# Grand Theft Auto Is on Every List. Never in the Same Place
> Fifteen rankings, one badge: Grand Theft Auto as the greatest game ever made, the best crime game, the outsider among RPGs and the most controversial release.
*By YPB Team · Published August 25, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/grand-theft-auto-ranked-many-ways*
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The GTA V midnight launch at Hamleys, London. Photo by OfficialFR, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on 19 November 2026, and four days from now Rockstar premieres an extended look at it on Netflix before its own YouTube channel gets it.1 The game it follows has sold more than 230 million copies since 2013, which puts Grand Theft Auto V second on the all-time list behind Minecraft.2 Those are the numbers a publisher likes. The same series is also the one American politicians reached for whenever they needed a villain, and the one whose most famous game was pulled off shelves.
Fifteen separate rankings on this site hold a Grand Theft Auto entry. Read them together and they stop agreeing about what the series even is.
> Grand Theft Auto is the medium's showpiece and its favourite defendant, and the lists that celebrate it are built out of the same games as the lists that indict it.
## GTA V vs Ocarina of Time: the biggest question in games
Ask which video game is the greatest ever made and the field opens to twenty entries, Grand Theft Auto V among them.
Its commercial case has no rival. Take-Two announced worldwide retail sales above $1 billion in the game's first three days, and said it believed no entertainment property of any kind, film included, had reached that mark faster.3
Its neighbours did not arrive commercially. Ocarina of Time, Tetris, Chrono Trigger and Half-Life 2 are here for what they did to the form, and two of them were built by teams of a few dozen people.
That is the honest tension in a question this wide. Commercial reach and creative influence are different measurements, and a single ordering has to pick one of them.
The widest question in games, and GTA V is one of twenty names in it. Play it →
## Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario, sixty-four franchises deep
Whole series rather than single games: the field grows to sixty-four. Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Gears of War and Gran Turismo are all in it.
Grand Theft Auto belongs there on volume alone: the series has sold roughly 475 million copies across its life.2
Super Mario answers on a different measure. Nintendo has kept one plumber commercially central for four decades across platformers, kart racers, sports games and party games, and Grand Theft Auto has released far fewer games in the same span.
Breadth against depth is the whole disagreement in this ranking, and both franchises are near the extreme of one of them.
Sixty-four franchises, and the biggest seller is not automatically the best. Play it →
## San Andreas vs Vice City: the series arguing with itself
One ranking drops every other franchise and sets the eight mainline Grand Theft Auto games against each other, GTA III and Chinatown Wars included.
San Andreas, released in 2004, is what people usually point at when they claim the series peaked. It gave players three cities, a state between them, gang politics, and a protagonist who could get fat.
Vice City, from two years earlier, argues the other way. It is smaller and tighter, set in one neon 1980s city, and it did more than any other entry to fix what Grand Theft Auto sounds and looks like.
Then there is GTA V, which outsold both by an order of magnitude and still loses this argument to nostalgia in most rooms. A ranking restricted to one series is the only place where that comparison is even possible.
Eight games, one series, and no agreement about which one is the series. Play it →
## Red Dead Redemption 2 is Rockstar's problem, not Grand Theft Auto's
Narrow the question to one studio and six Grand Theft Auto games appear on the same ranking, alongside Bully, Max Payne, L.A. Noire and two Red Dead games.
Here the series stops being the automatic answer. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the game Rockstar's own admirers cite to argue that the studio's best work is not the crime series paying for everything.
Grand Theft Auto's counter is structural rather than artistic. It is the engine that funded the westerns, the noir detective game and the schoolyard satire, and Rockstar has never released two of those in the same decade without a GTA behind them.
Six GTAs on one studio's shelf, and a western that keeps beating all of them. Play it →
## Breath of the Wild and the open world GTA V made ordinary
Twenty open-world games sit on this ranking, and two of them are Grand Theft Auto.
The series is on it for a reason older than most of the competition: traffic that behaves, pedestrians who react, radio that plays whether or not anyone is listening. Those were novelties when GTA III shipped in 2001 and they are baseline expectations now.
Breath of the Wild took the genre somewhere Rockstar never goes. Nintendo removed the mission markers, the phone calls and most of the instruction, and let players climb whatever they could see.
Elden Ring, Skyrim and Ghost of Tsushima are all here too. A genre eventually stops belonging to whoever popularised it.
