The eye-popping totals for Grand Theft Auto IV eclipse all other forms of popular entertainment. The prior one-week sales record was held by the Hollywood blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, a 2007 sequel that took in $404 million worldwide.
"Grand Theft Auto IV's first week performance represents the biggest launch in the history of interactive entertainment," said Strauss Zelnick, the chairman of Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes the game, in a statement yesterday. "We believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date."
The digerati are hailing GTA IV as a masterpiece, the War and Peace of the gaming world. But only if Leo Tolstoy had been kidnapped by the makers of those explicitly ghoulish Saw films.
The casual and graphic quality of the violence in GTA IV has drawn heated complaints from watchdog groups such as the Parents Television Council, which blasted the game as "brutally violent" as well as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (GTA IV is ostensibly set in "Liberty City," but with landmarks such as Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty, it is clearly a stand-in for the Big Apple.)
The parents' group has been lobbying the gaming industry's ratings board without success to change GTA IV's current rating of M (17 and older) to AO (adults only: 18 and older). The group's director, Gavin McKiernan, argues that the nature of the game makes it more hazardous for young adults than any R-rated film.
"An R-rated movie is a two-hour passive experience," he said. "With this we're talking about 70 to 80 hours of game play where you're practicing and completing these [violent] acts."
Mothers Against Drunk Driving has been pillorying GTA IV because Niko is capable of downing several cocktails before sliding behind the wheel - usually of a vehicle seized at gunpoint.
"Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke," reads a MADD statement.
