History of the GTA Series: 1997 to 2026

Grand Theft Auto began as a top-down 2D game with a Birds Eye View and deliberately simple premise: steal cars, complete missions, evade the police, accumulate points. The year was 1997. The developer was DMA Design, a studio based in Dundee, Scotland, that would eventually be renamed Rockstar North.

Twenty-nine years later, the sixth mainline entry in that series is the most anticipated entertainment product in history, carrying an estimated $1–2 billion development budget and the cultural weight of a franchise that has defined what an open-world game can be.

This is the complete history.

The Complete GTA Chronology

GTA 1 (1997): The Controversial Beginning

DMA Design's original Grand Theft Auto was not an immediate critical success. It was a chaotic, often unplayable top-down crime game with a simple premise — steal cars, complete missions for anonymous criminal employers, don't get killed by police.

What made GTA notable in 1997 was not its gameplay but its publicity. The game was banned outright in several countries, condemned by politicians and parents' groups across the UK and US, and generated exactly the kind of controversy that DMA Design and publisher BMG Interactive may or may not have intentionally courted.

The controversy was the marketing. GTA sold on the strength of its notoriety. Players who bought it often found a rough, frustrating game — but they kept coming back, and the IP's potential was clear enough that BMG Interactive's successor, Take-Two Interactive, acquired DMA Design and developed the sequel.

The three cities in GTA 1 — Liberty City (New York), Vice City (Miami), San Andreas (San Francisco) — became the canonical GTA setting names, reused and reimagined in every subsequent 3D entry.

GTA III (2001): The Revolution

Nothing in gaming history quite parallels what GTA III did in 2001.

The transition from top-down 2D to fully 3D third-person open world wasn't GTA III's idea alone — Driver and other games had explored similar territory. But GTA III executed the concept at a quality and scale that made everything else look preliminary.

Liberty City — a fictional New York spanning three islands — was a living environment where pedestrians had schedules, traffic moved, crime and police existed as persistent systems, and missions unfolded in a coherent spatial world rather than a menu. The player character, Claude, was a silent protagonist defined entirely by player action. You robbed, you drove, you killed, and the world responded.

GTA III sold 14.5 million copies on PS2 alone, became the first game to be blamed for a real-world murder trial defense (the "GTA defense" became a recurring courtroom phenomenon), and attracted more mainstream media attention than any game before it.

Developer DMA Design was renamed Rockstar North during GTA III's development. The Rockstar brand — previously a publisher name — became the defining identity for this type of game.

GTA: Vice City (2002): The Cultural Peak

Vice City remains the most beloved entry in the GTA series for a generation of players. Released in 2002, set in a fictional 1980s Miami, it combined:

• Tommy Vercetti — the first GTA protagonist with a defined personality and voice (Ray Liotta)
• 1980s Miami aesthetics — neon, pastels, Art Deco architecture, cocaine, helicopters
• Scarface-level ambition — the game openly referenced Scarface, Miami Vice, and De Palma's crime cinema
• A radio soundtrack that holds up thirty years later — Wave 103, V-Rock, Flash FM

Vice City told the story of a New York gangster sent to Miami, betrayed, and working his way up from nothing to property magnate and crime boss. The "buy properties to generate income" mechanic was a precursor to GTA Online's entire business model.

The game sold faster than GTA III and received better reviews. It defined what many players imagine when they think "GTA" — the style, the satirical humor, the specific 1980s crime fiction aesthetic.

Vice City's return as the setting for GTA 6 is therefore not nostalgia for its own sake. It's Rockstar returning to the series' emotional peak and rebuilding it with 24 years of additional capability.

GTA: San Andreas (2004): Ambition at Maximum

San Andreas was Rockstar's attempt to top Vice City by doing everything bigger. Three cities — Los Santos (LA), San Fierro (SF), Las Venturas (Las Vegas) — plus countryside, desert, and mountain ranges connecting them. A map approximately three times larger than Vice City.

The protagonist, Carl "CJ" Johnson, was a deeper character than Tommy Vercetti — a Black man returning to his neighborhood in Los Santos after his mother's murder, navigating gang politics, betrayal, and eventually uncovering a conspiracy. San Andreas addressed race, class, and the Los Angeles of the 1990s more directly than any GTA game before or since.