The genre GTA popularised, judged on its own terms. Play it →
## GTA V vs L.A. Noire: crime, by the studio that made both
Restrict the field to crime and Grand Theft Auto is on home ground, with GTA V and San Andreas both in the running.
L.A. Noire is the interesting opponent because Rockstar published it too. It is a 1947 Los Angeles detective game where the interrogations are the mechanic and shooting people is mostly a failure state, which is close to the inverse of a GTA.
The rest of the ranking spreads across Yakuza's Tokyo, the Mafia trilogy's period pieces, Payday's heists and Disco Elysium, a murder investigation with no combat at all.
Crime is a wide enough word to hold all of that, and Grand Theft Auto only owns the loudest corner of it.
Narrow it to crime and the competition is a detective, a mob dynasty and a western. Play it →
## Los Santos vs Night City: when the map is the game
Ranking cities rather than games puts three Grand Theft Auto entries on one list, because Los Santos, Vice City and Liberty City are each famous separately from the games they belong to.
Los Santos is the most complete of them. It has a downtown, a beach, a canyon, farmland and a mountain, and Rockstar has kept it commercially alive for over a decade with a persistent online version.
Night City is the direct challenge. Cyberpunk 2077 builds vertically where Los Santos sprawls, stacking megatowers over slums, and it is the only city here designed to be looked up at.
Rapture, Midgar, Novigrad and Yharnam round the list out, and the next GTA city is already named. Grand Theft Auto VI is set in Leonida, with Vice City rebuilt at its centre.1
Three GTA cities on one list, competing with each other before anyone else gets a turn. Play it →
## CJ vs Master Chief: the protagonist with no armour
Grand Theft Auto's entry in a ranking of video game protagonists is Carl Johnson, the returning son at the centre of San Andreas.
He is an unusual candidate for the category. Most of the field is armoured, super-powered or professionally lethal, and CJ starts the game on a bicycle, broke, at his mother's funeral.
Master Chief is the shape the category usually takes: a faceless soldier who exists to be pointed at a war. Mario, Samus and Kratos all sit closer to that end than to CJ's.
Rockstar has been moving away from the loner ever since. Grand Theft Auto V split the role across three men, and GTA VI hands it to a pair, Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval.1
Mascots, soldiers, and one man who came home to Grove Street. Play it →
## San Andreas on the PlayStation 2 shelf
Sorted by console instead of by genre, San Andreas lands on a shelf with eighteen of the PlayStation 2's best games.
The competition is unusually strong, because the PS2 is where Japanese studios did their most confident work: Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill 2, Okami, Ico, Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 are all here.
San Andreas is the entry from the other tradition, a Scottish studio building an American state, and it is the only game on the list that a player could still be exploring after fifty hours without following a mission.
The console San Andreas was built for, and the shelf it has to share. Play it →
## Halo 3, GTA IV and the Xbox 360's best year
On Microsoft's console the Grand Theft Auto entry is GTA IV, and its numbers were extraordinary: a Metascore of 98, which almost nothing since has matched.4
Halo 3 is the opponent that owns the machine itself. Bungie's shooter sold the console and defined what Xbox Live was for, and Gears of War, Forza and Fable did the rest.
Grand Theft Auto IV arrived in 2008 as a visitor, shipping the same day on a rival platform. Very little released for the Xbox 360 afterwards reviewed better.
One generation on, on the other manufacturer's box. Play it →
## GTA IV meets The Last of Us on PlayStation 3
The same GTA IV appears again on the PlayStation 3 list, which is a useful demonstration of how much a ranking's frame does.
Its neighbours here are Naughty Dog and FromSoftware at their best: The Last of Us, Uncharted 2, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, plus Journey, which takes about two hours and has no dialogue.
Grand Theft Auto IV is the bleakest story Rockstar has told, and on this shelf it is still the loud one.
The same game again, in a room full of Naughty Dog and FromSoftware. Play it →
## Half-Life 2 vs San Andreas: two 2004 sequels that moved the goalposts
A ranking of sequels is the one category where Grand Theft Auto's habit of arriving late is an advantage, because every GTA after the first is a sequel to something.
San Andreas is the entry, and its claim is scale. Vice City gave it a formula and San Andreas multiplied it by three cities plus the countryside in between, which is roughly what Super Mario Bros. 3 and Diablo II did to their own originals.
Half-Life 2 shipped the same year with the opposite ambition. Valve made the world smaller and the physics load-bearing, so that a see-saw and a few cinder blocks became a puzzle.
