There aren’t a lot of things that can beat the Grand Theft Auto IV buzz these days… The final countdown before the release started…well…a few months ago, and it seems the delay from October 2007 to April 2008 just increased expectations and gave birth to waves of speculations: who will win the console battle, will GTA IV meet sales expectations or will it exceed them, is GTA IV everything we want it to be?

Today is the big day! After all the trailers (which only made us speculate some more), after all the fuss with the pre-orders (Xbox or PS3), after all the controversy (should teenagers’ access to the game be restricted due to violent content?), gamers all over the world are finally experiencing what they’ve been waiting for: The Game… or the big crowd in front of the retail stores.

Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t just another game, it is this year’s sensation - a combination between a video game and a complex story, with an ending at the player’s choice and special missions we still know very little about. Rockstar’s Dan Houser told Variety that his ambition was to create something like a gangster movie rather than a game, which is probably why GTA IV is expected to be a hit within its first days of availability.

“Suffice it to say that Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that could keep anyone busy for a long, long time. Although it's got plenty of excellent features, it's ultimately the storytelling that makes it an instant classic, a game unlike any we've played before. As is the case with many great books and movies, you'll want to know what happens to the characters after the game ends, and one can't help hoping that all of their American Dreams come true,” wrote Will Tuttle in his review for GameSpy.

Even before the game’s official release, the battle of the pre-orders began all over the world, as Grand Theft Auto managed to rank among the top selling games, such as Nintendo’s Wii Fit or Mario Kart Wii. Microsoft’s strategy to push Xbox ahead of the PS3 relies on an extra content, which is said to add up to 10 hours of game through 2 episodes that will become available in August 2008, thanks to a deal between them and Rockstar.

The marketing battle between Sony and Microsoft is on, and although Microsoft’s deal with Rockstar gives it a little advantage, the dice haven’t been thrown yet. At the end of last week, PS3 was conquering the hearts of Australians, with pre-orders pouring in ahead of the Xbox 360. However, Xbox was the champ on Amazon.com, so it’s hard to say who the winner is, since the real sales have just begun.

The efforts of the 1,000 people who have been working on Grand Theft Auto IV will pay off, analysts predict, and the $45 million investment will turn into almost 6 millions of copies sold and $400 million in sales in the first week of availability.

Michael Pachter, video game analyst at Wedbush Morgan, is far more optimistic: “The addressable market at launch is about 24 million consoles. So how many will sell in the first week or month or few months? Nine million. That’s the number. That’s about a 35 percent attach rate. By year’s end, it’ll be somewhere between 11 and 13 million because more consoles will be sole before the holidays,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.

The interest in GTA IV is indisputable. Fans in North America will have to pay $89.99 for the Special Edition of the game (or 89.99 euros in Europe), which will consist of Grand Theft Auto with special packaging, the GTA IV Art Book, with never-before-seen production artwork from GTA IV, selected soundtrack CD from GTA IV, with new material from top artists, and an exclusive Rockstar keychain for the safety deposit box keys.

The Grand Theft Auto IV mania has begun even before the release, going as far as uploading the game on various torrent sites. The gaming site Kotaku revealed that the Xbox 360 pirated version of the game has already appeared in 6.32 GB version. The investigation on how this happened continues.

There are a lot of words to describe Grand Theft Auto IV, and one of them is controversy: is this an appropriate game for teenagers? Politicians are pushing for restrictive bills to be adopted, so as to protect under-18 buyers from violent and sexual content.

But Stephen Kings told Entertainment Weekly at the beginning of this month, the bill is rather useless. Although he agreed with one of the bill’s creators who said that young minds shouldn’t be under a constant barrage of violence and think it is alright, Kings also said it’s not the games that alter their minds, as games are mere reflections of what goes around them in reality.