How much would it cost to program Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?

Without doing any research at all, I can tell you that modern video games like the wildly popular - and controversial - Grand Theft Auto series tend to cost millions of dollars to produce. In fact, the very best video games now have production budgets that rival Hollywood movies. It's not just two guys working in their garage for a few months any more, needless to say.

But let's dig into it and see if we can find out just how long it took to write Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, how many people were involved and their production and advertising budgets.

First stop, as always, is Google. First search, for "how long did it take to program write grand theft auto san andreas" failed to produce anything interesting, so it's time to put a bit more effort into things. One handy trick: search Google News so that results are constrained to media outlets, online and off, rather than the entire world of Web sites.

Even with that, though, I had a heck of a time finding any budgetary numbers for "San Andreas", but there's lots of information about the production budget for the sequel, "GTA IV" (aka "Liberty City Stories").

According to The Times Online, the production budget for GTA IV was (ready for this?) $100 million dollars. The game took three and a half years to produce and Rockstar Games GTA IV producer Leslie Benzies says " About 1,000 people have had a hand in developing it."

A game like this -- and San Andreas before it -- isn't just about imagining things and rendering sketches in a 3d graphics app. For Liberty City Stories, they set up time-lapse cameras on rooftops in New York to capture the correct intensity of the rain, and over 100,000 photographs were taken on location.

You ready to compete with that?

They sold over 70 million units of Grand Theft Auto prior to the release of Liberty City Stories.

You ready to compete with those sales figures?

I didn't think so. :-)