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GTA 4's Production Budget Estimated at $100M
by Aaron Linde, Apr 30, 2008 12:58pm PDTRockstar North president Leslie Benzies revealed in an interview that the recently released Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, X360) had a budget of roughly $100 million, marking the title as the most costly development of any game to date.
GTA IV's massive budget pins the title above the previous front-runner Shenmue, released for the Dreamcast in 1999 and costing an unprecedented $70 million to produce.
"It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," Benzies told the Times Online.
Benzies also noted that about 1,000 people pitched in on the game's development. Beyond the expected tasks of programming and design, Rockstar also set up time-lapse cameras on New York rooftops to capture the correct intensity of the rain, and took over 100,000 photographs on location to piece together Liberty City.
"We're constantly competing against ourselves," says Benzies. "If something isn't exactly right, it comes out of the game or gets fixed."
Comments
The game looks fantastic, but looking at the low poly main characters and strippers and the rest makes me laugh. Dead or Alive 2 was almost 10 years ago! At least the people have individual fingers now (i think).
The rest of the world is pretty detailed, cars, streets, buildings, etc.. But the people still look pretty bad except for the faces, though the lip syncing doesn't seem so hot either. The animation seems a lot better this time at least.
Is it still a trade-off for the amount of people in any given outdoor scene? Why can't indoor areas like cutscenes, comedy and strip clubs get loaded with some higher quality assets than the masses outside?
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A lot of the little touches are head & shoulders above the rest though, like the way shitty cars are rusted and backfire black smoke, the steam coming from the sewer grates on the streets, and the unique street texturing in general, the way you break into and hotwire cars. The lighting and physics of everything (okay those are big but are subtle and brilliant in the game). You could write pages of all the little stuff the game does well, but the stuff it doesn't do so well is still there and detracts from the consistency you speak of.
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