A Polish website has posted images of what they say are real promotional posters for Grand Theft Auto V. The posters peg the game for a spring 2013 release date for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. We can't verify their authenticity but have asked a Rockstar rep if he will. This post will be updated if he does.

The images bear a European ratings logo on them, so, even if they're real, there's a chance the rest of the world could be getting the game some other season.

But these posters have the benefit of plausibility. GTA V was shown in action to reporters from Game Informer magazine earlier this month. And, from personal experience, I can say that Rockstar tends not to show reporters their games more than six or so months before release. Spring seems like a good time to launch.

So... legit? You decide (or, Rockstar, tell us, please!).

Premiera GTA V wiosną 2013! Mamy przeciek! TYLKO U NAS! [GTA-V.pl, Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

To celebrate the upcoming 10th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (on October 29!), Rockstar will re-release the popular game on mobile platforms this fall.

"Grand Theft Auto: Vice City gave players the freedom of a massive open-world in one of the most iconic and vibrant settings ever realized in a game," Rockstar founder Sam Houser said in a press release. "It was a defining moment in the series and we're delighted to be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year with a stunning, updated version for phones and tablets."

Here's Rockstar:

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was originally released in October 2002 for the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system, just one year after its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto III, changed the gaming landscape forever with its combination of open-world freedom, humor and action in a living, breathing city. Vice City expanded upon the open world gameplay of Grand Theft Auto III, combined with nostalgia for the 1980s to create one of the true high points in the marriage of video games and mainstream pop culture, loved by hardcore gamers and casual players alike. The upcoming mobile version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City brings the full experience to mobile devices, featuring native high-resolution graphics and several enhancements unique to the iOS and Android platforms.

(Image via Videogamesblogger.com)

Games take us to all manner of fantastical, unlikely places. But as good as video games have gotten at accurately recreating a space-marine shootout or a mountaintop dragon battle, there's one thing developers are still learning how to create: A dance club.

Many games try to create thriving urban environments for players to occupy, and there's nothing that says "thriving" and "urban" like a packed, sweaty dance club. Unfortunately, until very recently, games have been very, very bad at rendering realistic dance clubs.

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This scene from Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (a game which I love, I should say) best exemplifies the sort of awkward, embarrassing antics you'd see in early video game dance clubs. There just wasn't enough processing power to make the club as hazy, loud, or crowded-feeling as it needs to be to be convincing. I love dancing at The Asylum, but mostly because it's so endearingly goofy.

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There's nothing sadder than an empty dance floor, though, as evidenced by this video from Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's like being at an unpopular kid's Bar Mitzvah.

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I remember playing Mass Effect 2, when I first arrived at the Afterlife bar, I was incredibly impressed with how alive it felt. (Now, when I visit, I'm more aware of how empty it is.) Still, it's a pretty good scene, if only in how it builds up to the entrance to the club.

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I liked the vibe of The Hive in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The audio may not have been quite right, but it conveyed an icy, cool energy that worked with the game. Don't know how I feel about the random chicks gyrating around the place, but hey, no video game club is perfect.

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Rockstar have long understood how dance clubs feel, once again demonstrating their preternatural ability to be ahead of the curve on this sort of thing. Even with its now-primitive graphics, Vice City's Malibu Club is a pretty convincing club:

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It paves the way, of course, for the much more convincing clubs in Grand Theft Auto IV and its expansion chapters:

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The dance club scene in Max Payne 3 may represent the pinnacle of video games' representations of dance clubs so far:

Nice. The thrumming bass, the way that dialogue instantly gets cut out and muffled, the fact that you can't understand what the hell anyone is saying. There are some shortcuts—see through the smoke and mirrors of the lens filters and fog machines and you can tell that the dancefloor animations are somewhat repetitive and limited—but all the same, this club feels more authentic than any before it.

A huge part of creating a convincing digital dance club is the music and more specifically, the way the music sounds. It can't just be the regular background music that plays during the game—music in a club is thrumming, physical, oppressive. You can't hear anything over it, and as a result everyone is shouting. On top of the pounding bass, there's a high-frequency scream of reverberating voices. It's not an easy thing to get right, making it all the more remarkable when a game does.

I turn it over to you—what are some of your favorite video game clubs? Any classics that are worth mentioning?

The art style that Rockstar Games uses to promote its Grand Theft Auto games has been almost as important as the gameplay in the open-world series. Over the years, the publisher has doled out hints as to the sex, drugs and hi-jinx players would get into via posters and other graphic design images, long before any glimpses of gameplay were offered.

This time, it's a wee bit different as the art above clearly references a moment from the GTA V trailer, specifically one of the few instances where weapons of any kind show up. In the Rockstar Instagram feed where this piece showed up, the accompanying comment said, "Lots of info coming next month. Get ready." until, then look at the pretty (important) picture.

All video games have a history... a history of rumors and official statements, of leaks, of screenshots, of trailers and other things that excite us, confuse us or do both. So how do we get from the smallest hint of a new game to the real thing? What's the journey?

Today, we're debuting something a little different: a Kotaku Timeline—a timeline that tells the tale of the public emergence of the biggest, most interesting video games. The first game we're giving this treatment to may well be the biggest game of 2013: Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V. We'll be updating it in the months to come, through the release of the game and beyond.

You could say that people have been expecting a GTA V as far back as when GTA sequels first had numbers in their titles. But the first hints... the first rumors that seemed to have at least some possibility of truth behind them, hit in 2009. And so that's when our timeline begins...

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Grand Theft Auto V is in playable form, and at least one reporter is getting his hands on it today.

Game Informer editor-in-chief Andy McNamara wrote on Twitter today that he's at Rockstar, checking the next Grand Theft Auto game out for the magazine's December cover story.

This means we could see a release date very soon. Game Informer typically reveals its covers (along with details on the game it is showing off) during the first week of the month before the one on the issue. So we should hear more about Grand Theft Auto V in early November.

While the cover art appears to be predictably awful, there's little disputing the quality of the contents of this compilation of Rockstar games that's turned up on retail sites.

Called "Rockstar Games Collection: Edition 1", it bundles Red Dead Redemption, LA Noire, Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City and Midnight Club Los Angeles: Complete Edition.

It's listed at around $60, and is slated for release on 360 and PS3 on November 13.

Rockstar Games Collection: Edition 1 Playstation 3 [CD Universe]

Rockstar Games Collection Coming Soon, 4 games for the price of 1 [thekonamicode @ NeoGAF]

I hear the cops, even those in Liberty City, frown on never-ending loops of vehicular homicide in stolen taxi cabs.

GTAIV [neogohann]

NASA scientist Rich Terrile has a neat way of explaining stuff that you or I should, by all rights, not be able to understand at all: he uses Grand Theft Auto IV as a means of explaining how we might all be living our lives in a giant galactic simulation.

Speaking with Vice, Terrile details how Liberty City can be a lot more than just a place to steal cars and buy bad coffee.

The natural world behaves exactly the same way as the environment of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the game, you can explore Liberty City seamlessly in phenomenal detail. I made a calculation of how big that city is, and it turns out it's a million times larger than my PlayStation 3. You see exactly what you need to see of Liberty City when you need to see it, abbreviating the entire game universe into the console. The universe behaves in the exact same way. In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a definite state unless they're being observed. Many theorists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you explain this. One explanation is that we're living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we need to see it.

Whoah.

WHOA, DUDE, ARE WE INSIDE A COMPUTER RIGHT NOW? [VICE, via Rockstar]