GTA 4 Finally Gets Bikes After 17 Years
Grand Theft Auto 4 is known for its gritty story, moody Liberty City, and some of the most realistic driving physics in the series. But it has always been missing one thing that fans of GTA San Andreas loved: bicycles. Now, more than a decade later, a dedicated modder has finally fixed that.
A new Bicycle Mod for GTA 4 adds fully working bikes to the game, not just as a visual swap but as properly functioning vehicles that feel like they were always meant to be there. For PC players who still love revisiting Liberty City, it is a great example of how modders keep older games alive and evolving.
How The Bicycle Mod Actually Works
On the surface, adding a bike to GTA 4 might sound simple. Just drop in a new 3D model, tweak some numbers, and ride off into the sunset. In reality, it is far more complex because of how the game was originally built.
GTA 4 was designed in 2008 with one assumption baked deep into its code: anything with wheels is basically a car. That means the game expects every wheeled vehicle to have things like:
- Engine health and engine damage
- Fuel tanks that can explode
- Starter motors and stall states
- Collision reactions designed for heavy cars and SUVs
Obviously, none of that makes sense for a bicycle. The mod’s creator, Shvab, had to dig into the game’s ageing vehicle logic and teach it a completely new rule set: bikes exist and they should not behave like dying taxis.
To pull this off, the mod disables engine logic entirely for bicycles. That means no engine health, no stalling, and definitely no exploding fuel tank when you clip a curb. On top of that, the handling setup has been rewritten so the bike behaves like a lightweight, human powered vehicle instead of a compact car with a missing roof.
There is also a custom IK system so that Niko’s feet land properly on the pedals. Instead of floating feet or broken animations, the character model adjusts naturally, making it feel like Rockstar had planned to include bikes all along and someone simply flipped the switch in 2025.
Shvab’s goal was to make bikes feel native to GTA 4, not like a clunky hack. Compared to older attempts at bike mods that often felt buggy or fragile, this approach integrates much more smoothly with the original systems.
Open Source Modding And Future Upgrades
One of the coolest parts of this project is that it is open source. That means other modders can dive into the code, see how it works, and start building their own improvements on top of it. For a game as heavily modded as GTA 4, that is a big deal.
Planned and potential upgrades already being discussed include:
- A proper bunny hop so you can jump curbs and small obstacles
- The ability to stand while riding for a more dynamic, stylized look
- More refined physics for cornering and braking
- Extra bike models, textures, and customizations from the community
Open sourcing this kind of work turns it from a one person project into a community platform. Liberty City’s most chaotic engineers can now collaborate, experiment, and push the vehicle system in directions Rockstar never intended.
The result is not just a funny visual gag. Bikes change how you move through the city. Instead of tearing down highways at full speed in a sports car, you can now cruise slowly through traffic, weave between taxis, and see Liberty City from a more grounded street level perspective.
Why This Matters For PC Gamers
For PC players, this mod is a good reminder of why the platform remains so powerful for long term gaming. A 2008 game is getting significant new features in 2025 thanks entirely to fans who refuse to leave it behind.
In an era where official remasters are hit and miss, modding communities often deliver more interesting upgrades than publishers do. They add quality of life fixes, performance tweaks, visual overhauls, and in this case, entirely new vehicle types that mesh with the original physics system.
Watching Niko Bellic pedal across Broker Bridge, dodging cabs at a modest 12 miles per hour, is both ridiculous and strangely perfect. It is a softer, more playful way to experience one of the most serious entries in the series, and it shows just how flexible PC games can be when the community has the tools and the patience to tinker under the hood.
If you still have GTA 4 installed on your gaming PC or you are thinking of revisiting Liberty City on modern hardware, this Bicycle Mod is exactly the kind of addition that can make an old favorite feel fresh again. It does not change the story or the core tone of the game, but it lets you explore that world with a completely different vibe and reminds you how much life there still is in classic PC titles when modders get involved.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/grand-theft-auto/after-17-years-the-most-sophisticated-bike-mod-has-landed-in-gta-4-and-it-wasnt-easy-i-wanted-it-to-feel-like-gta-4-always-meant-to-have-bikes-not-like-some-clunky-workaround/
