Grand Theft Auto V has broken 7 World Records

Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most popular games among people of all the ages, no doubt in it, now also have obtained a certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records.

The records keeping publication of Guinness Book of World Records confirmed on Tuesday that the game sold $800 million in its first day and within 3 days of its launched reached the $1 billion mark.

Let’s now look at the records broken by the Grand Theft Auto V; Best-selling action-adventure video game in 24 hours, Best-selling video game in 24 hours, Fastest entertainment property to gross $1 billion, Fastest video game to gross $1 billion, Highest grossing video game in 24 hours, Highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours, Most viewed trailer for an action-adventure video game.

“Gaming is a worldwide hobby of people from all types of ages around the world.” said Craig Glenday, the editor in chief of Guinness Book of World Records. He added, we are really happy to see a game in the record books.

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games.

Source: http://www.ghanalive.tv

Grand Theft Auto Franchise Playfully Flicks Mud at Its Birthplace: Scotland

Since its introduction 16 years ago, the wildly popular video game franchise GrandTheft Auto has been set in some of the most recognizable cities in the United States. There were New York, Miami and San Francisco, and in the fifth installment, released to great fanfare this month, Los Angeles.

Yet the roots of the game can be traced directly back to Dundee, a former shipbuilding city in Scotland, better known as the humble home of jam and jute, a vegetable fiber used to make rope and burlap. It is a city that has, instead of the raw urbanity celebrated in the video game, a quaint coastline, as well as a population that prizes irreverence and wit.

“There’s a cultural aspect in the U.K. of not taking other people too seriously,” said Brian Baglow, a writer for the series’ first installment and the head of the Scottish Games Network. “That’s a very large part of why G.T.A. works the way it does.”

He added: “Basically, we’re all just sarcastic. There’s a strong tradition of satire here, which is centuries old. I think that in an American studio, you would run the risk of being entirely serious and straight-faced, whereas there is subversion in G.T.A. all the way through. It’s black humor.”

Grand Theft Auto was created in 1995 by four friends — David Jones, Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly — in a two-room office above a small shop in Dundee that sold baby clothes.

Mr. Dailly, a programmer, had been toying with the idea of creating a “virtual 3-D city” that would allow players to roam freely and choose their actions. The team initially intended the protagonist to be a police officer, but it quickly scrapped the idea in favor of inhabiting a criminal.

“You just can’t go around running over people if you’re a cop — nobody liked playing the cop,” said Mr. Baglow, an early member of the team.

Fascinated by American gangster films like “Goodfellas” and “Scarface,” the four, who ran a company called DMA Design, based the narratives on their vision of the United States. (At the time, none of them had been there.)

“In the 1980s, Dundee was a shadow of its former self — it wasn’t the nicest of places,” said Mr. Kay, who rewrote the game for consoles. “We didn’t think it would be exciting if the games were set in Dundee.”

Creating the game was a form of escapism, he said: “We made a lot of inside jokes.”

And while the game — which has sold more than 125 million units worldwide since its debut in 1997 — satirizes much of American culture, it is also peppered with Scottish references. San Fierro, a fictional city, features a wealthy district called Calton Heights, after the dilapidated Calton area of Glasgow. San Fierro is also home to the Hippy Shopper chain, a twist on Happy Shopper, a grocery chain with stores in Scotland and Britain. In another city, a Saltire, the blue-and-white national flag, flies over a building. And a racehorse named Scotland Nil alludes to the long, humiliating history of goal-less matches by Scotland’s national soccer team.

DMA Design was eventually sold, through a series of complicated takeovers, to Rockstar Games, a label of the American game publisher Take-TwoInteractive Software, and the Dundee connection was broken. Rockstar Games has eight studios, including Rockstar North, based in Edinburgh, which is responsible for the creative content of Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar North is one of the biggest game developers in Britain, employing 300 people.

Scotland is now the biggest hub for game developers in Britain and among the biggest in Europe, with around 80 developers huddled around Dundee.

While some consider the game Scotland’s greatest cultural export since “Auld Lang Syne,” the game’s louche tone does not resonate with everyone. David Paterson, a councilor for the Scottish town of Hawick, said recently that he was “absolutelydisgusted” at the use of the town’s name for a “druggie hipster” district in its latest installment.

