Grand Theft Auto is in a lane of its own. In the 26 years since the first instalment crashed onto the scene, the series has shattered records and expectations.
Players have spent countless hours driving its virtual streets inspired by the US cities of New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Each entry has offered an even bigger playground, where gamers could role-play as criminals and moonlight as firefighters or taxi drivers in their downtime.
Once GTA 5 took the series online in 2013, there was no looking back. The game has sold a jaw-dropping 185 million copies and raked in £6.4 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, players have been treated to a growing buffet of new missions, races, and vehicles.
Despite this embarrassment of riches, calls for a new game have been growing louder with every passing year. After a decade-long wait, fans will eventually get a first look at GTA 6 in early December.
What better way to celebrate than taking a joyride down memory lane? Revisit the highs and lows of the influential series with our ranking of the main GTA games.
GTA 5
Arriving in 2013 to near-universal acclaim, GTA 5 took the series to dizzying new heights. Players could now switch between three protagonists, with pivotal missions requiring the unique skills of each character.
Rockstar also switched up the gameplay to focus on daring heists, which played out like cinematic set pieces. Set in San Andreas, the story took potshots at Silicon Valley tech bros, the Beverly Hills elite, and Hollywood bigwigs.
Where the campaign ended, GTA Online picked up. After some initial teething issues, the multiplayer mode began dishing out new updates at a steady clip. Rockstar kept evolving the world of San Andreas with new missions, items, cosmetics, and locations.
GTA Online quickly allowed players to create their own jobs, a virtual casino opened in 2019, and the private island of Cayo Perico was introduced as part of a heist mission in 2020.
Rating: 10/10
GTA: San Andreas
The series went big with San Andreas. GTA Vice City’s map is estimated at 5.6 square kilometres, San Andreas’s is 38 square km. It represents LA, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, and features open and empty cruising highways we’d never seen in the series before.
It's bigger, but is it better too? That enlarged scale let Rockstar include new classes of vehicles, including a fighter jet and passenger plane. There was just more to do here than in Vice City, which was a concentrated shot of 80s vibes.
San Andreas moved us into the 90s, putting us in the shoes of CJ, who is drawn back into a life of crime after he returns to his childhood patch in Los Santos.
Rating: 9/10
GTA 4
Rockstar took a turn for the dour in GTA 4. The bright sunlight of San Andreas’s fictional California was replaced by the grey murk of New York, aka Liberty City. Some say this was where GTA became too serious for their tastes, but GTA 4 also marked a huge uplift in how rich and realistic the world felt.
Character rag-doll physics seemed incredible at the time too. They employed Rockstar’s RAGE engine, which was put to great effect when your character drank too much alcohol, stumbling about the place with liquid legs. And this happened a lot, as protagonist Nico Bellic’s friends were always ringing and asking to hang out.
GTA 4 is the most grounded of the Grand Theft Auto games. And if that’s not your bag, try the much-loved add-ons The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, which up the charm.
Rating: 9/10
GTA 3
Grand Theft Auto 3 was the first must-have GTA game. Rendered in glorious 3D, Liberty City suddenly felt alive. The janky, top-down camera was gone, replaced by a third-person view that thrust players closer to the bullet-dodging action.
Most of the upgrades were made possible by the leap to the PS2. The console’s extra computing power and DVD player enabled Rockstar to cram more data into the game. As a result, characters were spouting lengthy lines of dialogue. There was also a story inflected by crime sagas such as Goodfellas and The Godfather which helped establish the series’ narrative style, and your actions finally mattered.
The game’s arsenal of weapons also grew in devilishly inspired ways. Fiendish players could blowtorch enemies and innocent bystanders using a flamethrower, or meticulously pick off henchmen with a sniper rifle.
More than past entries, GTA 3 ramped up the frenetic action. The game’s sandbox inevitably encouraged some players to try to break or exploit it. Everyone had that one friend who was convinced there was a hidden area you could reach with the right car or stunt. Once you’d exhausted your options, you could hop into a tank with the zero-gravity cheat enabled and soar across the map. Put simply, there was little else like GTA 3 in 2001.
Rating: 8/10
GTA: Vice City
For its fourth main instalment, Grand Theft Auto traded its worn leather jacket for a white blazer with rolled-up sleeves.
The series ditched the grimy streets of Liberty City for Vice City’s mini-Miami in the 80s. And Rockstar spared no expense in bringing the era to life: Mega-hits by Michael Jackson and Blondie were licensed for the soundtrack; Hollywood icons Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds were tapped to voice characters; and the game drew inspiration from the decade’s cultural touchstones, Scarface and Miami Vice.
Although it didn’t offer a tremendous leap in graphics, the fourth GTA boasted some memorable firsts. Players could finally buy properties and run businesses, including a nightclub and adult film studio. Alongside cars, the emergence of motorbikes ushered in another mode of transport, making it easier to zip through traffic when pressed for time.
Now may be the best time to revisit Vice City. If reports are to be believed, GTA 6 will feature an expanded, contemporary version of the older game’s titular location.
Rating: 8/10
GTA
In the 90s, a team of unassuming developers created a thrilling, open-world game that rewarded criminal deeds. The brainchild of Dundee-based DMA Designs, Grand Theft Auto locked into a hit formula predicated on guns, carjackings, and crookedness.
Best of all, it offered a level of freedom that many players hadn’t experienced up until that point. This defined a free-roaming style that has come to dominate gaming for better and worse.
Although it lacks a story or the biting satire of the recent instalments, many of the key elements of the GTA series are here: the map is split into three cities — Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City — that would be fleshed out in later games; committing crimes causes your wanted level to increase; and radio stations provide the soundtrack.
In hindsight, the fact that it became a smash hit is remarkable. GTA’s publisher frequently threatened to shelve it, critics derided its rough graphics, and the press accused it of glamourising violence. Nevertheless, a legion of gamers thirsty for some grit recognised GTA as something special.
Rating: 7/10
GTA 2
Perhaps the most easily disregarded of all the GTA games, 1999’s GTA 2 was a tightening up of the original. We got more eye-catching lighting effects, a camera less likely to give you motion sickness, and easier-to-handle controls.
Tearing around the city in a fast car became at least marginally easier in GTA 2. We do mean marginally, though. IGN described the Dreamcast’s controls as “unforgivable.”
After the relatively grounded settings of the original and its expansions, GTA 2 was set in a near-future US city, letting developer DMA Design throw in some more outlandish-looking car designs. It didn’t sell anywhere near as well as the original, though, with estimates at a million copies to the first game’s 3.5 million.
Rating: 7/10
GTA London: 1969
A lot had happened to the makers of the GTA games between the original and its “expansion pack” GTA London: 1969.
GTA developer DMA Design was acquired. Then the company that acquired them was bought. And then DMA’s intellectual property was sold to publisher Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar, now known as the maker of GTA, was formed.
So, yeah, GTA London: 1969 is actually the first Grand Theft Auto game made by Rockstar. All of this background kerfuffle may be why after almost 18 months since the original (a much longer time in 1990s game design than it is today), this ended up being a bit of a reskin job. New graphics, new music, but very familiar gameplay. That said, the radio has always been a core part of the series, and the soundtrack contains some great retro-themed tunes.
There’s also an expansion to this expansion, GTA London: 1961, released free of charge three months later.
Rating: 6/10
