'Grand Theft Auto IV' pulled over until 2008

— -- Grand Theft Auto fans are going to have to wait a bit longer for the next installment.

Take-Two Interactive announced Thursday that Grand Theft Auto IV would not be released Oct. 18 for Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game systems, as originally planned. Instead, the game will arrive in spring of 2008, "due to additional development time required to complete the title," the company said in a statement.

Rockstar Games founder Sam Houser says in the statement, "the new consoles are allowing us to create the "Grand Theft Auto" game we always dreamed about. Every aspect of the game and its design has been completely transformed. The game is huge and is pushing the hardware platforms to their absolute limits. The top engineers from Sony and Microsoft are working closely with the team in Edinburgh right now, helping us to fully leverage the power of both platforms. As always, our goal is to surpass even the wildest expectations of the game's fans, and to create the ultimate high definition video game experience."

Industry analysts had expected GTA IV to battle Halo 3— and perhaps Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band— for the top-selling game of the year. The last GTA game for consoles, 2004's GTA: San Andreas has sold more than 20 million copies.

On his Level Up blog, Newsweek's N'gai Croal mused: "It will be interesting to see which publishers move their games out of the November crunch and into October now that the neutron bomb that is Grand Theft Auto IV will no longer be dropped in 2007."

His take: Nintendo benefits most because it gives consumers more reason to buy a Wii. And Microsoft takes a bigger hit than Sony because its expected one-two punch of Halo 3 and GTA IV might have resulted in more Xbox 360 converts. "Rockstar has delivered its Grand Theft Auto games more or less like clockwork, making today's announcement something of a shock," he wrote.

On FiringSquad, news editor John Callaham trumped that calling the delay "a major shock" and noted that "this delay, plus the delay in the release of Rockstar's Manhunt 2, will drastically affect Take Two's financial results causing the company to lose about $200 million in revenue for its fiscal 2007 year.