Saturday 21 September 2013

GTA GTA Everywhere!

It's been a couple of days since the biggest game in videogame history got released. In fact, it has the potential to be the biggest thing in entertainment. The news is everywhere, you don't have to be a gamer to have heard about GTA V. Almost everyone you know have heard/seen something about GTA V at least once in the past week.

GTA V is in the newspapers, on the internet, on Facebook, ads on the streets, on TV. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called it a "Cultural Phenomenon" and he is absolutely right. GTA V has become so huge that even your mum might have heard about it. When I went to collect my game on Sep 17, I saw dads, mums, girlfriends, wives, sisters queuing up to collect a copy. On Facebook, I have seen "non-gamers", cousins, relatives, who otherwise would have never batted an eyelid for any other game release, talking about GTA V. 

In fact, it's so huge, other publishers are even acknowledging it.. I saw this pic on the Watch_Dogs Facebook page..


I think it was pretty cool of them to do that.. 

Obviously, it's just not all talk.. the stats are there. At US$256 million, GTA V is the highest costing video-game to produce and in fact, even costs more than any other movie film, except for one Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which had a US$300 million budget. 



It's reaping the rewards of course. Making US$800 million on release day alone and that figure quickly rose to US$1 billion in the first 3 days! It could be the fastest any entertainment property has reached the $1 billion mark.

Sure, the hype and popularity has helped bring in lots of Day 1 sales, especially with the"non-hardcore" gamer crowds but it would never reached these heights if it wasn't an awesome game.

I have been playing it and the game is exceeding expectations. There are so many things to do in the game that I have hardly time to even do the missions. The map is epic-ly huge and there's always things to see or do. I can't tell you everything in 1 post so what I'm going to do a GTA diary for the next week or so, probably until GTA Online starts up. 

Rockstar has given a "unofficial deadline" till Oct 1 for us to complete the story mode so we will see how it goes. I'll try to do a post each day on my "day" in San Andreas. I will be leaving out the story missions so there won't be any spoilers and just note down the extra stuff that I did. You might still want to avoid it if you want your experience absolutely spoiler-free, but it might also show you some stuff that you have missed. For me, however, I want my experience spoiler-free so I will appreciate if you guys don't post stuff about what you have seen :)

Click here to see my GTA V Diary

Hope you like it!