Grand Theft Auto V © Rockstar Games

It’s nearly here. After a five year wait, Grand Theft Auto V finally hits shelves this Tuesday. Over the course of 15 years, Rockstar’s open world crime spree series has evolved to become not just the biggest franchise in gaming, but in entertainment, and the fifth instalment is expected to shatter all records once again. In fact, it’s already started - here are ten mind blowing stats about the biggest budget, most controversial video game ever.

1. The new game is twice the size of Manhattan

Measuring 13.9 virtual square miles, 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was the biggest game in the series until now - but Grand Theft Auto V has been built on an even more epic scale. Rockstar’s confirmed that the size of the map is going to be even greater than the worlds of Red Dead Redemption , GTA IV and GTA: San Andreas combined. With a bit of arithmetic, that means the Los Santos of GTA V measures at least 48.7 square miles - that’s over 17,665 football pitches, or 1,416,422,409 PlayStation 3s laid next to each other in rows. Best of all, you’ll be able to explore the whole thing as soon as you pop the disc in, with no artificial barriers in place. Talk about open world.

2. The series has sold enough to span half the globe

As of 2012, the Grand Theft Auto series had sold over 125 million copies worldwide. To give you some perspective, that means that if each game was sold in a standard DVD box and laid end-to-end, they would stretch on for over 23,750km - that’s more than halfway around the equator. If you stacked each copy on top of each other, they’d measure up to 1,750km - you’d need 5,401 Eiffel Towers to match that height.

3. Only one movie in history has cost more to make than GTA V

Making a video game is certainly not cheap, especially if it’s one of the most anticipated in, well, ever. Rockstar is certainly not afraid to reach deep and break out the big bucks, as the budget for GTA V is reportedly over £170 million ($267.3 million) - only one Hollywood movie has cost more to make, and that was 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which cost a cool £190 million ($300 million) to make.

4. GTA has five times more cars than the Gumball 3000 rally

It wouldn’t be Grand Theft Auto without the cars, and to date, there’ve been over 519 different vehicles throughout the series for you to break into and steal - five times more than in the original Gran Turismo, and ten times more than the number of cars in your average Le Mans 24 Hour. They may not carry the official licences, but each car is inspired by real life equivalents, including the Dodge Viper-inspired Bravado Banshee (which Rockstar is offering as a real life car as part of a competition in the US), and it looks like the devs are pulling out all the stops for the latest GTA title, which promises the biggest garage yet - over 200 vehicles for you to thrash around, and over 1,000 different modifications you can make to them. Why yes, we’d like a test drive please.

5. GTA V has twice as many missions as all the previous games combined

The GTA games are known for their high-octane missions that often span the entire map.

There have been 450 main single player missions throughout each game to date, but GTA V is going to hit another gear with approximately 80 single player missions, and over 700 online missions in multiplayer mode which you can tackle with up to 15 mates - plus you’ll be able to make your own online missions too.

6. GTA IV’s script is longer than Harry Potter

You could say ‘over the top’ is the franchise’s motto, but there are some elements to the series that help it stay true to reality, including the voice acting. We’ve seen celebrities like William Fichtner, Samuel L Jackson and Ray Liotta lending their voices to the digital denizens of the GTA world, but for the latest game, Rockstar has even enlisted the help of real life gang members, giving the game’s digital triads a stamp of authenticity. We expect to see plenty of voice acting in GTA V too: Grand Theft Auto IV had over 80,000 lines of dialogue - to put that in perspective, the first Harry Potter book is approximately 77,000 words.

7. Grand Theft Auto V has already sold millions

GTA V isn’t even on sale yet, but it’s almost certainly a best seller already. So confident is the game’s publisher that it has reportedly allocated three million copies for launch day in the UK alone - if it sells all of them on day one, it will double the current British record of 1.4m copies for Call of Duty: Black Ops. All signs point to similar demand worldwide: VGChartz estimates current pre-orders for the game stand at 2.6 million, which is more than all current pre-orders for Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts on all platforms combined . Grand Theft Auto IV became the biggest entertainment launch of all time in 2008, and it looks like its sequel will smash the record again.

8. GTA V’s launch day will cost the UK economy more than an Olympic stadium

The Guardian reports tha t that 14 percent of British men admit that they’re likely to throw a sickie for the launch of GTA V. Let’s hope not: with around 14.6 million men of working age in employment in the UK, that means 2.4 million will be phoning in sick on Tuesday. Based on the UK average daily salary (£72.60), that’s £174.2 million employers could be paying out while gamers fire up their consoles - substantially more than the price of the £105 million Stratford Velodrome built for the 2012 Olympics.

Grand Theft Auto has come along way since the 1997 original, created by Dundee development studio DMA Design, the brains behind Lemmings.

9. GTA boasts the most expensive bonus content ever

You might think the latest downloadable content for Call of Duty is expensive, but it’s nothing compared to what Rockstar and publisher Take-Two had to pay for an extra feature in a GTA game that was never even meant to see the light of day. Locked away and hidden under lines and lines of code in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was an X-rated playable mini game which drew the attention of many family organisations and politicians when the notorious “Hot Coffee” mod was released, letting players access it on the PC version of the title. The Hot Coffee scandal ended up costing the publisher over $20 million (£12.6 million) thanks to a settlement in its class action lawsuit in the US. To put that number into perspective, the first game in Ubisoft’s blockbuster Assassin’s Creed series cost around the same to make. Risky business indeed.

10. GTA is the number one most controversial video game series ever. Fact.

You don’t need us to tell you the hyper-violent GTA series has gained notoriety, but you may not realise that it actually holds a world record for it. No, really: the Guinness Book of Records lists the Grand Theft Auto series as the most consistently controversial game franchise in history, counting over 4,000 news stories dedicated to the controversial nature of the open-world adventure series. That’s a record, and we don’t see any other games on the horizon that promises to strip Rockstar of its title.

And one fact we can’t quite prove….

Is Bigfoot really in San Andreas? Or is just a hack?