Grand Theft Auto leads the pack

An all-new episode of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series launched yesterday - download only and for a low price of approximately £14. Yes, this is huge.

Grand Theft Auto is notorious for causing trouble, but as of yesterday has been doing so in a ground-breaking productive way. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned writes a new chapter against the backdrop of Liberty City. We meet a new hero, biker dude Johnny Klebitz, and learn all about him throughout a fully-fledged Story mode. After that we can indulge in biker-theme multiplayer scenarios created especially for The Lost and Damned. It's near as damn it a whole new GTA available at a fraction of the cost of a full-price Xbox 360 title, delivered to your home via broadband.

Even if The Lost and Damned was only averagely entertaining (it is, however, brilliant) its arrival signifies a huge leap for digital entertainment of any kind.

Time magazine this week has run a cover story praising Grand Theft Auto IV as a "supremely ambitious experiment in storytelling", and the GTA series overall as "a sustained fictional inquiry into the myth of the great American badass". The Lost and the Damned is more than just a clever add-on to a best-selling videogame. It is being viewed by a world renowned cultural commentator as significant.

If you didn't believe the hype last April with the release of Grand Theft Auto IV there's no escaping the furore in early 09. The Lost and Damned is the first download game we've seen prominently advertised on the high street, a sign of things to come for videogames if not ahead of its time in many ways. As an exclusive for Xbox 360 gamers, it should prove to be a massive boost for the Microsoft console as it rallies against the superior marketing of Wii and gathering momentum of PlayStation 3.

It is hard to imagine anyone else being in a similar position to GTA any time soon, however, offering similar movie-style locations to support any number of compelling side stories. This is a direction Electronic Arts might have considered for its Godfather trilogy, but instead has gone back to the drawing board for The Godfather II. Episodic content has been promised by Sony since PlayStation 2 but is yet to arrive.

We guess, just like every great GTA situation, this silver lining has its own cloud! Let's hope it won't be for too long. Meantime, Xbox 360 is getting another GTAIV chapter to show the way forward later this year.