You may know YouTuber Any Austin for his viral videos about where the rivers go in Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom, but he's recently set his sights on GTA's power lines. Two months ago he investigated the ones in GTA 4's Liberty City, and he's now released a new video concerning the ones in GTA 5.
Austin begins the video noting "in real life this would all end by connecting to some sort of power plant [...] but this is video games, so the wires don't have to connect to anything." Rockstar is known for its attention to detail – we all remember how the horse balls in Red Dead Redemption 2 shrink in the cold – and there are actually transmission towers in GTA 5, so it may all be connected properly.
The intrepid investigator starts his journey in the north east of Los Santos and follows the transmission towers into the city. These towers do eventually lead to a substation, but they aren't connected. A different substation on the outskirts of the city does connect to a transmission tower as well as the local utility poles, the wooden ones you see in suburbs and on streets. So, it seems the game is just a bit inconsistent with this, something Austin finds "charming."
- GTA 3 originally gave players a wanted level for running a red light, but "This was not popular with the team," so a developer "quickly removed it"
- Red Dead Redemption 2 has some of the most accurate rivers in video games, according to the video game geographer who charted Skyrim and Zelda's waterways
In real life, substations change the voltage from the high ones needed to transport electricity over large distances to lower ones that are more safe for homes and businesses. The science behind it is something I could never truly understand – I almost failed my electrical engineering module at university and promptly switched to film and TV because electricity scares me.
Luckily for you, Austin got another YouTuber, civil engineer Grady Hillhouse from Practical Engineering, to analyze the accuracy of the substation. He notes a lot of errors, but says "it's meant to look normal from a distance, but a closer look shows, at least from an electrical engineering perspective, it's pretty much nonsense."
Throughout the city the utility poles do actually connect to a lot of the buildings on their street, and even use more realistic connectors than they did in GTA 4. In that game, some wires just went straight into the corner of an apartment or shop, and while this does still happen in GTA 5 sometimes, "the density of wires per utility pole [in GTA 5] is genuinely very impressive."
Eventually, some lines of transmission towers do connect to substations at power plants, so GTA 5 has at least the appearance of a legitimate electrical grid.
I absolutely love this YouTube channel. Austin hones in on a lot of the seemingly pointless minutiae of games, like Super Mario Sunshine's economy, or Windhelm's unemployment rate. It's a cool reminder that great video games build worlds, even if they don't always make sense.
If you want to uncover more of Los Santos, take a look at our GTA 5 100% completion guide.
