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Niko Bellic vs. Britney Spears and Indiana Jones
By BILL MARSH
Published: May 11, 2008

How huge is Grand Theft Auto IV, the recently released installment of the guns-ablazing video game franchise?

(...)Wall Street analysts expected it to sell about five million copies in its first two weeks. Instead, it sold 3.6 million copies in just one day, April 29. Sales hit six million globally in its first week for a total haul of $500 million, it was announced Wednesday.

G.T.A. IV may move more than 15 million copies over its sales lifetime - which will last a lot longer than most of its thuggish characters do.
Game players inhabit a gangster who is equipped to dispatch scores of rival criminals and others, including police officers and innocent bystanders, on the rough streets of Liberty City, the bullet-riddled stand-in for New York.

By several imperfect measures, G.T.A. IV, which sells for $60 in the United States, is shaping up to be one of the biggest products in entertainment history.

There is no definitive comparison of all-time best-selling music, film, games and books. Each industry tends to calculate revenues by its own ethods. Most of those figures are unavailable to he public, closely guarded in a fiercely competitive business.

For a little context, however, it is possible to place Grand Theft Auto IV's expected sales - and sales of the whole series (eight titles) - among the iconic names of the film and music idustries. Britney Spears, meet Niko Bellic, G.T.A. IV's criminal star. He is on track to sell more than nine million copies of his game, domestically - approaching what you sold of "Oops . . . I Did It Again," the 24th-biggest album since detailed sales data appeared in 1991.

About 70 million copies of earlier G.T.A. editions have sold worldwide since the 1997 debut, perhaps three-quarters of those domestically - roughly 53 million units. That is close to Whitney Houston's career unit
sales (rank: 20), and ahead of U2, Celine Dion and Shania Twain, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Previous versions of G.T.A. provoked harsh criticism for their bloodstained plotlines. The latest, which allows players to hire prostitutes and then run them over or shoot them right after they've performed their work, has been met with a more muted response, thus far, as it flies off store shelves.

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I'm not sure what your last hostile line is meant to communicate, it doesn't make much sense. I do find puritanical moralizing, especially the kind that lacks a critical edge, rather tedious, however.

[ 25 May 2008: Message edited by: Catchfire ]

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(The) San Andreas (version of GTA III)also attracted controversy when a sex minigame that was cut from the game, but remained in the game code, was discovered in both the console and Windows versions of the game. Dubbed the Hot Coffee mod, the minigame allowed players to have sex with their in-game girlfriends.

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[ 25 May 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]