Upstate Liberty

“There was never meant to be anything on the other end of the tunnel, we were just playing with ways to make the world feel like it continues past the physical boundary. It’s something that we’ve been pushing in all sorts of ways ever since, making the world you experience as a player feel like it’s part of something bigger. This tunnel was one of our first little baby steps in that direction”

— Grand Theft Auto III: Your Questions Answered – Part Two, Rockstar Games, January 5, 2012.

Upstate Liberty is a unseen geographic region of the State of Liberty, mentioned in Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.

Description[]

Upstate consists of the portion of the State of Liberty lying north of Cedar Ridge in Shoreside Vale. Little to no information is given about this area.

Upstate was first referenced in Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. In Shoreside Vale, there are two road tunnels are located inside Cedar Ridge to the north of the Cedar Grove neighborhood and to the east of Cochrane Dam, which according to the signs in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, leads to Upstate. The tunnels do connect to each other at an underground T-junction, where another tunnel branching off at the intersection leads to Upstate, with the visible part turning left.

Originally, as stated in Grand Theft Auto III, both Lazlow Jones and Fernando Martinez claimed to be from Upstate Liberty, though this was retconned in the HD Universe canon.

Upstate is never mentioned by name in Grand Theft Auto Advance. The tunnels and mountains appear as a flat terrain due to the top-down perspective and hardware limitations of the Game Boy Advance. An invisible wall in the northern border of the map is used to prevent the player from passing.

Rockstar North's Developer Names[]

UpstateLiberty-GTAIII-RadarText — The radar names.

Close to the edge of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto III, an Easter egg consisting of several names that can be seen on the radar: Chris's Town, Gary's Town, Adamton, Obbeburgh, Woodcunty, Les County, and Aaronsville, all of which were named after some of the Rockstar North programmers and developers of the game.

The fact that these are named as towns indicates that they are depicting a rural upstate area with many small towns, emulating Upstate New York.

Name	Programmer name	Position
Aaronsville	Aaron Garbut	Art Director
Adamton	Adam Fowler, Adam Cochrane	Technical Direction, 3D Artist
Chris'sTown	Chris Rothwell	Design By
Garystown	Gary McAdam	3D Artist
Les County	Leslie Benzies	Producer
Obbeburgh	Obbe Vermeij	Technical Direction
Woodcunty	Alisdair Wood

Influence[]

It is the equivalent of Upstate New York, located on the northern portion of the New York State, lying north of New York City.

Gallery[]

Trivia[]

The visible cliffs located north of Liberty City are located further north in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories in comparison to Grand Theft Auto III.
In The Definitive Edition of Grand Theft Auto III, an unnamed residential area makes a non-canon appearance, placed in the empty area of the Shoreside Vale mountains, to the east from the observatory in Cedar Ridge. The area is only meant to be seen from afar and cannot be accessed by normal means.