Dedicated fans have recreated Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV's Liberty City by taking thousands of screenshots and uploading them to Google Maps Street View. This means if you're feeling nostalgic and want to visit the city without launching the whole game, you can now cruise through it straight from your browser: Liberty City Map.
The GTA fans have had an interactive map for a while but the Street View improvement adds a whole new dimension (both figuratively and literally). To try it out yourself, just drag the pegman icon to any highlighted road to see a panorama of that location.
All roads have been covered, except for a few on and off ramps that were deemed not very interesting. The 80,000 in-game screenshots were uploaded and stitched together to form around 3,000 separate panoramas. The final set of tiles consists of over 1 million images.
The creators warn that an HTML5 browser is recommended to view the interactive map. Newer browsers are able to compensate for distortion in the projection, which is most noticeable when you're looking up or down. That being said, older browsers should still show something reasonable.
This is a huge amount of work just to recreate something that already exists in a similar form. It's not as if a real-life place is being recreated virtually, or a virtual place is being recreated in real-life: we're talking about taking a virtual place and recreating it virtually as well. Which game would you want to see this done for?