Best GTA Games Ranked: Every Grand Theft Auto, Worst to Best

Grand Theft Auto has been reinventing itself since 1997 — top-down chaos, the 3D revolution, handheld experiments, and one game so big it has outsold entire console generations. Ranking the series means ranking gaming history, so here is our honest order, worst to best, with GTA 6 left out until it has actually been played. Disagree in the details if you like; everyone does.

10. Grand Theft Auto (1997)

Where it started: a top-down crime spree across Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, released on PC and the original PlayStation in November 1997. The wanted system, the freedom to ignore the story and just cause mayhem — the blueprint is all here. It is also, inevitably, the roughest game on this list: a fascinating museum piece that modern players bounce off within minutes.

9. Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999)

GTA 2 took the series to Anywhere City, a deliberately unnamed near-future sprawl, and introduced the gang respect system — work for one gang and its rivals start shooting on sight. It is the strangest GTA ever made, all retro-future menace and dark humour, but the top-down formula was already straining. Ambitious, admired, and rarely replayed.

8. GTA: Vice City Stories (2006)

A PSP prequel that squeezed a full 3D GTA — plus a genuinely good empire-building business system — onto a handheld in 2006. Vic Vance's story never got the audience it deserved, and some missions feel like they were designed to test the PSP's battery rather than the player, but as a technical achievement it is remarkable.

7. GTA: Liberty City Stories (2005)

The first true 3D GTA on a handheld, and a proper prequel to GTA 3 with Toni Cipriani climbing the Leone family ladder. It does nothing revolutionary, but it does everything well: a full Liberty City, a meaty campaign, and the novelty, at the time, of carrying all of it in your pocket. It later became the best-selling PSP game ever, which tells its own story.

6. GTA: Chinatown Wars (2009)

The most inventive handheld GTA by a distance. Built for the Nintendo DS in 2009, it went back to a top-down camera and turned the limitations into features: hotwiring cars with touchscreen minigames, a full drug-dealing economy that players still cite as one of the series' best side systems, and a stylish cel-shaded Liberty City. Proof that a GTA does not need horsepower to have ideas.

5. Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001)

The revolution. GTA 3 moved the series into a fully 3D open world in October 2001 and effectively invented the modern crime game — every open-world title since lives in its shadow. Claude's silent rampage through a rain-slicked Liberty City feels sparse next to what came later, but sparse is not the same as small: nothing in gaming had ever offered this freedom before.

4. GTA: Vice City (2002)

Style over scale, and what style. Vice City dropped players into a neon-drenched 1986 Miami analogue with Ray Liotta voicing Tommy Vercetti and arguably the greatest licensed soundtrack in games. The map is modest by later standards, but no GTA has ever had a stronger sense of place — every sunset, pastel suit and synth track is burned into a generation's memory.

3. Grand Theft Auto 4 (2008)

The boldest GTA. Niko Bellic's immigrant story is the series' best writing, Liberty City was rebuilt as a dense, lived-in New York, and the Euphoria physics made every crash and stumble feel uncomfortably real. Its two expansions — The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony — are among the best DLC ever made. The driving divides people to this day, but no GTA has aimed higher.

2. Grand Theft Auto 5 (2013)

Three protagonists, a heist structure borrowed from great crime films, and a Los Santos so detailed it still anchors GTA Online's enormous player base more than a decade later. GTA 5 is the series' commercial peak — one of the best-selling games of all time — and its character-switching mechanic genuinely moved open-world storytelling forward. Only one game beats it, and only just.

1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)

The most GTA ever crammed into one game. San Andreas is not a city but a whole state: Los Santos, San Fierro, Las Venturas, plus countryside, desert and a mountain in between. CJ's story runs from Grove Street gang wars to casino heists, while RPG systems — gyms, skills, turf wars, girlfriends, a jetpack — pile up until the game threatens to burst. Released in October 2004 on hardware that had no business running it, San Andreas remains the series' high-water mark: the GTA against which every other open world, including Rockstar's own, is still measured.