It’s true to say you need to speculate to accumulate but we reckon that the makers of GTAIV have brought new meaning to the phrase.

In a revealing interview with Timesonline.co.uk Rockstar North’s president, Leslie Benzies, admits that he’s not quite sure quite how much Grand Theft Auto IV has cost to produce but that he thinks it’s somewhere in the region of $100 million. “It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package,” he says, casually. Blimey, he's not kidding! As far as we’re aware that’s by far the biggest video game budget ever. Unless anyone out there knows any different?

Elsewhere in the interview we find out where some of the money was spent. Around 1000 people have helped to build the game, which is astonishing in itself. However some of the lengths the company went to in the name of authenticity were perhaps a little OTT – was it really necessary to mount time-lapse cameras atop New York rooftops just to capture the right intensity of rainfall? Er, now we’ve seen it, yeah, probably.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old Mr Benzies. After three and a half years of high intensity production the come-down is turning out to be anticlimactic: “It is almost depressing. It's like somebody's gone from your life. A couple of weeks from now, I'll be fine,” He says. Aw, diddums…