Grand Theft Auto 5 and Rockstar's post-Apocalypse Now | 10 Years Ago This Month
The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
September of 2013 was absolutely packed with industry-shaking news, but there's really no competition for what we're going to talk about here, and that's Grand Theft Auto 5.
Grand Theft Auto 5 launched on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 on September 17, 2013. People had a couple weeks to tear through the single-player mode before trying out its multiplayer component, Grand Theft Auto Online, when it went live October 1, 2013.
Two console generations of hardware, the game just keeps on giving for Take-Two Interactive. It shipped another five million copies last quarter – as it seems to almost every quarter – bringing its lifetime total to a staggering 185 million.
Obviously everybody expected Grand Theft Auto 5 to be big, but nobody expected this, not even Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick.
"When we first launched GTA Online, we didn't know how the title would be received," Zelnick told us. "And we didn't know how virtual currency sales would pencil out. One of the reasons we haven't released a lot of metrics around that is because we've been learning as we go along…
"When we launched GTA Online, we had virtual currency sales experience with NBA 2K, but we had no experience about what an online offering could look like on an ongoing basis. Even this year, we said we
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
