"Grand Theft Auto": The 25 Best (and Most Interesting) Moments in the Video Game's Franchise History

Year Of Release: 2001

GTA V may indeed be one of the best open-world crime games ever made, and it dwarfs what was possible in either the original Grand Theft Auto or GTA III. But for all the series outrageousness, what stands out more than anything else is the simple act of getting together with a group of friends and passing the controller around to see who could last the longest in a five-star rampage. GTA III's fully 3D rampages were a game-changer – one that, even while easily eclipsed today, is the sole reason why open-world chaos is still fun. The legacy lives on.

Year Of Release: 2001-present

GTA has in its modern iterations always done a great job of skewerish American culture, whether through pointed in-game radio station personalities and guests or societal commentary of one sort or another. The most recent? Lifeinvader, a mock-up social media site ("Inflate yourself online" is one of the site's many great slogans) that you can read in your actual web browser. It looks and acts like Facebook, but the really interesting (and cynically humorous) bit is that it's also an ad for GTA V itself, which in turn is exactly the kind of marketing you really see on social media. This is what our culture has become, and Rockstar knows just how to exploit it.

Year Of Release: 2008

No GTA list is complete without mentioning GTA IV's Michael Mann-inspired heist mission-gone-wrong, "Three Leaf Clover". What starts as an easy bank heist goes South fast when two of your partners get into an argument – what follows is one hell of a shootout, from the floor of Algonquin's Bank of Liberty to the streets and ultimately the subway. Not exactly a walk in the park.

Year Of Release: 2002

Goodfellas' Ray Liotta lending his voice for Vice City protagonist Tommy Vercetti was a big deal in 2002, even more so than the celebrity cast of NPCs were the year before in GTA III. Why? Aside from being a whole new dimension to a game series that would only continue to refine its cultural edge, it set the precedent for series' protagonists that had their fair share of personality as well as problems. By the time GTA IV rolled around in 2008, the series had earned its rep for character complexity, at least compared to most other games.

Year Of Release: 2004

Long before Rockstar scandalized the cultural landscape with a DS drug-dealing sim, they cut their teeth with the infamous Hot Coffee incident, so named for the sex mini-game that was buried, but not accessible without hacks, in San Andreas' lines of code. Sure, the modified GTA III engine made the, uh, act look about as sexy as a Tron VR porn sim, but we're not including Hot Coffee because it's that great – it's just that it's so, so ridiculous it ever existed. So ridiculous, in fact, that the ESRB re-rated all existing copies of the game as Adults Only and forced retailers to pull copies from store shelves. Rockstar, don't ever change.

Year Of Release: 2002

Vice City had arguably one of the best video game soundtracks ever (although maybe it was eclipsed by Vice City Stories' own stellar set of '80s tunes). It also introduced motorcycles into the GTA landscape, which are considerably more fun – and more dangerous – to drive. Still, rampaging around Washington Beach on a crotch rocket blasting Flock of Seagulls is an indelible gaming memory, and one that we replicated countless times over the course of our time in VC.

Year Of Release: 2009

It wasn't enough that Rockstar managed to put out a really well-done GTA experience on Nintendo's underpowered, family-friendly DS. No, the developers even managed to frame a good chunk of Chinatown Wars' gameplay around the economics of drug dealing, giving you all the tools needed to flood the market with various forms of recreational contraband, not to mention controlling the markets and prices. Easily one of Rockstar's most controversial choices ever, and one that's yet to be duplicated. But like it or not, the audacity of Chinatown Wars' drug operations made the game.

Year Of Release: 2001

If you managed to get a tank in GTA III (or, more likely, entered the cheat for one), chances are high that you quickly noticed that by shooting off rounds as quickly as possible in one direction let you harness momentum (and the game's buggy engine) to make your military grade death machine "fly" significant distances in the opposite direction. It never got old.

Year Of Release: 2001

Ah, yes, the Dodo. How many hours did you spend trying to get this damn aircraft to yaw just right, letting you accomplish the unthinkable in sailing miles above GTA III's Liberty City? Probably more than you'd care to admit. Of course, this near flightless plane was arguably nothing compared to a trick clever players quickly figured out on rampages...

