Grand Theft Auto IV Joyride

MID-AFTERNOON on a grey Glasgow day, drizzle trickling through the air like sour balsamic. Partick is hoaching: pawnbroker's, funeral parlour, bookies and bars – all busy. But Chips, a video games store on Dumbarton Road, is very quiet. This is the calm before the storm. Behind the counter, the manager Ken Clark is on the phone. "Yes, it goes on sale next Tuesday." He shakes his head. "No, we're not allowed to sell it early. We've had to sign a disclaimer.

The sooner you put a pre-order down the better because
everyone's stock is going to be short. Uh,
£44.99. Right, bye.

He hangs up with a grin. He has had that conversation a lot lately. People are desperate to get their hands on Grand Theft Auto IV, the new game from Edinburgh developer Rockstar North, which will be available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. "This is as big as it gets," says Clark. "We've taken more pre-orders on this than any other title. Everybody is asking about it. Well, all the males. We've had no pre-orders from females. If I had to bet my mortgage on the biggest-selling game of the decade, this would be it."

The previous GTA titles have combined global sales of 66 million. The new game, in which you play Niko Bellic, an Eastern European who gets involved with American organised crime, is expected to sell six million in the first week.

Clark will be selling the game from midnight on Monday and expects a crowd. One of Clark's regulars, a 20-year-old rugby coach called Steven Longwell, pops into Chips. Like a lot of young men, he started playing the 18-certificate GTA titles when he was still legally too young to do so. He says he's attracted to the freedom the game offers and the way it allows you to engage in activities – stealing cars, dealing drugs – which he wouldn't get involved with in real life. "I'm really excited about the new game," he says. "I've taken Wednesday off work so I can play all day."

GTA IV promises to be an immersive experience. It's set in Liberty City, a reimagined New York. As research for the look and tone of the game, 50 members of the Rockstar North team spent time in New York and returned to Edinburgh with a quarter of a million photographs. In the firm's Edinburgh headquarters in Calton Square, near the top of Leith Walk, video footage of NYC played on monitors 24 hours a day. The art director, Aaron Garbut, stacked his desk with DVDs of traffic flows. Rockstar North even studied census data in order to get the ethnic mix right, and came to know more about New York's sewers and electrical grid than was necessary or desirable.

The result is a verisimilitude that meant when Rockstar's US-based president, Sam Houser, spent a fortnight in Edinburgh looking at the game he felt as if he had never left New York. As Les Benzies, head of the Scottish team, puts it: "We won't stop until you can't tell the difference between our artificial world and the real world."

Rockstar North is a company at the centre of a perfect storm of critical acclaim, commercial success and media controversy, and is especially fascinating for being so enigmatic. Two hundred and twenty people are employed there, yet very little is known about the way they operate so rumours pour in to fill the vacuum. Some say it's an incredibly hedonistic working environment, where excess is commonplace; others that it's monastic. All these rumours get mixed up until it sounds as if the typical Rockstar North employee is akin to Byron illustrating the Book of Kells, decadent and diligent in equal measure.

In this context, eyewitness testimony is seized upon and is all over the internet within minutes. Last year, a former Rockstar employee called Jeff Williams described in his blog a company staffed by hard-drinking and horny young men and women who were "arrogant to the point of absurdity". He was writing about the New York office, though. The Edinburgh studio, where most of the work gets done, remains mysterious. As another former employee puts it, referencing Willy Wonka: "Nobody goes in, nobody comes out."

One reason for this reclusiveness is that Rockstar has been portrayed around the world by press and politicians as a corrupting force, its games singled out because of the free reign it gives the protagonist to indulge in a orgy of violence, sex and bad driving. In 2004, the parents of a murdered 14-year-old boy from Leicester claimed that his killer was obsessed with the Rockstar title Manhunt. More recently, the sequel, Manhunt 2, was refused a certificate by the British Board Of Film Classification which criticised the game's "casual sadism and unrelenting bleakness". Following a legal challenge it was given an 18 certificate.

But it is Grand Theft Auto that has attracted most moral outrage. In 2005, Hillary Clinton attacked violent video games as "a silent epidemic" among children and demanded a federal investigation into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. She said the game "has so many demeaning messages about women and so encourages violent imagination and activities and it scares parents… They're playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them. You know, that's kind of hard to digest".