New mechanics: RPG-style character progression (body, stamina, driving, weapons), swimming, bicycles, jetpacks, gang territory control, real estate investment. San Andreas was an enormous game that tried to include everything.

San Andreas became the best-selling PS2 game of all time — 27.5 million copies on PS2 alone. It remains the reference point when GTA fans debate which game in the series is the best.

GTA IV (2008): The Mature Turn

After the maximalism of San Andreas, Rockstar went in a different direction with GTA IV. Liberty City returned — smaller than San Andreas's map, more detailed, more realistic. Niko Bellic, a Serbian immigrant, arrived in America chasing the dream and finding something more complicated.

GTA IV's tone was darker and more grounded than any previous entry. The satire was sharper, the violence more consequence-laden, the story more genuinely affecting. Niko's experiences as an immigrant — the gap between expectation and reality, the weight of a violent past — were handled with more literary care than the crime pastiche of Vice City.

The RAGE engine debuted in GTA IV, along with the Euphoria physics system for character animation — technologies still in use, heavily evolved, in GTA 6.

GTA IV received perfect scores from most major outlets. It currently sits at 98/100 on Metacritic for PS3 — one of the highest-rated games in history. The later DLC episodes (Lost and Damned, Ballad of Gay Tony) expanded the story with additional protagonists and mechanics.

The controversy around GTA IV was less about violence and more about its depiction of immigrants and drunk driving — the drunk driving missions, in which the player must navigate traffic while impaired, drew particular attention.

GTA V (2013): The Commercial Peak

GTA V is the commercial endpoint of the series as it existed before GTA 6.

Three protagonists. A map larger than San Andreas's city-only areas. A narrative that satirized post-financial crisis America — Michael (retired criminal, dysfunctional family), Trevor (psychotic businessman of crime), Franklin (young Los Santos resident trying to escape poverty).

The single-player campaign was polished and elaborate. The heists — particularly the final option missions — were the series' best set-piece storytelling. The writing and voice acting were excellent.

But what made GTA V historic was GTA Online. What started as an add-on became the primary product. Shark Cards generated revenue that funded Rockstar's next thirteen years. The online world absorbed development resources and player attention at a scale that made GTA Online — not GTA V — the real commercial achievement.

200 million copies across five generations of hardware. Six platform releases. Thirteen years of continued sales. GTA V is the best-selling entertainment product in history, and it's not close.

GTA Online (2013–2026): The Platform

GTA Online deserves its own entry in the chronology because it became something qualitatively different from a multiplayer game mode.

Over thirteen years, GTA Online evolved into:

• A live-service platform with hundreds of hours of content
• A social space where players built identities and reputations
• A creator ecosystem through FiveM (acquired by Rockstar in 2023) hosting thousands of custom roleplay servers
• A revenue engine generating hundreds of millions of dollars per year through Shark Cards

The economic success of GTA Online is the primary reason GTA 6 has a $1–2 billion budget. Rockstar's management team has explicitly described GTA Online as the foundation that made GTA 6's scale possible.

Cultural Impact: The Political Dimension

No game series has attracted more sustained political and media attention than Grand Theft Auto. A brief survey:

1997–2001: UK tabloids condemned GTA 1 and GTA 2 for glorifying car theft and violence. Multiple European countries restricted sales.

2003: The "Hot Coffee" controversy erupted in 2005 around San Andreas — a disabled minigame with sexual content, discovered by modders, triggered congressional hearings, an FTC investigation, a revised ESRB rating, and a class action lawsuit against Rockstar.

2009–2014: The "GTA defense" became a recurring courtroom phenomenon — defense attorneys in violent crime cases argued that GTA caused or normalized the defendant's behavior. Courts universally rejected these arguments, but the coverage sustained public debate about game violence.

2013: GTA V was criticized for torture missions, the depiction of female characters, and the absence of a female protagonist. These criticisms directly influenced Rockstar's decision to create Lucia as GTA 6's female lead.

2026: GTA 6's depiction of social media culture, influencer economics, and Florida's extreme inequality is already generating commentary before release. Rockstar's satirical lens has always operated as a pressure cooker for contemporary American anxieties.

