Every ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Installment, Definitively Ranked

The fender-bending franchise—whose long-delayed 6th entry drops this fall—has already yielded some of the best games ever, from Vice City to V and San Andreas.Composite: GQ / Getty, Rockstar Games, IGBDThe release of Grand Theft Auto VI seems virtually guaranteed to be an entertainment event that'll make Avengers: Endgame look niche. The latest installment in Rockstar Games’ storied series of open-world crime games is set to make the equivalent of the GDP of a small state on its opening weekend. A 27-minute extended trailer hit Netflix this week; the first trailer, released in December 2023, has over 290 million views on YouTube, and caused Tom Petty's “Love is a Long Road” to blow up on Spotify. November 19, the day GTA VI drops, will be a great day for gamers with PTO to spend—and a dark day for global productivity.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-realized 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 while bumping Laura Branigan or Hall & Oates.It's that rare series in which all of the games are genuinely masterworks; nostalgic preferences aside, trying to pick a favorite is like trying to pick your favorite drug-addicted child, who also happens to be a serial killer. (And yet you still love them.) Nonetheless, we had a blast picking ours.7 & 6. GTA 1 & 2The games that started it all bear little resemblance to the monolithic franchise that would follow them, although the seeds of the franchise's future are here. They're top-down shooters in which you accrue points to advance, arcade-style, by driving around huge cityscapes, shooting people in the streets, doing missions for crime lords—accessed, in very late '90s fashion, via pay phone— and climbing the underworld ladder. The first GTA features 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. Both games are bit of fun for an hour or two. But oh, if we knew what was to come.5. GTA IIIRockstar GamesOne step up 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?Look, there's no question regarding GTA III's revolutionary status in gaming history. It's 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. Incredible for its time, for sure. But on revisit, it almost feels like a tech demo for the more three-dimensional Vice City and San Andreas, which put a ton of meat on this installment's brilliant bones with more expansive, organic worlds, improved customization, refined satirical identities, and gripping storytelling. Another mark against it, on reflection: Rockstar licensed very little actual music for the in-game radio stations, and you just can't do a drive-by without The Buggles.4. GTA VRockstar Games / IGBDGood god, take me back to late 2013, when the anticipation for GTA V hit a crazy fever pitch, as Rockstar drip-fed the masses with trailers showcasing the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Los Santos, loosely 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. These characters rise through the ranks in the Los Santos criminal underworld, executing increasingly convoluted — and extremely Mission: Impossible-coded — heists. The men come off pretty well, for menaces to society. 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) installment 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 CityRockstar GamesBasically 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.)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 Twisted Sister's “I Wanna Rock.” It was also the game wherein Rockstar began to properly refine its blend of satirical humor and cartoonish violence, exchanging its predecessor's dreary mood for a more colorful and vibrant world, bristling with references to the pop cultural staples of the ‘80s. It’s both a stylish ode to the MTV generation and a killer sandbox in which you can commit plentiful mass murder with a chainsaw.2. GTA IVRockstar Games / IGBDTaking a few cues from then-burgeoning prestige-TV staples 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. Protagonist Niko Bellic, a cynical, weary veteran of the Yugoslav Wars, ships over to Liberty City—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; at one point, players are 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 humor, 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 the insanely ambitious scope of San Andreas and some of that installment's gameplay innovations—you couldn't bulk up at the gym anymore, and car customization was out—it's still the closest any of these games have come to the complex storytelling and moral ambiguity of the greatest movies or TV; it's hard to argue that any other title in the series feels more like a work of art.1. GTA: San AndreasRockstar GamesTo 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 recognizable as an LA clone; 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 centering on CJ, a former gang banger who returns to his old neighborhood 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, in a genuinely great voice-acting performance, by Samuel L. Jackson.) The story is full of betrayal, revenge, and zany side-quests, one of which takes you into the steel belly of a top-secret government base called “Area 69.” (Rockstar, never change.)There's just so much to do and explore, and it's all packaged with an A-grade plot that felt revolutionary in 2004 and still holds up, even in our present era of cinematized 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 aging 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.This story originally appeared in British GQ.