After all the receipts are tallied, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V will go down in history as the most financially success video game in history.
In its first day of release alone, the game netted $800 million in sales, destroying the “one-day retail sales record set by Activision Blizzard Inc., whose ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II’ brought in $500 million in its first 24 hours of release,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
This impressive record would not have been accomplished without the army of fanatical gamers who, for the past five years, have obsessed over the game map, a mysterious shed, and the bikini model who graced all the game’s advertising.
Since its release Tuesday, GTA V has been a worldwide trending topic on Twitter and inspired countless pieces of fan art, but the most impressive tribute is an 8-bit trailer produced by the Majami Hiroz show for Machinima Respawn. The Majami Hiroz YouTube channel specializes in remixing “’80s movies like Scarface, ’80s TV series like Miami Vice, GTA: Vice City, ’80s music, ’80s video games and all things retro (not necessarily in this order and not necessarily all of them).”
The trailer has already been viewed 95,000 times. Not bad, considering that its target audience is GTA V players, who would actually have to quit the game for a few minutes to watch a video on YouTube.
Screengrab via YouTube