Its output has been described as “sick, deluded and beneath contempt” and banned for its “casual sadism”. Now the head of the company that designed Grand Theft Auto, the video game in which players kill policemen, take part in drug deals and visit prostitutes, has condemned his critics as the same kind of people who complained about Elvis Presley gyrating his hips in the 1950s.

In his first newspaper interview, Leslie Benzies, 37, president of the Edinburgh-based gaming company Rockstar North, says its games are victims of the same misplaced moral panic that greeted rock’n’roll.

Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest instalment in the computer game franchise, which has sold more than 70m copies, is due to be released on Tuesday and is expected to take £200m world-wide in its first week. It will have an 18 certificate.

Rockstar’s games have frequently provoked controversy.

One game was withdrawn across America after it emerged that it contained hidden sex scenes. The case prompted Hillary Clinton to call on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. She criticised Rockstar for “stealing the innocence of our children and making the difficult job of being a parent even harder”.

The first Grand Theft Auto, released a decade ago, was branded as “sick, deluded and beneath contempt” by the Police Federation. Last year the British Board of Film Classification refused to certify the Rockstar game Manhunt 2 because of its “casual sadism” and “unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying”.

High street retailers including Dixons, Currys and PC World banned the original Manhunt after it was linked to the murder in 2004 of Stefan Pakeerah, 14, from Leicester, who was beaten with a claw hammer and stabbed repeatedly. His parents blamed the murder on the game; the killer was a frequent player.

Commenting on the Manhunt furore, Benzies said: “We wanted to make a horror game that would scare you in the same way a film would.

“It doesn’t seem to me to be any worse than a film. If it’s a film or a book, you can do what you want. We seem to be in a different category.”

However, Benzies claims that some of those who criticise his games are unnerved by progress. “There is a big fear factor here. It’s the coming of the railways, it’s Elvis shaking his hips. It’s cars going over 25 miles per hour and making people explode,” he said.

“We’ve had such a beating over the past three years. If I get into a confrontation about it, once I’ve had my beating, I ask if they’ve ever played the game. Invariably they haven’t.”

Benzies said that he was mindful of the game’s 18 certificate and would not allow his children to play it, adding: “We’re very careful about who we market the game to and what is in the game.”

Grand Theft Auto IV is highly realistic and violent. Players control Niko Bellic, an illegal eastern European immigrant who arrives in Liberty City, a pastiche of New York, and is sucked into the criminal underworld.

Gamers then explore the virtual landscape and engage in drug deals, hijackings and gang warfare. They can execute passers-by, have sex with prostitutes and goad the police into high-speed chases. Weapons on offer include Uzi 9mm sub-machineguns, shotguns, hand grenades, knives and baseball bats.

The anticipated success of Grand Theft Auto IV comes as one of Britain’s most prominent neuroscientists warns that children who spend hours playing computer games could risk doing so much damage to their brains that they lose their personalities.

Baroness Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, claims the rush of continually winning and losing at the games produces “hits” of dopamine, the euphoria-inducing chemical that has been linked to drug dependency. The long-term result, she suggests in an interview in today’s Sunday Times Magazine, could be damage to a part of the brain that is key to forming personality. The excessive dopamine, according to Greenfield, may “reduce activation in the prefrontal cortex and, in so doing, tip the balance away from awareness of the significance, the meaning of our actions”.

The scientist warns: “Individuality could be obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations – a ‘yuck’ and ‘wow’ mentality.”

Greenfield elaborates her theories in ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, to be published next month.

Stafford Lightman, professor of medicine at Bristol University and a leading neuroscientist, said: “It may well be there are children who become more susceptible to the influence of the big kick they get from winning on a computer game.”

He said there was “no evidence at all” for Greenfield’s theory about the longer-term personality effect.

Additional reporting: Roger Waite

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