Paris — The most expensive, most watched, most pirated and most award-festooned fictional television series in history... As "Game of Thrones" starts its eighth and final season on April 14, a look-back on its record-breaking run.

Massive ratings

First broadcast in 2011 on the US cable channel HBO, "Game of Thrones" -- or GoT to its fans -- was not an overnight phenomenon. But its audiences have never stopped growing and by 2014 it had overtaken HBO's flagship hit, "The Sopranos".

By its seventh season in 2017, viewing figures were stratospheric. Its final episode set an all-time US record for premium cable TV with 16.5 million people watching live or streaming on the day of transmission and 15 million more tuning in later.

Viewing records also tumbled in many of the 186 countries in which it was shown, with Britain's Sky Atlantic and OCS in France showing episodes in the middle of the night in sync with their US premieres.

But the figures become truly mind-boggling when illegal downloading is taken into account, with more than one billion people watching pirated copies of the seventh season.

Colossal budgets

The eighth run-out for "Game of Thrones" is reportedly the most expensive season of TV ever shot, with a budget of $15 million (13 million euros) per episode, taking the overall season cost to $90 million.

Although much of this has gone on lavish locations and special effects, the final two episodes will be one hour 20 minutes long -- almost the length of Hollywood movies.

HBO knows there is little danger of them not getting their money back, with the franchise so far earning them more than $1 billion, according to the New York Times.

The massive investment has also brought the series a record-breaking trove of 47 Emmy Awards from 128 nominations.

Top secret

After the leak of four episodes of season five before it was broadcast, the producers massively overhauled their security.

To throw hackers and pirates off the scent, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have shot several versions of the final episode, a tactic already used for "The Sopranos" and "Breaking Bad".

Actress Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark, admitted that even she had been fooled into believing a red herring version of the denouement.

To make sure no one was snooping, the producers took measures to stop drones overflying their shoots.

Game of Tourists

The series has also been a boon for tourism, particularly in Northern Ireland, where much of the series was shot, with fans flooding in to visit locations in the region which had previously been best known for its violent sectarian past.

Iceland and the Spanish cities of Girona in the Catalan north and Osuna near Seville have seen their visitor numbers rocket from special "Game of Thrones" tours.

But the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, the setting for King's Landing, discovered you can have too much of a good thing. It has had to put limits on the number of visitors it can receive in its picturesque medieval centre.

Dothraki baby names

Dogs, goldfish and lots of babies have also been named after characters from the series, with Arya -- together with its alternative spelling Aria -- entering the top 20 most popular names for girls in Britain last year.

Khaleesi, the honorary title in the imaginary Dothraki language given to Daenerys Targaryen, has also become popular, with 466 little girls in the US and 77 in France named after the queen of dragons last year.

The series has been something of a mixed blessing for pets too. Peter Dinklage, who plays "the Imp" Tyrion Lannister, had to appeal to fans to stop buying Siberian husky dogs who look similar to the dire wolves in the show.

Animal rights campaigners had complained that the number of huskies abandoned in Britain has risen seven-fold since the show started.

Presidential fans

While he was still in the White House, Barack Obama admitted to being a big fan of the series. He even asked HBO to bend their strict rules to allow him a sneak preview of the sixth season.

His successor in the Oval Office Donald Trump has made wide use of the "Winter is coming" motto of the House of Stark.

Much to the irritation of the channel and several of its actors, the US president has adapted the line several times in his tweets, including about Iran -- "sanctions are coming" -- and his border wall with Mexico: "The wall is coming."

The president, however, does not appear to have learned the lesson of the "Game of Thrones" wall, which has proved utterly ineffective against illegal immigration of Wildlings and zombie White Walkers.

George R.R. Martin: Father of 'Game of Thrones'

George R.R. Martin, the 70-year-old writer behind HBO's blood-spattered epic "Game of Thrones", has created a multitude of fantasy worlds spanning medieval pasts to distant sci-fi futures.

Portly, with a white beard, glasses and usually wearing a cap, Martin has been described as "America's Tolkien" and says he was inspired by the British fantasy master's "The Lord of the Rings" as a teenager.

He grew up poor but his rich imagination and prolific output -- including the five novels in the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series that became television's "Game of Thrones" -- saw him listed by Forbes magazine as the 12th highest-paid author in 2016.

Heavy on violence and sex, the books about noble families vying for the Iron Throne were released between 1996 and 2011 and already bestsellers before they were adapted for television.

"His skill as a crafter of narrative exceeds that of almost any literary novelist writing today," Time magazine wrote in 2011.

Martin started on the first in the series in 1991 aiming to "write something just as big as my imagination," he told Time in 2017.

From the mid-1980s he had worked as a Hollywood television screenwriter, including on "The Twilight Zone" and "Beauty and the Beast".

The reaction to his first drafts would be, "'George, we love it, but it's five times our budget ... the big battle you have where there's 10,000 people on a side, make that a duel between the hero and the villain'," he told Time.

He could abandon such limitations when he dedicated himself to prose from the mid-1990s.

"I'm going to have all the characters I want, and gigantic castles, and dragons, and dire wolves, and hundreds of years of history, and a really complex plot, and it's fine because it's a book," he recalled thinking.

The first in the famous series, "A Game of Thrones", was published in 1996.

He thought it was "essentially unfilmable" until he was approached by directors and writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss in 2006. "Game of Thrones" launched on HBO five years later.

"The show could not be without the mad genius of George," Benioff said in 2018, when accepting one of its 47 Emmys.

Translated into 47 languages, the books have sold more than 85 million copies and fans have been impatient for the sixth and seventh novels promised since 2011.

Their huge popularity means that "I'm very conscious I have to do something great, and trying to do something great is a considerable weight to bear," he told The Guardian newspaper in 2018.

George Raymond Richard Martin was born on September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey, his father working as a docker.

"We were poor," he told PBS television in 2018. "We never went anywhere in the summer, we just stayed in the same old place. But books took me everywhere."

At 13 he became hooked on by J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", learning from the killing of the wizard Gandalf that the sudden death of key characters is a twist that can work.

"The minute you kill Gandalf, the suspense of everything that follows is a thousand times greater because now anybody could die," he told PBS.

As a child he wrote monster stories, selling them to friends for a nickel, then superhero tales for school fanzines.

Martin graduated in journalism from Northwestern University in Illinois in 1971, becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

Passionate about medieval history and mythology, he started publishing in the 1970s, winning prizes for his science fiction short stories.

Other top titles have included the science fiction novella "A Song for Lya" (1976), fantasy mystery "Armageddon Rag" (1983), horror "Nightflyers" (1985) and an extensive superhero series "Wild Cards" from 1987.

He has lived in Santa Fe in New Mexico for four decades and he married Parris McBride, his second wife, in 2011. — AFP