IT is likely to be the biggest entertainment launch in history - and it is made in Scotland.

The latest incarnation of video game Grand Theft Auto is out next week and is expected to make hundreds of millions of pounds worldwide for a franchise now bigger than Star Wars.

GTA V - set in kitschy Americana but devised first in Dundee and then developed in Edinburgh - goes on sale on September 17.

Now owned by New York-based Rockstar but still developed in the capital, the video game is expected to be so good the share price of its makers has doubled in the last year.

But few in the United States recognised that the product - with back-drop of urban America - is a tartan-tinged vision of their homeland.

Brian ­Baglow, a one time GTA writer who know runs industry umbrella group Scottish Games Network, said: "By any sort of commercial scale, Grand Theft Auto is easily Scotland's largest cultural export ever.

"The series has sold something like 135 million copies so far.

"It's coming up to 17 years since GTA began and it's become something I don't think anyone involved with the original game would have expected."