video, and a lot of his videos were helpful in me understanding river dynamics for the last video. Makes very excellent content. Now, there are two things that Grady mentioned that I'm going to attempt to expound upon.
Firstly, these big boxes are called transformers. The job of a transformer is to take electricity of one voltage, say a really high voltage, and convert it to another voltage, say a lower voltage. Generally, you want the electricity to go in one of these bushings at one voltage, and flow out another one of these bushings at another voltage. If you connect the two bushings together, the mismatched voltages will cause the transformer to break, and everyone in the neighborhood will lose power. Possibly there will be some kind of explosion.
Bad news all around. Secondly, this substation doesn't connect to anything, meaning that in the literal interpretation of the game environment, this substation isn't good. doing anything. Power is neither flowing in nor out, and yet it obviously is because of that 60 hertz hum that we hear. And Grady did mention this idea that the power could be coming in from underground, and while there is absolutely zero good evidence of that and no supporting digital infrastructure, bear that idea in mind because we are going to come back to it briefly later.
Grand Theft Auto 4 does have a second substation in the game. Once again, it's not actually connected to anything despite the fact that there's a utility pole right there. You know, they could have just...
boop. But, you know, whatever. I mean, it's not like any of us noticed it while playing it. Me and you, and Grady, I guess, are probably the first three people in the world to actually look at this stuff outside of the four people on the development team who put it together.
And most likely, me and you and Grady are thinking about it a hell of a lot harder than they did. Because guess what? It doesn't really matter.
Turns out, games can be awesome even if they don't have realistic electrical infrastructure. I know. Who would have thought? Anyway.
Back to the task at hand. If we had to pick a spot that could potentially represent the source of all the power in Liberty City, where would it be? Assuming we're going to be as flexible and as charitable as necessary, which piece of the electrical grid could we consider the first stop in the chain of power that creates all of the city lights, all of the advertisements, all of the office buildings? Well, after a few hours of scouring, there's only really one good candidate, and it is right here.
This utility pole can be found within the property lines of the actor nuclear power plant, and it's as close as any piece of connected infrastructure actually gets to the plant. What this means for us is that this is the point that we're going to start from when trying to figure out how big of an area this power plant covers. Because at the very least, we know it doesn't cover the first little area that we mapped.
I mean, it doesn't even make it to this substation on the same island. And frankly, I don't see how this game expects us to believe that it's gonna power the Liberty City equivalent of Times Square. I mean, for Christ's sake, you probably need a ton of power lines to keep all those billboards running in Times Square.
You probably need tons of power lines. Where are all the power lines in Times Square? There are no power lines in Times Square.
What the hell? There are definitely power lines in plenty of neighborhoods in New York City, but most of Manhattan and a lot of the other areas don't have any power lines. You know what that means, right? All of Manhattan is actually powered by individual solar panels. Just kidding.
They actually moved all of the power grid underground because of a really bad blizzard in 1888, which is incredible foresight if you think about it, and it probably causes the grid to be ridiculously annoying to repair if it breaks. On a side note, one of the many wild stories about that blizzard is that the snow was so heavy that it stopped the trains in place up on the raised tracks, and some enterprising New Yorkers, they brought ladders out to help get people down. but they would only get people down if the people would pay them money. I know we like to say that we're like way greedier and more evil than ever, but man, the things we were doing out in the open, you know, at the turn of the 20th century, crazy. I guess in some sense we've just sort of outsourced that ethical dilemma.
But in any case now what's really cool about the fact that this electricity mostly runs underground is that whether intentionally or not Rockstar did include a small reference to the underground power grid in grand theft auto 4 Run into any street light or traffic light with a car and it will break off its foundation in a shower of sparks Where do you think those sparks come from underground get up close and you'll even see wires connecting those lights onto that underground Electrical grid pretty cool rockstar big thumbs up. This revelation doesn't totally explain our previously perceived unrealism, but it does add some useful context. For example, it definitely explains why we don't see power lines all over this area of the game, because this area... is modeled after Manhattan, which doesn't have any power lines in it in real life.
And, while it doesn't excuse the total lack of visible infrastructure to indicate it, it does kind of give us a possible hint as to why the development team may have foregone including an above-ground connection between the substations and other power infrastructure. Here's a picture of a substation in Brooklyn, New York, that has no visible above-ground connections to the grid. Here's another one in Lower Manhattan that not only has no above-ground connections, but is also semi-indoors. Now, we don't have the luxury of seeing inside these substations to figure out how to get to the ground.
figure out how they may connect to that underground grid, but we can at least see how, if they were going based on, you know, scouting photographs, Rockstar may have thought substations in New York are just standalone little sites of their own. That said, it still doesn't make any sense to have these substations right next to a bunch of above ground utility poles with power lines. You know, your grid is either underground or not underground. You can't have it both ways. Maybe you can, I don't know.
