From the Empire State Building to the Statue of Liberty, there’s no shortage of timeless and striking landmarks in the iconic city of New York. The Big Apple has been represented in every type of media imaginable, inspiring some of the most prominent and widely-received movies, music, and literature ever created.
New York’s representation in video games spans a wide variety of genres that each show off the city that never sleeps in its own unique and memorable ways. Its huge looming skyscrapers and bustling city skyline act as the perfect backdrop to house some of the most memorable experiences in gaming. Here are some of the very best games set in New York City.
10 Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy)
With its original release in 2005, Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in North America) revolutionized video game storytelling, thanks to its thought-provoking narrative that bridged together the worlds of cinema and games.
You take control of multiple characters as a murderous plot unravels in a blisteringly cold and gloomy New York City. Fahrenheit was way ahead of its time and included an intriguing story of investigative mystery where your choices mattered. New York poses as the perfect backdrop to house this noir tale of the paranormal and takes much inspiration from movies based in New York, including Seven and Angel Heart.
9 True Crime: New York City
Another relic of the past, True Crime: New York City is the sequel to True Crime: Streets of LA, and is an ambitious open-world city sandbox that puts you in the role of a police officer looking to clean up the streets of Manhattan.
The game’s depiction of New York is impressively detailed for a game from 2005 and included a stellar cast of voice actors to accompany a strong story. The gameplay mechanics certainly left a lot to be desired at the time and even more so now, and as a result, it couldn’t compete with the more popular Grand Theft Auto series. Still, it was a joy to cruise around New York, passing by faithful recreations of some of the most iconic landmarks the city has to offer.
8 Peter Jackson’s King Kong
Movie tie-in games usually have no business being any good, thanks to a history of rushed shovel-ware titles being pushed out to coincide with a film’s release. Luckily, this wasn’t the case for Peter Jackson’s King Kong, as plenty of thought and care was put into its video game counterpart.
You play as both the film's lead character, Jack Driscoll, and King Kong in their own dedicated levels. Eventually, you’ll end up in New York where you get to go ape in a 1930s version of the Big Apple as Kong himself. After smashing through some pesky police and chucking a few cars about, you’ll get to relive the age-old iconic image of everyone’s favorite giant gorilla running rampant on the top of the Empire State Building.
7 Assassin’s Creed 3
Long before the city had towering skyscrapers or streets littered with Wall Street yuppies, New York was once a humble up-and-coming port town that was the heart of trade and commerce. Assassin’s Creed 3 takes you to an 18th-century version of New York, right at the start of the American Revolution.
It does a fantastic job of transporting you back to this revolution-era take on Manhattan as you roam around the British-occupied streets as the Assassin, Conner. Just as with any early Assassin's Creed game, the combat and parkour feel great while clambering over the city’s rooftops and taking out the British redcoats with the nasty assassination takedowns and brutal finishers the series is known for.
6 Ghostbusters: The Video Game
The Ghostbusters video game is often thought of as the continuation of the Ghostbusters story that ended in 1989. It’s essentially the third movie fans never got, with much of the original cast reprising their roles.
It takes place in a ghost-infested New York in the early '90s, where you play a fresh-faced rookie looking to prove himself as a worthy addition to the team. The missions have you proton-beaming an assortment of ghosts, ghouls, and possessed marshmallow creatures in iconic locales, including the city’s Natural History Museum, the New York Public Library, Central Park, and even the team’s fictional base, the Ghostbusters Firehouse.
5 Prototype
Prototype offers one of the more interesting ways to traverse New York, as you take on the role of Alex Mercer, a biologically enhanced acrobatic shape-shifter. In addition to being able to grow literal claws and blades out of his fists, Mercer has a whole host of fancy traversal abilities up his sleeve, which makes getting around Manhattan a breeze.
Skyscrapers no longer pose an obstacle as you can speedily run up and glide off of them with ease, while also being able to sprint with extreme speed and jump to great heights. When mastered, you can put all of this together in a glorious chain of free-flowing souped-up Parkour that would put any white-hooded assassin to shame. Although not the most inspired depiction of New York, it’s still interesting to see the city under lockdown due to an all-encompassing and life-threatening supernatural virus.
4 Max Payne
The first Max Payne is set in a film noir take of New York, solely taking place over the course of three gloomy evenings in a city completely covered in snow.
You spend most of your time in expensive high-rise apartments and grimy run-down drug dens, as the famous skyline takes a bit of a backseat to the seedy underbelly of the city. It does a great job of capturing a gritty neo-noir tone that takes inspiration from various hard-boiled detective novels and iconic New York-based movie classics such as Taxi Driver. It was the first step in solidifying Remedy as a master of video game storytelling.
3 Tom Clancy’s The Division
New York in Tom Clancy’s The Division is not a very nice place to be. After a viral outbreak that has decimated the population, the city has become a desolate quarantine zone of disorder and chaos as lawless bands of scavengers fight for territory and resources. It’s up to you and your merry band of agents to liberate the city and bring order to a post-apocalyptic New York.
It's infectiously atmospheric and full of incredible detail as you run around a snowy Christmas-themed New York, shooting and looting in its sparse streets. You can even stumble across the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, but be careful as they are located within the dangerously untamed Dark Zone - a place where both risk and reward are in abundant supply.
2 Grand Theft Auto 4
Grand Theft Auto 4’s Liberty City is New York in everything but name, as it depicts one of the most fully realized video game adaptations of the city to date. You can drive around and find all the major landmarks, including Times Square, Central Park, and even a satirical representation of The Statue of Liberty holding a coffee cup instead of a torch.
The fourth installment of the GTA series brought with it more side activities to play around with in its sandbox, which made the world feel much more fully realized. It was as effective at depicting the city’s gritty and violent underbelly as it was at representing the frustrating feeling of receiving unwanted phone calls from persistent bowling-obsessed family members.
1 Marvel’s Spider-Man
There have been many iterations of Spider-Man’s New York, but Marvel’s Spider-Man’s Big Apple is definitely the most visually impressive it has ever looked, and is by far the most exhilaratingly fun way of traversing the iconic city.
Though not a one-to-one scale representation, it beautifully depicts the city with an impressive degree of detail. It also helps that the web-slinging is the best it has ever been, allowing you to swing, zip, and wall-run at breakneck speed. It feels fantastic to dash up the impressive One World Trade building for a quick selfie using the game’s stellar photo mode - you may even catch a glimpse of the Avengers Tower photo-bombing you in the background. The remastered version of the game looks even better with its enhanced models, lighting, and ray-tracing.