Resident Evil 4, Majora's Mask and Street Fighter II are all here on the same logic: the second attempt is where a studio finds out what it actually built.
Every entry here outgrew the game before it. So did San Andreas. Play it →
## The RPG list where Grand Theft Auto has no character sheet
Grand Theft Auto V is on a ranking of open-world role-playing games, next to The Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Skyrim and Fallout 4.
It does not have levels, classes, dialogue trees or a build. San Andreas had stats a player could raise, and Rockstar removed most of that afterwards.
On this list Grand Theft Auto is the outsider rather than the standard, because the category was defined around something the series never set out to be.
The list where GTA is the outsider: everyone else brought a character sheet. Play it →
## GTA VI vs Duke Nukem Forever: a study in waiting
The most anticipated games of all time are a category Grand Theft Auto VI has a strong claim on, thirteen years after the last mainline entry, with a trailer premiere scheduled as a Netflix event.
Duke Nukem Forever is the warning attached to it. Announced in 1997 and released in 2011, it spent fourteen years being rewritten and arrived to reviews that treated it as a museum piece.
Elsewhere the ranking splits between waits that paid off and waits that did not. Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild and Final Fantasy VII Remake sit on one side; No Man's Sky, Spore and Cyberpunk 2077 launched short of what had been shown.
The Elder Scrolls VI is the outlier, still unreleased after a 2018 teaser, and still collecting anticipation it has not had to justify.
A list of long waits, and one of them ends in November. Play it →
## Hot Coffee: the mod that got San Andreas re-rated
San Andreas carries the series into its oldest category of all.
The Federal Trade Commission's account is the plainest one. Unused code for a sex mini-game shipped on the disc; players unlocked it with a program called Hot Coffee; the ESRB re-rated the game Adults Only, national retailers pulled it, and Take-Two reported $24.5 million in costs from the returns.5
Rockstar's way out is on the same page. It released a patch that switched the hidden code off, agreed to relabel or recall the stock already in shops, and later put San Andreas back on sale as an M-rated edition with the content stripped out.
Mortal Kombat is the opponent because it got there first. Its 1992 fatalities were the exhibit at the US Senate hearings that produced the ESRB in 1994, which is the body that later re-rated San Andreas.6
Doom, Night Trap, Manhunt 2 and Six Days in Fallujah fill out a ranking that is really a timeline of what each decade decided was unacceptable. Grand Theft Auto appears in more decades of it than anything else.
The unflattering list, and the one GTA has been on the longest. Play it →
## Fifteen lists, one badge, no single verdict
Nothing about Grand Theft Auto reads the same twice. It is the record-setter on a sales chart, a visitor on Nintendo's and Microsoft's shelves, an outsider among role-playing games, and the recurring defendant in every account of what games are accused of doing to people.
None of those descriptions is wrong, and the series keeps supplying material for all of them: GTA V still sells around five million copies a quarter, thirteen years after release.2 Every ranking above resolves itself in pairs, which is [how head-to-head voting works](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison).
Think a badge, a studio or a city deserves its own set of questions? Build the ranking and see which answers survive.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Pokémon, Ranked Many Ways](/articles/pokemon-ranked-many-ways) — the other franchise that outsold its own medium
- [Super Mario vs The Legend of Zelda](/articles/super-mario-vs-legend-of-zelda) — Nintendo's two answers to the same question
- [PlayStation vs Xbox vs Nintendo](/articles/playstation-vs-xbox-vs-nintendo-ranked) — the boxes all these games had to run on
Sources
Netflix Tudum — Grand Theft Auto VI extended first look, release date, setting and protagonists: netflix.com (checked 2026-08-23)
Game Developer — GTA V passes 230 million units and the series nears 475 million, per Take-Two's quarter ending 30 June 2026: gamedeveloper.com (checked 2026-08-23)
Take-Two Interactive — "Grand Theft Auto V Worldwide Sales Surpass $1 Billion In First Three Days", 20 September 2013: ir.take2games.com (checked 2026-08-23)
Metacritic — Grand Theft Auto IV Metascore: metacritic.com (checked 2026-08-23)
Federal Trade Commission — "Makers of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Settle FTC Charges", including the Adults Only re-rating, retailer withdrawals and $24.5 million in return costs: ftc.gov (checked 2026-08-23)
Entertainment Software Rating Board — Our History, ESRB founded 1994: esrb.org (checked 2026-08-23)