Last week Chicago's Transport Authority removed adverts for GTA IV from the sides of their buses after Fox News criticised the game. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg of New York said that it wasn't fair to set the game in a city which actually has declining rates of homicide and auto-theft.

So how does the Rockstar team feel about all the hostile coverage by the mainstream media? "It pisses them off," says Tony Mott, editor of the video games magazine Edge, who has met and interviewed the senior management. "What they are doing is incorporating themes and stories that have been used by movies and other media for years. They are really scrutinised and made out to be monsters, but actually they are pioneers. People on the outside think that Grand Theft Auto is all about murdering prostitutes or killing cops, but those who pigeonhole Rockstar in that way are failing to see how sophisticated their productions have become."

Back in 1997, around the time that the original Grand Theft Auto was launched, the publicist Max Clifford was hired to stir up a stooshie about the game, so in some ways Rockstar is now reaping what it sowed. Yet it is possible to understand the company's frustration with the various controversies that keep cropping up. There's a widespread belief that the games contain violent content because Rockstar knows this is what its audience wants and is simply serving up what will sell. However, this seems not to be the case. The games contain violence because that is what Rockstar wants them to contain. That's the aesthetic in which it is interested. The company's creatives are perfectionists who regard cinema as their competition and the context in which their work should be seen.

Another aspect of Rockstar's vision, which is often overlooked, is the sense of humour. There are some very Scottish jokes and references. The Forth Road and rail bridges appear in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Also in San Andreas, it's possible to jump out of a plane and float down to earth on a tartan parachute. In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City there's a billboard saying: "Come to Dundee."

Dundee is where the game was conceived back in 1987. DMA Design, which would eventually become Rockstar North, had its first premises in a flat above a shop selling children's clothes at 134b Nethergate. The company, then owned by David Jones, who now heads Realtime Worlds, scored its first big hit in 1990 with Lemmings. Grand Theft Auto was in development for over four years and on occasion came close to not being released at all.

"It was originally going to be called Race And Chase," recalls Brian Baglow, who worked in the design department and now runs the PR company Indoctrimat. "The idea was that you would play a cop cleaning up the city and chasing bad guys. But as things progressed it became apparent that the game wasn't very enjoyable. To avoid being penalised you had to drive carefully and it almost became like a driving instructor simulation. So someone came up with the radical idea: 'Why don't we try it so you are playing the criminal?' As soon as we altered the code to make that work it suddenly became a lot more fun."

The key to the franchise's appeal is right there in that decision, and the reason for its infamy. It was also a fortuitous decision for Scotland as the success of Rockstar North has been a boost both to our economy and the international perception of our creative intelligence. The games industry in Scotland employs more than 500 people across 30 companies and generates £20m annually. Every year the game development courses at the University of Abertay are oversubscribed by young men and women inspired by Grand Theft Auto. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government has announced that schoolchildren are to be taught games design as part of the Curriculum for Excellence. The future of this nation, it seems, is electronic, and Scotland may yet become the best Wii country in the world.

One last question, though: why has Grand Theft Auto, above all other games, become a cultural phenomenon? Could it be that in a world where people feel unable to influence politics, where the economy is jerking like a dying fish, and where climate change seems to have reached a tipping point, GTA's free-roaming play offers a sense of liberty and control missing from our real lives? Sitting in his video game store, Ken Clark mulls this over. "I'm no psychologist," he shrugs. "Maybe people just like driving around a big city in any car they want."

Steals the show

Grand Theft Auto IV: Scotland on Sunday's Kate Heavenor gives her verdict

GTA IV: Liberty City follows the exploits of Niko Bellic, an Eastern European who comes to the United States in search of the American Dream, only to find his cousin has lied about the wealth that would be waiting for him.

The BBFC censor cleared the game with no cuts, but this is an 18-rated game with an abundance of sex, drugs, killing and lots of swearing.

One of the most striking things about GTA IV is the improvement in the way the characters look and move. It is far more realistic than its predecessors. This means that when you do engage in fisticuffs, it will get your heart racing.

For adults who are looking for a fantasy game, or who have had a bad week and just want to dream that the baddie who's head they're pounding is their boss, the game delivers. Think serious blood, guts and gore.

My friends have already been warned: I won't be available for the next few weeks because I'll be glued to this game until no stone has been left unturned.