Former DJ and label manager Ivan Pavlovich, the man behind Grand Theft Auto IV's soundtrack, has opened up to MTV about the process of picking the 214 songs which eventually made up the mega-successful game's music background. He also revealed that Rockstar pondered fitting main character Niko Bellic with an iPod or a Walkman or another portable music device but it didn't make it into the final cut. I guess iPods are not for tough guys.

Pavlovich apparently made up a list of some 850 songs he wanted into the soundtrack, and asked some 2,000 people responsible for their rights if they want to license them. That might not seem like much of a problem, if you fail to consider that the developers did not want to reveal what they wanted them for. A somewhat awkward "problem" is that a lot of the people who gave their music for the Grand Theft Auto IV have called back the favor and asked for free copies of the game, usually two, Pavlovich said.

The theme song was composed by Michael Hunter, the same guy who wrote the theme for previous GTA games.

During an interview with Next-Gen, Aaron Greenberg, director of product management for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, claimed that Microsoft was informed by its retailers that the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV is outselling the PS3 version by a margin of two to one. However, there are no official figures that could confirm Greenberg’s comment.

In the first day of GTA IV availability, Microsoft was very quick to remind gamers that Xbox 360 will benefit from the additional content promised by Rockstar for Xbox Live. According to Microsoft, the new content will be available starting this autumn, but the company did not release any other details. It only said that it will add “hours of gameplay.”

GTA IV producer Leslie Benzies has confirmed that the budget invested in the new Rockstar’s title was approximately $100 million. Benzies said that a team of 1,000 people was involved in the creation of the game in the past three and a half years.

It appears that the enormous budget, which makes it the most expensive video game ever created by man, did not guarantee a bug-free launch.

Due to its complexity, it turned out that the game still has issues even after being released to the public. Rockstar is working around the clock to fix reported crash or freeze issues, mostly on Playstation 3s. Rumors are that the Playstation 3 version is also mainly responsible for the delays which moved the release date from October last year to last month.