Rockstar has come to expect a withering barrage of criticism with every new Grand Theft Auto release. But critics and supporters alike may be surprised to know that some of the profits of their latest hit will be supporting higher education in England.

GTA4' s Euphoria Engine is behind the unique movement of the Liberty City citizens as they stalk the city and fly across your windshield, among other things, and it was developed by the Oxford spin-off company NaturalMotion using research from Oxford University' s Zoology department. Rather than using ragdoll physics, Euphoria models a character' s muscles, nervous systems and behavior patterns in a way that enables games to avoid traditional, preset animations.

NaturalMotion was co-founded in 2001 by Oxford graduates Torsten Reil and Colm Massey, and has since entered into partnership with multiple developers including Rockstar and Lucasarts. With GTA4 selling 609,000 copies on its first day in the United Kingdom alone according to MCV, Oxford stands to make a tidy profit from a system that was originally meant to model the movements of humans and animals.

An Oxford spokeswoman called the game a huge success, saying, " GTA4' s use of technology from an Oxford spin-out company is an illustration that the fruits of Oxford research get all over the world and into all sorts of arenas."

Euphoria will also be used in upcoming games such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and BackBreaker, which should facilitate Oxford' s research into realistically flailing virtual limbs well into the future.