In GTA 6 City of the Week, we take a look at a different city in the USA and put it through its paces to see how it would measure up as the setting of a GTA title, according to a number of criteria tailored to the franchise.
For the past few weeks, we've stuck to one of the two coasts or at least close to them in order to nail cities that score well in terms of geography. In order to mix things up a bit (and because we've almost run out of coastal cities), we're moving further inland in our hunt for the next GTA location. That said, we're not quite ready to leave the comforting proximity of water just yet...
Salt Lake City
In spite of being named after the Great Salt Lake (with the "Great" part only dropped 1868), Salt Lake City technically does not share a shore with the lake itself. The only indirect connection it has with the lake is the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area, a swampy collection of small lakes joined to the Great Salt Lake by a narrow strip of water.
Today, the city proper is home to just under 200,000 residents, making it one of the smallest we've looked at in this article series. That said, the Salt Lake City metropolitan area around it is the home of over one million, so it's not like the area falls too far behind the others.
The Crossroads of the West, as it is often called, was an important factor in the expansion of European colonists in the western reaches of what is today the United States. Though hardly the first city in the area, it boosted the number of incoming pioneers who used it as a jumping-off point to found new settlements both in Utah as well as neighboring states.
