Submission + - Pirated 'Grand Theft Auto IV' Hits Internet
Narrative Fallacy writes: "Illegal copies of the new GTA IV game appear to be available for download from bit torrent file-sharing sites, six days before the game is officially released. The files in question are supposedly an illegal copy of the Xbox 360 version of the game, and have been seeded across various torrent sites by a group calling themselves iCON. Grand Theft Auto IV, which gets its official global release on April 29, is expected to sell around six million copies in its first week. When the first Grand Theft Auto appeared just over ten years ago it was a top-down-view, two-dimensional game with fairly rudimentary graphics produced by a small Scottish designer. "In terms of someone successfully combining an action game and an exploratory world to hang out in and be entertained by," says Rockstar's senior creative honcho Dan Houser, "it was definitely the first game that did it successfully. The mission play was there and the non-mission play was there and you moved between the two very seamlessly." GTA IV may retain the classic lines and and slick handling of its predecessors but it has been given a thorough tune-up. "The big deal", says Houser, was "detail — our goal was to make a high-definition gaming experience and then figure out what that means tonally through the whole experience, so it's not just about graphics, it's about animation, physics, writing, storytelling, physics, characterisation...""