Streamer Tom Walker on the "slapstick" experience of finally beating GTA IV with super fast cars
“When my life flashes before my eyes, at least some of the footage is going to be GTA IV now, and that sucks.”
Over the past year, nothing has consistently sent me into a giggling fit like stand-up comedian and Twitch streamer Tom Walker’s “fast traffic” playthrough of Grand Theft Auto 4. Using a mod where the cars move at near-light speed, Tom’s attempt to complete the game while ducking and weaving out of the way of unpredictable and terrifyingly fast cars never failed to delight me.
Tom is an entertaining streamer with a creative and welcoming community, and the mod itself provides many opportunities for surprise and delight.The game seems to somehow take a perverse delight in lulling Tom and his viewers into a false sense of security before immediately hurling a car directly at the protagonist Niko’s head.
After over a year of Sisyphean attempts, Tom finally beat the base game of GTA IV. The final missions were uploaded to YouTube last week, and are a hilarious cap to that portion of the project. But Tom’s not done: After a few weeks away from the game, he returned to the world of GTA IV Monday by starting a similar attempt at the game’s motorcycle-focused DLC, The Lost and Damned. You can find his streams at twitch.tv/tomwalker as well as a full playlist of edited highlights on Tom’s YouTube channel.
I spoke with Tom over a video call this week – we covered the origins of the idea, highlights from the experience, what he learned, the relationship between improv comedy and online streaming, and what’s next for one of the funniest creators on Twitch.
This interview has been edited lightly for content and clarity.
How did this idea first come to you?
I got served a video of someone just playing the game with the mod, no camera, no talking about it, just watching Nico fly around with [invulnerability mod] God mode on. And it was really good. But I thought, Wow, what if someone was in the corner, being really frustrated the entire time?
The immediate slapstick appeal of it was huge. If you crank the cars up to unbelievable amounts, everything happens at the speed of a Looney Tunes cartoon, so you would just get wiped off the screen like Elmer Fudd. I didn't think it was going to be a full thing. I thought I'll play this once, and that'll be fine. But unfortunately, I am a stubborn-brained freak who's imprinted on much worse games and finished much, much stupider things for much less reward.
I’m always surprised how well the game’s physics engine seems to hold it all together.
Yeah, it's able to deal with these forces that are far beyond our comprehension. I'm amazed that, with friction completely taken out of it, it's able to keep up with a car ping-ponging around in an enclosed space and throwing itself out into the ocean. GTA wasn't an especially easy-to-optimize game at launch, and even now, this computer was designed to do much more than play Grand Theft Auto IV, and it'll struggle with playing Grand Theft Auto IV.
What was your prior experience with GTA IV?
I played it when it came out. I remember playing it an insane amount. When did it come out? Let me look that up, because I want to be anchored here. [Quick Googling.]
It came out in 2008, which is disappointing to me, because I remembered playing it as a very young boy and really wasting a lot of time on it that I could afford to waste. And then the fact that it came out in 2008 means I was, at minimum, 19. That sucks, because I remember the amount of time I sat in front of it and just zoned out. All I would do is play the classical music station and drive around in a taxi and just pretend I was in this brown-and-gray version of New York City.
The fact that I was doing that at 19 rather than 15 … it’s a heartbreaking four-year difference, dude. Importantly, the legal drinking age here is 18. I should have had enough friends that I don’t have enough ambient memories [of GTA IV]. When my life flashes before my eyes, at least some of the footage is going to be GTA IV now, and that sucks. I’ve misspent so much of my life.
One of my favorite parts of the last stream of the base game was when you finished one of the two possible final missions. There was a moment where it seemed like you might be done, that you wouldn’t go back to do the other one. And then you came back and said you hoped that once you finish all the missions, and this is a direct quote, you would “get it out of [your] system and feel fine.” Do you feel fine?
Yeah, I do. I do!
I feel like finishing the game and putting an exclamation mark there felt so good because that was going for so long. With the branching mission paths, one of the missions was harder than the other. Luckily, the harder one was second. So that meant there was still a feeling of building up to it. But the most difficult stuff was long before that.
There were two missions that were incredibly painful, which were the bank job mission and the escort mission when you're trying to get Phil Bell to a speed boat. Both of those had so many heartbreaking failure points. So, in part, I needed an ending. Basically, I was on a quest for closure, which is what I got by doing both endings. I was like, okay, good. This is done. I'm going to take a few weeks’ break, and then go back to the DLC if I want to. It felt good to get to a point where I'm like, I am coming back to this of my own free will. I am not driven by the devil to complete this.
What have you learned about yourself doing this?
If I've learned something, it's that I can really become superstitious and look for meaning as an escape from the vicissitudes of an uncaring world. It is more fun to hop on one leg in a circle backwards, saying, No car, no car, no car, no car. It's so easy to see a cruel God behind the hand of a car, to picture the hand of something throwing it at you, rather than just accept that it was throwing itself at you. Because some of the stuff that happened, I legitimately cannot believe. If you're falling through the air and then get hit by a car while jumping, the odds of that are so infinitesimally small.
I wasn’t raised Christian. I don’t have any religious beliefs. But this was a real case of finding out Man, I’m one lightning strike away from running into my hut and making an idol of whoever I thought threw that bolt.
What’s a highlight that sticks out to you from this experience?
I have to give a humongous shout out to the Twitch user Wood Elemental, who is an absolute fucking mad man. He actually finished the game on his own before I did, just for fun. He made a spreadsheet of each mission and ranked them by difficulty, and made sure that he worked out what the cars are that you need to change so that the necessary cars are drivable. He did so much that I felt like I had a Q back at base who was helping me every step of the way.