Why Vice City for GTA 6?

Rockstar's return to Vice City is a deliberate creative and commercial decision that reflects several factors:

Nostalgia economics: Vice City remains the most beloved GTA setting for the generation of players who are now the primary demographic for GTA 6. Returning there with current-gen technology maximizes emotional resonance.

Thematic fit: 2020s Florida is one of the richest satirical environments available. The state's culture — wealth inequality, social media narcissism, true crime obsession, political theater, environmental fragility — maps directly onto GTA's satirical mode. The "Florida Man" phenomenon practically writes GTA missions.

Geographic variety: Florida's geography — urban coastline, swamps, inland towns, Key-like islands — provides more variety than a single-city setting while keeping a coherent regional identity.

Contrast with GTA V: Los Santos was Los Angeles — West Coast entertainment industry, suburban sprawl, desert. Vice City is East Coast money — beach culture, Latin American influence, tourism, nightlife. The contrast ensures GTA 6 feels like a new place rather than a revisit of GTA V's environment.

The female protagonist: Lucia works in Vice City in ways that would feel awkward elsewhere. Miami's criminal history, its Latin American connections, and its social extremes create the environment where a female criminal protagonist's story has natural complexity and texture.

The Rockstar North Story

The studio that built GTA is worth a brief portrait.

DMA Design was founded in 1987 in Dundee, Scotland, by David Jones. They built Lemmings (1991) — one of the most successful puzzle games ever — before pivoting to GTA. After Take-Two's acquisition, DMA became Rockstar North in 2002.

The studio's Dundee and Edinburgh roots have persisted through every generation of GTA. The dark humor, the satirical view of American culture from an outsider perspective, and the particular brand of British irreverence embedded in GTA's writing trace to the Scottish development culture that birthed the series.

Rockstar North remains the lead studio on GTA 6 — the Edinburgh office where Sam Houser, Dan Houser, and the core creative team built the series from a top-down crime game into the most valuable entertainment franchise in history.

FAQ

When did the GTA series start?

Grand Theft Auto 1 was released in October 1997 for PC, developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North). The series has run continuously since then with six mainline entries and multiple expansions.

How many GTA games are there in total?

Six mainline entries (GTA 1, GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA IV, GTA V/GTA 6), plus multiple expansions (London 1969, GTA 2, Lost and Damned, Ballad of Gay Tony, etc.) and spinoffs (Liberty City Stories, Vice City Stories, Chinatown Wars). GTA Online is a separate live-service platform.

Which GTA game is the best?

Depends on what you value. GTA IV has the best story and critical scores (98 Metacritic). San Andreas has the most content and the largest map in its era. Vice City has the best cultural aesthetic and is the most beloved by its generation. GTA V has sold the most copies and has the most active multiplayer community.

Why is GTA 6 set in Vice City and not somewhere new?

Rockstar chose Vice City for thematic fit (2020s Florida as satirical material), emotional resonance (Vice City 2002 is the most beloved GTA setting), geographic variety (coastal + swamp + urban), and the protagonist dynamic that works naturally in Miami's cultural context.

Did DMA Design always plan GTA as an open-world 3D game?

No. GTA 1 and GTA 2 were top-down 2D. The 3D open-world direction emerged with GTA III (2001) when the technology became capable enough for the concept to work at the necessary scale.

What happened to Dan and Sam Houser?

Sam Houser remains at Rockstar as President. Dan Houser departed Rockstar in 2020 after 25 years, citing a desire to pursue other projects. Both brothers were central to the creative vision of every GTA entry from GTA III through GTA V. GTA 6 is the first mainline entry without Dan Houser's direct involvement.

Is GTA Online part of the GTA series story?

GTA Online is set in the same Los Santos as GTA V but features a separate player character and doesn't directly connect to the single-player narrative. It's best understood as a parallel universe — same world, no canonical story crossover.

Will GTA 6 be the last GTA game?

Unknown. Rockstar has never discussed future entries publicly. GTA V was not described as the last entry before GTA 6 was announced. Given the commercial scale of the franchise, a GTA 7 is commercially logical — but that's decades away given GTA 6's development timeline.