Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is biggest-selling launch in entertainment history

Gamemaker Activision Blizzard said Thursday it sold 4.7 million copies of its Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game in the first 24 hours in North America and the United Kingdom. The take: $310 million.

That makes it the biggest-selling launch in entertainment history. The previous record was 3.6 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV.

If this is the first you've heard of game, here are some things you should know:

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is an incredibly realistic first-person shooter game wherein elite commandos fight terrorists threatening worldwide violence.

• Footage leaked a month ago stirred controversy because it revealed a level that allows players to slaughter innocent civilians in an airport.

• It sells for $59.99 and has an M-rating, for "Mature" (over 17), in the United States.

• The single-player game takes six or seven hours to complete.

• Thousands of gamers across the country, many dressed as Call of Duty characters, queued outside GameStop stores on Monday night to get first dibs. Of the 70 people in line at a store in Mankato, Minn., only one was female, and she said she was buying the game for her father, according to the Mankato Free Press.

• "No game this year will be more controversial and more easily misrepresented," writes Seth Schiesel in the New York Times. "That is because it revolves around the most provocative, forcefully uncomfortable and emotionally disturbing scene yet built into interactive entertainment. Rather than survey the battlefield from a clinical distance, the game thrusts the player into the harrowing experience of modern terrorism."

• From one gaming message board at ing.com:

gigablast35: The graphics are so realistic i actually feel like i am in a war.

EmissarySiskoDS9: If this game really made you feel like you were in a war no one would choose to play it!

• The Australian Council on Children and the Media called on the government's classification board to review the game's "15 and older" rating. "We understand that it's a game," the group's president told the Sydney Morning Herald, "but … we're not far off when you look at the images that you could actually put it on a Channel Nine news report and you'd think maybe that is real."

• In Great Britain, the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee has called on the government to prosecute retailers selling the game to children under 18.

• The score was created by Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer, known for movies such as The Lion King and Gladiator.

Asked by USA Today whether there is legitimacy in this art form, Zimmer said: "Absolutely, that we can't even question anymore. When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white, and there wasn't any sound, and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater … are each legitimate art forms. And now this new thing, it's interesting. We still call it a game. The word has a slightly sort of downmarket quality, that word. It is a trivial word. But remember, as a musician, we play all our lives, so the idea of playing something and being involved in something is actually quite powerful to a musician. The participation is the thing."