Grand Theft Auto IV car-jacked pop culture this week.

The controversial and coveted video game sold about six million units in the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 formats, reaping more than $500 million in worldwide sales.

The $59.99-a-copy game, which follows fresh-off-the-boat Serbian immigrant Niko Bellic on a crime spree around a spectacularly detailed virtual manifestation of New York, took in $310 million in its first day of release, April 29, more than the gaming industry’s previous record-holder, Halo 3, earned in a week.

The eye-popping totals for Grand Theft Auto IV eclipse all other forms of popular entertainment. The prior one-week sales record was held by the Hollywood blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” a 2007 sequel that took in $404 million worldwide.

“Grand Theft Auto IV’s first week performance represents the biggest launch in the history of interactive entertainment,” said Strauss Zelnick, the chairman of Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes the game, in a statement Wednesday. “We believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date.”

The digerati are hailing GTA IV as a masterpiece, the “War and Peace” of the gaming world. But only if Leo Tolstoy had been kidnapped by the makers of those explicitly ghoulish “Saw” films.

The casual and graphic quality of the violence in GTA IV has drawn heated complaints from watchdog groups such as the Parents Television Council, which blasted the game as “brutally violent” as well as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (GTA IV is ostensibly set in “Liberty City,” but with landmarks such as Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty, it is clearly a stand-in for the Big Apple.)

The parents’ group has been lobbying the gaming industry’s ratings board without success to change GTA IV’s current rating of M (17 and older) to AO (adults only: 18 and older). The group’s director, Gavin McKiernan, argues that the nature of the game makes it more hazardous for young adults than any R-rated film.

“An R-rated movie is a two-hour passive experience,” he said. “With this we’re talking about 70 to 80 hours of game play where you’re practicing and completing these (violent) acts.”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving has been pillorying GTA IV because Niko is capable of downing several cocktails before sliding behind the wheel — usually of a vehicle seized at gunpoint.

“Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke,” reads a MADD statement.

Ironically, the drumbeat of criticism may have worked better than any marketing campaign.

“There is a lot of attention given to controversial themes and it often helps the buzz for these types of products,” said Josh Eliashberg, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “All the controversy helped in psyching the target market for this game.”

Certainly the release of GTA IV set off a frenzy among players last Tuesday.

“We go to lots of launches of big-ticket games and consoles, and I’ve never seen a reaction like this,” said Shane Satterfield, the editor-in-chief of GameTrailers, a broadband video Web site for the gaming industry. “Even at the small mom-and-pop stores where usually you might have five kids standing outside, they had hundreds of kids waiting.”