The game was met with slightly above average reviews, but received a wave of media attention for its focus on car-jacking and allowing players to attack pedestrians. The Grand Theft Auto series was launched in 1997 as a somewhat plain-looking game where the player had a satellite-like view of a 2D city. The original GTA, not the prettiest of graphics, even for 1997 How has Grand Theft Auto become such a dominant franchise and what does its success say about the future of video games? Controversy leads to success While games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds have attracted most mainstream attention on video games in the past year and have users in the hundreds of millions, the success of Grand Theft Auto 5 is a pointed illustration that big budget console games - the game reportedly cost roughly $265 million to develop and market - still drive global video game sales.
Compare that to this summer's biggest blockbuster at the box office, Iron Man 3, which brought in "only" $372 million in its first weekend across the globe. 17, the franchise moved beyond just being one of the biggest video game franchises in the world and set its sights on a larger crown becoming the world's most successful release across all of entertainment. In just its first three days after release, Grand Theft Auto 5 raked in more than $1 billion in sales. With the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 on Sept.
Video games don't get much bigger than Take-Two Interactive's ( NASDAQ:TTWO) Grand Theft Auto, otherwise known as GTA.