Brace yourselves: we’re about to be hit with an entertainment event that’ll make Avengers: Endgame look like a niche indie release. That’s Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest instalment in the series of open-world crime games created by Rockstar North, set to make the equivalent of the GDP of a small state on its opening weekend. To date, the first trailer has over 290 million views on YouTube, backed by Tom Petty’s “Love is a Long Road,” which saw the dad rocker go nuclear on Spotify. It’ll soon be the first game in history to be previewed with an “extended look” on Netflix. The 19th of November, the day it finally comes out, is guaranteed to mark a world-record for collective sick days.
After all, when a new GTA comes out, everyone goes batshit. Not that much elaboration is needed as to why: we’ve all spent countless hours zipping around in cars, committing gleefully entertaining acts of vandalism, parachuting from mountains and evading our five-star wanted levels. It’s the pinnacle of escapism. No other gaming franchise allows us to explore such fully-realised worlds, nor to do what we want, when we want. Especially when that means shooting some poor store clerk in the face. Bloodshed, baby!
They’ve also evolved into some of the funniest satires of American culture and politics seen anywhere, let alone in the gamesphere, thanks to the Britain-born Rockstar’s outsider lens: the modern games skewer everything from rampant U.S. consumerism to vacuous Hollywood influencers, while all of them have taken a few pops at the country’s gleeful gun culture. But no GTA is the same: some come with a gritty tone akin to a Sunday night HBO show, while others are blockbuster adventures aping Hollywood’s greatest crime epics. As such, the debate as to which mainline game is the greatest will rage on until the heat death of the universe. Some will die on a hill for the gritty realism of GTA IV. For others, you’ll never top cruising around a sun-kissed Vice City to Laura Branigan or Hall & Oates.
It’s one of those rare examples of a series where all of the games are genuinely masterworks; nostalgia, no doubt, will play a part in your personal favouritism, but it’s really like trying to pick your favourite drug-addicted child, who also happens to be a serial killer. (And yet you still love them.) Nonetheless, we’ve had a bash at picking ours.
7 & 6. GTA 1 & 2
The games that started it all, though they bear little resemblance to the monolithic franchise that would follow them — being top-down shooters on the original PlayStation wherein you’d have to accrue points to advance, arcade-style. Mostly, they were carnage, though you can see the first seeds of the later GTA games in there: driving around huge cityscapes, shooting people in the streets, doing missions for crime lords — accessed, in very late ’90s fashion, via telephone boxes — and yourself climbing the greasy pole. The first GTA is based in crude versions of the cities (and later, states) that would dominate the GTA series moving forward, from Liberty City, to San Andreas, to Vice City; the second set itself in a near-future metropolis, Anywhere USA, that Rockstar is yet to revisit. A bit of fun for an hour or two. But oh, if we knew what was to come.
5. GTA III
One step from the bottom spot and we’re already at the point where to rank any of these games so “low” feels sacrilegious. GTA III, the fifth-best Grand Theft Auto entry in the mainline series? As in: the one that essentially started it all, made an art form of the open world, and established the blueprint of ruthless criminality and sandbox chaos that these games are still based upon today? Cheers lads. Nice one. Claude’s crying.There’s no question of GTA III‘s revolutionary status in gaming history, up there with the likes of Half-Life, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and The Last of Us: a dark, funny, rain-smeared descent into the criminal underworld of Liberty City (at that point, less of a direct New York knock-off). The game places players in the shoes of a voiceless, expressionless sociopath, the then-novel idea being to do missions for the mob, race around the streets and, if your heart should desire, blast people down with an M16 for funsies. Oh yes, incredible for its time. But playing it now, it almost feels like a tech demo for the other games of the 3D era Vice City and San Andreas, which whacked a ton of meat on its brilliant bones with more expansive, organic worlds, improved customisation, refined satirical identities and gripping storytelling. Another mark against it, on reflection: Rockstar hardly licensed any actual music for the radio stations, and you just can’t do a drive-by without The Buggles.
4. GTA V
Good god, take me back to late 2013, when the anticipation for GTA V hit a crazy fever pitch, Rockstar drip-feeding the masses with trailers showcasing the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of nü Los Santos: based on Southern California, a living-and-breathing satire of the vapid Hollywood lifestyle, materialist excess, and the perma-cringe of the early social media age. The game that arrived teemed with innovation, its city and northern countryside packed with things to do, people to meet, and crimes to commit, from boosting sports cars to full-on bank robberies, the final mission being a homework-copying homage to the final score in Heat.
It was also the first GTA that let you play as more than one character, each of them providing a unique perspective on the world. They were Michael, an ex-robber in the throes of a midlife crisis; Franklin, a street hustler from Los Santos’ equivalent of Compton; and Trevor, the psychopathic embodiment of GTA‘s signature bloodshed and chaos. The story saw them rise the ranks in the Los Santos criminal underworld, executing an increasingly convoluted — and extremely Mission: Impossible-coded — heists. The men come off pretty well, menaces to society so they are. But one wonders if Rockstar had to make the game’s female characters so unlikeable, with Michael’s wife falling into the Skyler White trap, weirdly vilified for having the audacity to disapprove of his lawless lifestyle.