“It is going to destroy the good reputation of this town,” he said.

Still, for those who were there at the game’s beginnings, its sly references to their home bring smiles to their faces.

“These little inside jokes are very clever,” said Mr. Baglow, who is Scottish. “It makes me very happy.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com

Does ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ Mean the End of Hollywood?

There’s a good chance you’ve heard: “Grand Theft Auto V,” the latest installment of the storied video game franchise, took in over $1 billion in its first week. That’s more than any movie released this year, with the exception of “Iron Man 3” (which happens to be the fifth highest-grossing movie of all time). At this rate, “GTA V” could be a nontrivial contributor to the U.S. gross domestic product. It’s a cultural event. Even Apple Inc. should be impressed.

It’s not a stretch to think that the people who didn’t go to the movies this summer might have said, ‘you know what, I’m skipping a few and using the cash for a different kind of blockbuster.’

In that case, the most interesting number to keep in mind may be 100 -- the approximate number of hours of gameplay that “GTA V” reportedly offers. For those diligent and conscientious enough to explore all the side quests, excursions and games-within-the-game, it provides weeks of entertainment.

That makes the $60 retail price a bargain: 100 hours of gameplay at $0.60 an hour. Compare that with the price of admission to a movie, even a two-and-a-half hour megaproduction. The other advantage for video games -- driving the usage cost down even further -- is that buyers get to keep the game.

So, could the multiple box-officedisappointments last summer reflect the beginning of a shift that goes well beyond blockbuster fatigue?

Merging Forms

There’s little reason to think that movies and video games couldn’t continue to co-exist. But if audiences are becoming overly familiar with Hollywood’s version of the three-act-structure and if games continue to grow as a form of narrative entertainment, it’s tantalizing to think that the next few years or decades might bring some more serious attempts at experimentation and cross-pollination.

It’s already been tried. Most of the results, however, have been marketing masquerading as “interactive storytelling.” Despite efforts in both industries to find some creative alchemy, most attempts, though admirable for the effort, fall short of true invention. Movies made from games, games made from movies, movies and games released simultaneously with added content end up being less than the sum of their parts, more like two conventional forms of entertainment smushed together and repackaged as a new product.

Movies and video games both take place in a larger, common universe of possible narratives. But are they fundamentally incompatible? Could anything interesting ever emerge from recombining the DNA of the two?

That’s where a game such as “GTA V” breaks through. It’s tempting to think of it as an open-ended movie: it’s written and directed by storytellers skilled in the cinematic form and produced by an expert group of visual designers. In that sense it feels like a big movie production. As the scale and complexity of these games increase -- and as our ability to simulate and render nuance and emotion and ambiguity increases - - these games are starting to verge on something entirely new. Whatever one might feel about the storyline of “Grand Theft Auto V,” it is hard to deny that it is pushing the boundary of the form.

Open world games have come a long way in a short time, but as impressive as they are, they’re still operated on rails -- theme-park rides rather than free-driving cars. “GTA V” points the way to games with a narrated openness in which players wouldn’t be presented with options so much as they would have tools to model their experience. Giving players the ability to create their own stories within the connected world of a larger story creates a natural, social evolution within the system. In this sense, “Grand Theft Auto V” and “Minecraft” show us what may be coming when the mediums we have now are reimagined as virtual worlds that can grow and evolve over time.

Next Generation

If anyone is going to invent a new form of entertainment from this model, she’s probably 15 years old right now, unbound by the conventions and assumptions of received forms. She’s growing up in a world in which a significant number of her interactions with other people are online (for better or worse). She consumes serialized programming in 13-hour blocks and doesn’t really distinguish between TV shows, movies or Internet videos. She consumes these stories on her phone, tablet and laptop whenever she wants, a few minutes at a time or maybe three hours at a stretch. She makes calls on her computer and surfs the web on her television. She makes no distinction between screens, small or large.

Maybe she’ll be the first auteur of this new kind of entertainment -- an environment with infinite horizons. She may imagine a platform where players are both the creator and the narrator, able to write the game as they play through it. Perhaps she’ll create the first Great American Possibility Space.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com