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

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Three cities, a state's worth of countryside, gyms, gangs, a jetpack, and CJ, one of the series' best-written leads. It's messy in places (the RC missions, the girlfriend mini-games nobody asked for) but the ambition is the point. Nothing before or since has matched its scope.

Also ranked in: Video Games Tier List: Ranking the Greatest Ever Made, The Greatest Video Games of All Time, Ranked

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Tommy Vercetti, a synth soundtrack, and a neon-drenched map that still feels like the coolest place Rockstar ever built. It's smaller than San Andreas and V, but nobody's ever complained about that once they're driving down Ocean Beach with the radio on. The fact it's coming back for GTA 6 tells you everything about how well this era aged.

Grand Theft Auto V

Three protagonists, a genuinely funny script, and a Los Santos that still looks sharp over a decade later, that's a hard combo to beat. Critics loved it, over 200 million copies sold say players did too, though plenty of fans will tell you GTA Online eventually ate the single-player game alive.

Also ranked in: Video Games Tier List: Ranking the Greatest Ever Made, The Greatest Video Games of All Time, Ranked

Grand Theft Auto IV

The most divisive game on this list. It scored a 98 on Metacritic and Niko Bellic is arguably the series' most human protagonist, but hardcore fans still gripe about the physics-heavy driving, the somber tone, and cousin Roman's bowling invitations. Great game, just not the fun-first arcade energy people wanted after San Andreas.

Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

The DLC that fixed GTA IV's mood problem. Faster cars, a parachute, nightclubs, and Luis Lopez being a far breezier lead than Niko, this is IV's world with the fun dialed back up. Genuinely one of the best expansions Rockstar's ever shipped.

Grand Theft Auto III

The game that invented the modern open-world crime genre, full stop. Claude never says a word, the camera fights you constantly, and Liberty City looks primitive now, but the chaos it enabled was genuinely new in 2001, and the cheat codes alone earned it a permanent place in gaming history.

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

A PSP game that punched way above its hardware, revisiting Liberty City with tighter mission design than III ever had. It doesn't get talked about much next to the console entries, but the people who played it on a plane or a bus in 2005 remember it fondly.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

The top-down DS entry that nobody expected to be this good, drug dealing mini-games, a touchscreen bomb-defusing puzzle, and surprisingly sharp writing for a handheld spinoff. Fans who actually played it rate it higher than its reputation suggests.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

Victor Vance's story never quite escapes the shadow of Tommy Vercetti's Vice City, and playing it right after the original makes the smaller scope obvious. Solid handheld game, but it's the definition of a spinoff that exists because the setting was popular.

Grand Theft Auto 2

A cult curiosity more than a classic, top-down chaos with gang respect meters and a cyberpunk-lite future setting that never really went anywhere else in the series. Worth knowing about for the history, not worth chasing down to actually play.

Grand Theft Auto: London 1969

This was the expansion pack to the original GTA, swapping the American cities for Swinging Sixties London, complete with Mini Coopers and Cockney slang. It's a neat historical curiosity if you're into the era, but the top-down gameplay was already showing its age even back then. The London 1961 expansion tacked onto it is more of a footnote than an addition, just a handful of extra missions and a different year on the box.

Grand Theft Auto 1

The one that started it all, and also the one most people have genuinely never played. A 1997 top-down game with primitive everything by today's standards, it matters historically, but there's no argument for booting this up over literally anything else on this list.

Grand Theft Auto Advance

Squeezing GTA onto a Game Boy Advance cartridge sounds like a fun idea on paper, and credit to the devs for getting a top-down open world running on that hardware at all. In practice it plays like a stripped-down GTA 2 with worse controls and none of the personality that makes the series worth caring about. A tech demo more than a game you'd actually choose to boot up.