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In a world where anything is possible, and the worst possible retribution is to fail and restart, there is little doubt that GTA does encourage players to behave badly. The question is, does it affect its players’ attitudes and responses in real life? It’s a hot topic in psychology, in the same way that television was in the 1970s, video nasties in the 1980s, and the jury is still very much out.

“Look,” Houser says, “video games are a popular and easy enemy. It’s all part and parcel of doing something that’s not been done before. One of the things that’s always been exciting is the feeling of being in at the birth of a new medium, but of course the history of technology-driven art from the printing press onwards has been of people fighting against that stuff.

“It feels at last like we’re moving on from that debate. The audience is getting past 30 so it all becomes a bit silly. That’s not to say that all games are for all people; we’ve never said that. GTA has always been rated 18 and we’ve always been very happy with that.

“Nevertheless, we do get frustrated when video games are singled out and movies are given a free pass. Manhunt 2 was banned in the same week that Saw was released. The arguments become quite ludicrous quite quickly when people argue that games are somehow more dangerous than full-motion video.

“Within Rockstar, sometimes we feel that some of our games get singled out and held up as pariahs. All we want to do is tell a story with rounded characters. Like GoodFellas, which is a key film for us, our rounded characters happen to be criminals.”

For a man with millions in the bank, he remains impressively passionate about his work, and equally keen for his private life to remain private. At times it seems like he is deliberately cultivating a mystique.

“I've read that about myself, but it’s a myth. I often speak to people like yourself. But me, Sam and Leslie [Benzies, another key force behind GTA] are very aware of the fact that we as a triumvirate do not make the games; 200, 300, 700 people make the games. It’s easy for people to focus on individuals because that’s an easier story to tell, but it’s not relevant to what we do.

“Furthermore, the games are too full of anti-celebrity diatribe for us to be anything but hypocritical if we were to jump on that bandwagon. It truly holds no appeal for any of us to be a celebrity. I find it very depressing as a consumer when you read about one actor’s experience of making a movie. What about the writer, the producer, the cinematographer or the director?

“We’ve got, you know, 100 plus people, at least 80 per cent of whom are far more intelligent than me, and to start saying it’s me or Sam or the pair of us because we’re such crazy brothers just seems stupid. And it’s not fair or appropriate.”

Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly Sam who has been the biggest influence on his younger brother's life. Sam it was who dreamt of being a rock star and took a job in the early 1990s with BMG Records, before moving to its interactive department. Dan followed. “I was always at BMG Interactive. It wasn’t particularly an enormous passion of mine, but out of nepotism it was the only job I could get.”

The sale of BMG Interactive to Take Two software in 1998 took the brothers to New York, and one year later the success of GTA II gave them the clout to form their own division within Take Two. They reflected the rock n roll ambitions of their youth in the name they chose – Rockstar. The timing was perfect. Sony released the PlayStation 2 in 2000, and GTA III followed one year later, the first 3D title in the series, and the first that came close to achieving the Rockstar boys' ambitions.

Thus began what seems to the outsider to be the perfect life: a Manhattan address, money in the bank and complete anonymity on the street. As video games have supplanted rock music as the leading source of the older generations’ opprobrium, it is somehow appropriate that the Rockstar founders are living the lives of the rock stars they set out to imitate.

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