Hot Coffee laid to rest: turns out NOBODY actually gave a shit

Remember the GTA: San Andreas Hot Coffee scandal? Of course you don’t, you were busy updating your Bebo profile, chatting on MSN messenger, patiently explaining to people why Limewire was so much better than YouTube, and all those other archaic things we used to do. Ah, the heady days of youth.

Rest assured though, Hot Coffee nearly brought the games industry to its knees, and certainly not in a good kind of ‘Thai massage’ way either. A naughty hacker squirreled deep within the game’s code and discovered a desperately unexciting sex-based mini game and produced a patch to unlock it.

Surprise, surprise: GTA IV breaks UK All Format sales record for week one

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A recipe for you: Take one of the most successful game franchises of all time, give its developers the budget of small South American country, apply enough hype to sink a blue whale, allow to simmer gently for 6 months until public desire reaches a raging fervour, and serve. There you have your very own Best Selling Game Ever™.

Yes, it is with very little shock at all that GTA IV has wreaked havoc on the UK All Formats games charts, cruelly destroying some hippie yoga nonsense Wii Fit board by a factor of 9 to 1, shifting over a million copies and raking in over 40m in its first week. In fact some 926,000 copies were gone in the first five days.

Grand Theft Auto IV launches across the globe, draws few crowds in its home town

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At midnight last night, game stores across the country opened for launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. You may not have heard of it – it’s an understated affair from a little known developer. It certainly isn’t the kind of game where every single newly unearthed feature is granyted its own headline. And Rockstar definitely doesn’t like carefully building hype for its games to a deafening crescendo right before launch. Oh no…

Grand Theft Auto IV set to be the highest rated game of all time?

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The GTA IV review deadline landed this weekend and hundreds of online publications were allowed to air their thoughts and critiques of the new addition to the GTA franchise. According to metacritic at the time of writing, both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are not just topping the charts for their respective formats, they both have an average rating of 100, making GTA IV as close to gaming perfection as its possible to get.