Nonetheless, the trio are indisputable video game icons, and GTA V itself is one of the greatest games of all time, even if its 13 years as the only current-gen (and last-gen) instalment has allowed some fatigue to creep in. It’d also help if GTA Online hadn’t become a complete shit show full of 13-year-olds killing everyone on those rocket-powered flying murder bikes. Still, there’s a reason we’ve all clocked a bazillion hours on the thing.
3. GTA: Vice City
Basically Scarface: The Game, with the player placed in the shoes of a rising drug lord in the titular Vice City, a neon-soaked stand-in for ‘80s Miami, with more palm trees than you’d find on a desert island. Even the eventual home of the player character, the Hawaiian shirt-wearing Tommy Vercetti, is basically the mansion owned by Tony Montana, with a major set piece in the game mirroring that film’s climactic shootout. (Funnily enough, Scarface‘s famous montage song, “Push It To the Limit,” was previously on GTA III‘s in-game radio, one of the few actual tracks included.)
Perhaps this is the GTA that most wears its cinematic influence on its billowy suit sleeve, but that’s not the main reason it holds so many of us in its nostalgic clutches. Etched into so many brains is the image of rolling down Vice City beach with the top down, the radio blasting “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Billie Jean” or, for the V-Rock faithful, Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock” and Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”. It was also the game wherein Rockstar began to properly refine its blend of satirical humour and cartoonish violence, exchanging its predecessor’s dreary mood for a world more colourful and vibrant, bristling with references to the pop cultural staples of the ‘80s. It’s a stylish ode to the MTV generation. And, yes, a killer sandbox in which you can commit plentiful mass murder with a chainsaw.
2. GTA IV
Taking a few cues from the then-burgeoning staples of prestige TV, like The Sopranos and The Wire, the fourth mainline game in the GTA franchise leapt onto the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with a grittier, more grounded tone, centring on Niko Bellic, a cynical, weary veteran of the Yugoslav Wars who ships over to Liberty City — now a bustling, like-for-like parody of 2000s New York — in pursuit of the American Dream. He starts out doing odd jobs for his bowling-addicted cousin, who owns a taxi firm operating out of the city’s equivalent of Brooklyn, and before you know it, he’s rubbing shoulders with Jamaican drug lords, Irish bank robbers, and the mob.
The game was like an incredibly jacked, super-next-gen GTA III. It was also twice as depressing, with a bleak, often heartbreaking storyline, the player at one point forced to choose between the death of Niko’s cousin and his girlfriend. Not that it was entirely without Rockstar’s sometimes juvenile, oft satirically on-point sense of humour, from dumb street name gags through to the Statue of Liberty being modelled after Hillary Clinton, her torch replaced by a coffee cup. (That being both a joke about America’s proclivity for Starbucks and the “Hot Coffee” hidden sex game über controversy that hit the company following the release of GTA: San Andreas.) While it lacked some of the gameplay innovations brought about by San Andreas, dialling down from its insanely ambitious scope — you couldn’t bulk up at the gym anymore, and car customisation was out — it’s hard to argue that any of the other titles feel more like “art,” in that it’s the closest any of them have come to achieving the complex storytelling, and moral ambiguity, of the greatest movies or TV.
1. GTA: San Andreas
To date, San Andreas is the only 3D GTA wherein Rockstar has tried to replicate an entire state, with more than one major city: you start in a smaller version of ‘90s Los Santos, rendered in blocky PlayStation 2-era graphics, though hardly less recognisable as an LA clone. And as the story unfolds, you’re taken on a clockwise journey through the rural backwoods, onto the steep, hilly streets of San Fierro — a San Francisco stand-in with its own version of the Golden Gate Bridge — and then to Las Venturas, a hedonistic casino playground in the middle of nowhere, just like Vegas IRL. The scale of the map is actually smaller than GTA V, and yet it still feels like the more expansive world, with its variety of biomes and landmarks. Each city and town has its own distinct visual identity, from the Californian ambers of Los Santos to the scorching mustards and browns of the deserts you explore late-game.
And that’s just the world. The story, like most GTAs, follows a rags-to-riches tale centring on CJ, a former gang banger who returns to his family home on Grove Street after the death of his mum. He’s reunited with his embittered brother Sweet, plus childhood friends Big Smoke and Ryder; the first chunk of missions make for a great hang, with some of the most interesting characters in a Rockstar joint, whether you’re heading out to the drive-thru for Smoke’s ludicrously big fast-food order, doing a bit of petty crime, or racing lowriders through the Los Santos streets. What unfolds is a conspiracy leading back to the Los Santos police, led by a villainous cop played by Samuel L. Jackson — a genuinely great voice performance. It’s piled high with betrayal, revenge and, eventually, bizarro adventures with a far zanier bent, one of which takes you into the steel belly of a top-secret government base called Area 69. (Rockstar, never change.)
There is just so much to do and explore, all packaged with an A-grade plot that felt revolutionary in 2004. Hell, it still stands up in our present era of cinematised video games; I’d argue that it’s just as rich and emotional as The Last of Us or Red Dead 2. Beyond all that, it’s just a gaming masterclass. For one session, you might fly around shooting people with a jet pack, get your hair cut, hit the clothes shop, and then throw yourself into missions running errands for an ageing hippie. On another, you can cruise around in a biplane listening to “Free Bird.” Like that song, it’s the apex of freedom. “Ah shit, here we go again,” CJ bemoans on his return to San Andreas. But for us, it never gets old.
