GTA IV Episodes from Liberty City: The Last Story DLC

Episodes from Liberty City is the pack that bundles The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, the two GTA 4 expansions released in 2009. To this day, they’re the last real single-player DLC ever put out for a GTA. Sixteen years later, with Grand Theft Auto VI on the way and not a single story expansion announced, let’s look back at the high point of a genre the studio buried itself.

The Lost and Damned: Liberty City from the Gutter

On February 17, 2009, Rockstar dropped The Lost and Damned, the first expansion for Grand Theft Auto IV, on Xbox 360. You play as Johnny Klebitz, vice president of the biker club The Lost, a grimy Alderney crew eaten away by gang wars and drugs. Where Niko Bellic was chasing redemption, Johnny is holding together a brotherhood that’s tearing itself apart from within. The tone is darker, more jaded, carried by writing that’s unusually harsh for add-on content.

On the gameplay side, the episode adds turf wars, the ability to call your club brothers in for backup, a whole set of motorcycles and new weapons: sawed-off shotgun, grenade launcher, automatic pistol, Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs. A full transplant, not just a skin pack.

The Ballad of Gay Tony: Neon, Parachutes and Excess

Eight months later, on October 29, 2009, The Ballad of Gay Tony takes the exact opposite tack. You play as Luis Fernando Lopez, bodyguard and business partner to Anthony “Gay Tony” Prince, the fallen king of Liberty City nightlife. The gray of the outer boroughs is gone: in come the upscale clubs, the helicopters and a flashy, almost parodic energy that recalls the excess of Vice City.

It’s also the most gameplay-packed episode: a parachute and base jumping, an explosive shotgun, gold-plated weapons, an assault chopper, and a flood of mini-games (managing the clubs, dancing, drinking, cage fights, timed jumps). Many consider it the best way to play GTA IV, given how much fun it injects where the base game cultivated a heavy realism.

The Real Feat: Three Stories That Interweave

What earned Episodes from Liberty City its place in DLC legend isn’t just the amount of content. It’s the structure. Johnny’s and Luis’s campaigns unfold alongside Niko’s, in the same Liberty City, on the same dates. A botched diamond deal passes from hand to hand between the three protagonists, each episode casting a fresh light on scenes you’d already seen in the original game. You run into Niko mid-mission, you finally understand who was on the other end of a shootout. It’s a narrative puzzle, rare at this scale, that turns a city into a stage with three points of view.

Why Rockstar Never Did It Again

So why did this model disappear? The first reason is a check. Microsoft paid Take-Two around $50 million to keep these two episodes exclusive to the Xbox 360, before they were ported to PS3 and PC in 2010. That kind of deal doesn’t come around easily. The second reason runs deeper: episodic content brought in less than expected, and above all, GTA Online arrived.

After them, Rockstar signed off on just one more single-player expansion, Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption in 2010, before closing the book for good. The story DLC promised for GTA V was canceled, Red Dead Redemption 2 never got any, and these days the studio extends its worlds with a monetized online mode rather than paid campaigns. Johnny Klebitz’s fate sums up the era: the hero of The Lost and Damned is dispatched in seconds at the start of GTA V, killed by Trevor, a cruel symbol of the end of an era. To understand this shift and what it signals, read our analysis of single-player DLC and GTA 6, our GTA IV retrospective and our coverage of the GTA 6 release date.

Episodes from Liberty City remains a one-of-a-kind thing: the moment Rockstar proved that a DLC could be a complete work in its own right. We’re still waiting for a studio, its own included, to dare do it again. Alfred, GTA Zone.