Did you feel like you struck the right balance with the workarounds, in terms of the cars you had to modify to make them drivable within the chaos?
Ultimately, I think if there's one thing I've learned on Twitch, you have to have an elevator pitch. He's playing GTA but all the cars go stupidly fast. I think that that works, that sounds funny. The next thing you have to do is get an elevator pitch for the rules that you're following, which is just that if a car is necessary to complete a mission, then I will make it drivable, and it will stay drivable. I will basically “unlock” it. It did get to a point where too many of them were unlocked, and I went back and reset some of the ones that weren't going to become useful again.
There was one mission that I skipped eventually, because it was the mission where you drive a truck that has a bomb installed in it, and the bomb will go off if you get hit too much. You had to drive it a long, long route across a bridge. To me, it seemed like that was completely impossible. That one was just written off. I think I could potentially go back and finish now…
Careful! You might talk yourself into it.
I know, this is the problem.
I think as long as it's a challenge that you're setting for yourself, and everyone knows that, and as long as the challenge makes sense, and it's still incredibly difficult and stupid and with a high probability of failing, then I think we’re all good with communication. I think the cleanliness of “every car goes fast until it is needed for a mission, and then it's safe forever" is good. And it would also mean, for instance, after we unlocked the Blista Compact, when I would see one of those in the background, my whole face would light up. I adore that fucking little car.
Do you have a favorite genre of Niko death animation?
Yes, 100%. Favorite genre, by far: Car flying at exactly head level, sending him cartwheeling in such a way that Nico is essentially able to do the “you can’t do this on concrete” move of going from standing to “capture elements, Control+T, flip vertical” – that transition into instant death. That’s my favorite by far. I also liked the slow pinwheel off into the background, Team Rocket-style.
I loved when you got to the point where you were accepting the inevitability of a car hitting you, and you were rooting for Niko’s boddy to collide with something funny.
Sometimes, you’re going in there with your own pencil, making your own silver linings on the cloud.
I’m a person without a car who frequently walks around a city filled with fast-driving cars that don't seem to care about the law or my life. Do you have any survival tips for me?
I think this has genuinely made me a safer or more paranoid cyclist. If there’s one person who articulates the feeling of being Niko Bellic in fast-car GTA, it’s any cyclist in any city of the world. You are essentially PvP-flagged no matter what you do.
Look both ways and ascribe no rational behavior to the person behind the wheel, because the car will be flying behind you no matter what. You can go ahead and calculate trajectories as much as you want, but fundamentally, if you are the deer in the headlights, then you’ve got to get out of the headlights.
As someone who does both, how do you see the relationship between improv comedy and Twitch streaming?
When you see a stand-up do crowd work, usually it's to grease the wheels at the start of a set. You become more relatable. It gives you some stuff to talk about. You can call back to it. I feel like crowd work is a lot like Twitch streaming.
In my mind, the greatest Twitch streamer to ever do it is Northernlion. I've ostensibly watched Northernlion do things that I would never watch a live human being do. I've watched him play stuff that has been so anathema to my interests. It's the equivalent of John Mulaney playing Crusader Kings III, because he’s able to freewheelingly associate and riff on anything and talk about, importantly, anything on his mind, not the stuff in the game. The stuff in the game is so tangential to what is happening.
My goal is to maintain a flow of free, easy conversation that is not dependent on the game having anything happening in it. It's way more important in games that aren't serving up something interesting every second of the way. If you're playing Trackmania, where all you're doing is driving the same race course over and over again for an hour, that's a different conversational itch. But I find that you want to strike a balance of chat engagement and kind of rambling and then turning your attention back to the thing at hand.
But the interesting thing about streaming is, with crowd work in a comedy club, you would be asking the questions, leading someone into it. You wouldn't have a guy standing up in the club going, Hey, just so you know, I'm naked. Sorry about that. But also, I just dropped a slice of my wedding cake on my penis while I was watching. Which is something that happened during my stream.
So next for you is the motorcycle-focused DLC, The Lost and Damned.
I’m feeling like I’m gonna have subtitles turned off, because it turns out that bikers, in our understanding of how they talked in 2008 … back in 2008 they were not so woke, the bikers. Ideally, I would remove the dialogue files from the game entirely. I would adore a “every dialog moves 9999x speed,” that would be ideal.
Tom Walker recommends
Wanderstop: This is the most a game has ever resonated with me emotionally. It's the only game that I've left feeling like I'm a better person for playing it, and not in any kind of fucking highfalutin way. I am more conscious of my relationship to work and the people around me than I was before I double clicked a thing on Steam, which is such an insane achievement. And also it's funny! It's funny and good, and you'll like it.
The Goo Crew: Our little subset of people on Twitch who are funny, and don’t worry, they have good politics, and also they’re chill. Thelukeman and DeadBlossomJesse are two streamers who are really fucking funny. Luke does a Fortnite talk show. He jumps into any game of Fortnite with his mic on, and then as soon as they load in, he hits them with the “Hey everybody, welcome to Fortnite Talk Show!” He's recently happened upon a technology that is beyond compare, which is using a recorded woman's voice asking if anyone has a mic to get them to first talk, so they can't weasel their way out of it. But he just chats with people online and it's appointment TV.
DeadBlossomJesse is someone who is insanely funny. You may know them from breaking their neck in a spinning wooden box on Twitch, which is really a hell of a claim to fame, but they are also just incredibly funny and a hard-working streamer who has the the most fucked-up ideas in the business.