Conor Kearney, the ambulophile who strolls across open-world video game maps For Science! celebrated his 50th walk with a tour of North Yankton, the ghost-city-in-the-sky that begins Grand Theft Auto 5's single-player campaign.
Why is this important? Well, in terms of walking time, it takes as long to traverse North Yankton as it does to walk from one side of The Division's map to the other. By walking time it's also longer than a tour of Skyrim in first-person view and Fallout 4's Far Harbor expansion. It's also 20 minutes longer than Bully and Firewatch, which Kearney walked back in February.
It's important to measure this in walking time and not actual size because the walking paces may be completely different game to game (and Skyrim's appears to differ between first- and third-person perspectives). Also, sometimes walking in a straight line across the map is impossible, which adds to the walk time if not the map size. Still, that's a rather big area for something that's the scene of about five minutes of gameplay.
North Yankton was originally accessible by a glitch, since patched out, that allowed players to roam it in Grand Theft Auto Online. The glitch revealed that the map was set in the air somehwere near the Port of Los Santos. Since then, it's been accessible through a mod, which appears to be what Kearney is using here.
Kearney has walked all of the maps of the main entries in the Grand Theft Auto series, condensing them to a 15-minute time-lapsed video about a year ago. He's also taken on a walk across half of a No Man's Sky planet. For more of his work, see his YouTube channel.