So how does this happen? How does a game end up with substations that are realistic for an area and power lines that are realistic for the area? but accidentally put those two things together, canceling out the believability of both of them. While one, who cares, and two, one of the coolest things about- Video games is that they are top-down representations of real-life spaces. Developers, artists, spend a long time looking at, listening to, absorbing the energy of a space.
And then they recreate that space from its constituent parts. There's no fundamental understanding of the space itself, and there doesn't need to be. The developers of Grand Theft Auto 4 know that Manhattan feels like Manhattan, partly because of its lack of power lines, and so they don't add power lines to Manhattan. They may not have even thought that the reason Manhattan doesn't have power lines is because they're all underground, and they don't need to think about that. They're just capturing a space.
It's top down. Does that make sense? If not...
Don't really worry about it. That's not the point of the video. What is the point of the video is mapping out the power grid.
So as we said, we're going to call this utility pole the power plant for all intents and purposes. And from here, we're going to map out every connection on the grid. Get ready because it's a doozy.
I'll do my best to get through it quickly. The lines run north to another utility pole that then splits off with one connection going to this little trailer inside of an industrial park that looks like it's an office for the workers, but is actually apparently a place that either makes or sells Hot dogs. The other line continues north and then east and then it splits off again. Following the north east past along the road takes us across five more utility poles and then a sixth that has not a two-way split, not a three-way split, but a four-way split. I know.
Let's take the south heading line first which immediately leads to another pole with a three-way split. Both of these lines also lead to two more three-way splits now what it turns out is that this particular section of the grid down here by the power plant has a lot of interconnectedness a lot of sections that just loop back on themselves. This makes it really annoying to map because unless you have a really good memory of exactly what each power line looks like or a really methodical way of measuring distance between the poles, you are not going to easily know whether this section you're mapping is a new section or just an old section that you're retreading because you didn't recognize it. I was literally using a pen and paper to try and draw this out.
I'll put a picture of it up right now. So I ended up having to redraw these diagrams from scratch like four or five times as I realized I needed to be connecting disparate portions together. Now what ultimately ends up happening is something like this. From the four-way split, we go south and then east, and then this loops back around to the south to meet back up with two of those splits.
This easternmost line goes north along the road and then splits again, one line of which goes back west to connect to the four-way split from before. These two lines toward the south both head west separately, but eventually meet up at this point beneath the overpass. I don't know what... the heck this is. It kind of looks like they were supposed to put a utility pole there and they just forgot.
So then it's just a jumble of wires. You'll have to email Rockstar. And then this spot goes back west and ta-da, it meets up with the two-way split that we talked about earlier.
Zooming back out, we've got two lines headed north. The good news is that these lines do actually connect and form a nice complete circle. The bad news is there are two more lines shooting off in different directions. We'll tackle this one to the east first. It's more or less straightforward heading east and then north and then immediately terminating with two points.
along this road here, one further north and one to the east. The other path, going north, connects to the dirtiest police station you'll ever see. And then from that police station, it also heads up further west with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight more utility poles.
Are we done? Nope. Now I'm gonna need an electrician or something to help me explain what's going on here because I've got a line going north, connecting to a building, and then it keeps going and loops back around from the north to connect to the same building again.
And then the southern split also goes south. but then loops back around to connect to the same building a third time? Is there a reason why you would ever need that to happen? Especially of a small building like this?
I don't know. So are we done? Nope, there's another offshoot. Thankfully, this one just goes across two utility poles and then mercifully terminates by connecting to the refinery on the west side of the island.
That's it. That's the whole grid. Shall we look at it together? Wow. It's beautiful.
Now I put it together in such a way that we can actually overlay it on top of the map in Grand Theft Auto so you can see kind of what we're looking at. It's not perfect. I prioritized diagram aesthetics over proportionality, so you know, it mismatches a little bit, but I think, and I'm fairly confident, I think this is the single biggest collection of connected utility poles in the entire game. So, what have we learned?
I honestly don't really remember, so let me just leave you with one of my favorite video game observations ever. The power plant that powers the lights in my apartment in New Orleans right here is the Nine Mile Point Entergy No. 5 natural gas power plant in Nine Mile Point, Louisiana. The power plant that powers the lights in Nico Bellic's apartment in Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4 is also the Nine Mile Point Entergy No. 5 natural gas power station in Nine Mile Point, Louisiana. Absolutely incredible. I'm Eddie Austin.
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