GTA IV May Have Cost $100 Million to Make

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/gta-iv-may-have-cost-100-million-to-make/

GTA IV May Have Cost $100 Million to Make

Was Grand Theft Auto IV the most expensive game ever made? It sure seems that way, as Rockstar has guessed that it cost around $100 million. Good thing they will make that back and then some.
Posted by James Brightman on Wednesday, April 30, 2008

It's been well documented how costly it can be to make high-end video games for the current consoles, particularly the Xbox 360 and PS3. Game budgets of $20 million - $30 million or more are becoming more frequent as consumers demand bigger and bigger production values. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV certainly has the production values, and the game may have literally been the most expensive ever made.

In a recent Sunday Times report, Leslie Benzies, Rockstar North's president and the producer of GTA IV, said he didn't know exactly how much the game ultimately cost, but he guessed that it was in the range of $100 million. Roughly 1,000 people were involved in putting the whole game together. "It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," he said.

In addition to roughly 1,000 pages of script, acting, voice work, animation, music, and so on, in order to recreate a virtual New York (called Liberty City in the game), Rockstar took over 100,000 photographs on location and even used time-lapse cameras set on rooftops in New York to capture the correct intensity of the rain. This kind of detail alone no doubt shot the budget way up.

Normally, investing this kind of cash into a video game project would be a very risky endeavor, but GTA is one of those surefire hits. Even if it cost over $100 million, Take-Two is expected to rake in $400 million in the first week alone. That's quite a profit.