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

New Consoles Special Game: Waiting For PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Best Games May Have to Wait

Video game players are always excited to get their hands on new consoles, and in November, two new game machines are scheduled to be introduced: Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4. But while new consoles usually lead to better games, often that happens only in the long run. Some of the final games made for aging consoles have been better than the first games that were released for brand-new systems. Neither the PlayStation 3 in 2006 nor the Xbox 360 a year earlier went on sale with a single memorable initial title.

Xbox 360 gamers waited four months for their system’s first great game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and an entire year for the next one, Gears of War. Likewise, a full 12 months went by before PlayStation 3 players were able to get their hands on that system’s first noteworthy exclusive, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. At the same time, two of the PlayStation 2’s most highly regarded games, Bully and Okami, were released mere weeks before the release of the PlayStation 3.

While it’s too early to say for sure, something similar looks as if it will happen in 2013. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One each have a long list of launch titles, but the most interesting games that will be playable on the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft seem to be coming next year, including Titanfall from Respawn Entertainment and Project Spark from Microsoft Studios, both of which are Xbox exclusives on console; The Witness from Jonathan Blow’s Number None, a console exclusive for the PlayStation 4; and Destiny from Bungie, which will be playable on both (and on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3).

Who knows? There might be surprises among the first batch of games being released with the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Maybe Ryse: Son of Rome, an initial Xbox One title, will end up as one of the year’s best games. But Ryse’s E3 demonstration didn’t do much to auger that, instead promising to immerse players in antiquity by letting them repeatedly stab people in the neck. The developers of Dead Rising 3, another Xbox One exclusive, have talked about using the system’s superior technology for the important work of improving the graphical fidelity of zombie blood and teeth. Sony’s big-budget exclusives don’t look any more enticing.

Many games will be released with versions for currently available consoles — the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii U — as well as for the new ones. The most exciting of these games is Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, coming Nov. 19 for PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U. (No release date has been announced for the PS4 and Xbox One.) An open-world game about information hackers in a near-future Chicago, Watch Dogs seems impossibly well-timed for the year of Edward Snowden.

Perhaps because two new consoles are coming out nearly simultaneously, the next few months seem to be the most unpredictable video-game autumn in memory. Can the gameplay in Watch Dogs possibly live up to its alluring premise? Will the military shooters Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4 be hurt by a form of the blockbuster fatigue that afflicted moviegoers this summer? Will Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag mount a comeback for that series after last year’s divisive Assassin’s Creed III?

And many of 2013’s most-anticipated games won’t be playable at all on the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One. Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, the first Grand Theft Auto game in five years, will be released on Sept. 17 and can be played only on an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. Set in an immense virtual Los Angeles, the game features three criminal protagonists instead of the usual one, and players can switch freely among all three characters in the game’s open world. Rockstar says the world that it has built for Grand Theft Auto V is bigger than the ones inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption combined. I played Grand Theft Auto V for about four hours at Rockstar’s offices in SoHo last month, and it felt las if I only sampled the game’s possibilities.

Likewise, Batman: Arkham Origins, the third title in an exceptional series of games about that comic book hero, comes out Oct. 25 for PCs, PlayStation 3s, Xbox 360s and Wii U’s.

And Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls is a PlayStation 3 exclusive that stars virtual renditions of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. It lands on Oct. 8. Quantic Dream’s previous game, Heavy Rain, was a bold experiment in interactive storytelling, even if it didn’t entirely succeed.

Super Mario 3D World is the season’s most promising Nintendo game. For decades, Nintendo has often broken the rule of thumb that new consoles don’t ship with their greatest games. New Nintendo systems have been packaged with games like Super Mario Bros., Mario 64 and Wii Sports, after all.

But the Wii U, Nintendo’s newest console, went on sale last year and it is still waiting for its system-selling game. Super Mario 3D World, slated for Nov. 22, gives Nintendo reason to hope. It is being designed by the people behind the extraordinary Super Mario Galaxy games. For the first time since 1987’s Super Mario Bros. 2, players will be able to play as Princess Peach, rather than just saving her from a kidnapping. And now, the damsel can throw fireballs, too, just as Mario can.

There are also a number of intriguing games without scheduled release dates that might come out this fall but also might get pushed to 2014, including South Park: The Stick of Truth, a game for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that has the close involvement of the TV show creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone; TheWalking Dead: Season Two, the sequel to Telltale Games’ acclaimed series of downloadable episodes inspired by Robert Kirkman’s comic books; and Silent Enemy, a game about bullying from Minority Media, the independent studio that made Papo & Yo, my favorite game of 2012.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com