Year Of Release: 2002

Sure, Tommy's got the money, the power, the wheels and the mansion, but clothes make the man, especially in the aesthetically-fetishized '80s. Luckily, Vice City introduced wardrobe changes into the open-world DNA of the series, making sure you could always look your most flash wherever you went.

Year Of Release: 2002

Vice City's final mission "Keep Your Friends Close" ends the game with a massive (and pretty damn hard) mansion shootout at Vercetti Estates, with Tommy gunning for his double-crossing partner Lance Vance. The scenario is almost the opposite of Scarface, but the mission – like the game as a whole – about as close to a perfect homage as you can get. If only Rockstar could give us a current-gen rendition of this one.

Year Of Release: 2004

When CJ was offered a hit job late in San Andreas all the way back in Liberty City, it was a pretty big surprise. Actually going there was an even bigger one, even if you couldn't explore at will. If there's one thing that Rockstar has always done well, it's making its GTA universe cohesive – going all the way back to the original's locations of San Andreas, Liberty and Vice Cities. No one can accuse the developers of not sticking to their guns.

Year Of Release: 2004

San Andreas was the perfect representation of early-'90s South Central life, so it only made sense that the game would actually climax with a take on the real-life 1992 LA riots, sparked by the widely-publicized release of the Rodney King incident (and the subsequent acquittal of the police officers involved with the brutal beating). Was this a risky thing to do for a video game? Maybe. Was it an important distinction for Rockstar to make? Most definitely.

Year Of Release: 1999

GTA III established Rockstar's series as the quintessential video game social commentary on America, but before the series went 3D, the developers actually released an expansion set in a real city abroad, making Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 (and its PC-only predecessor London 1961) an interesting anomaly in the series history. Will GTA ever return to European soil as a proper setting? It seems unlikely at this point.

Year Of Release: 2004

Does Bigfoot really exist in the woods of San Andreas? Officially, no. But that hasn't stopped a group of dedicated players who claim otherwise, posting weirdly blurry found-footage videos and screenshots online. (And let's not forget the modding community.) Still, with all the sheer magnitude of shark jumping in San Andreas, the real-world phenomenon of in-game Sasquatch hunting makes for a worthy spot on our list.

Year Of Release: 2008

Chalk Eddie Low up as one of GTA's most disturbing inclusions to date – a necrophiliac, a serial killer and rapist, Eddie is a randomly encountered NPC that makes the normal madcap kind of GTA antics, even when they include all sorts of death and chaos, look cartoonish and silly by comparison. Low's dialogue in particular is pretty damn creepy, with the Son of Sam-inspired character talking about how he, say, likes to distinguish people's accents by the way they scream. We'll tip our hat to Rockstar for including this psycho (and making his appearances random so that he's that much more unsettling), bringing back a little (unintentional?) bit of Manhunt's nightmarish essence.

Year Of Release: 2001

In a perfect world, all horrible back-stabbing exes would get their comeuppance, right? That made getting your revenge on Catalina after she left you for dead at the hands of the Liberty City PD all the more satisfying. Nothing like vengeance by sniper rifle. (Or rocket launcher.)

Year Of Release:

We're not sure if this is really a "best" moment, but when Rockstar somewhat inexplicably opted for full-frontal male nudity in Grand Theft Auto IV's expansion The Lost and the Damned, giving players a face-full of NPC Congressman Thomas Stubbs' digital member during a mission briefing cutscene, it was a pretty ballsy choice. Pun intended.

Year Of Release: 2004

San Andreas's Californian-esque sprawl was unsurprisingly completely different from the very East Coast feel of Liberty City, so it was a trip to see Claude, the wordless protagonist of GTA III, show up in a cameo, challenging CJ to a street race. Amusingly, Claude stays silent, letting his then-new girlfriend Catalina do all the talking, nine years before double-crossing him in Liberty City.

Year Of Release: 2008

When GTA IV was released in 2008, its Liberty City was the most dense, living, breathing metropolis ever made for a game. Apart from the myriad things for Niko to do, (and the way that, say, NPCs act out their own scenarios regardless of your presence or not), you could actually go online and surf the in-game internet. That's right: the game was so f#$*ing detailed that the developers let you browse a number of fake websites. Niko can even read emails from his mother. How quaint.

Year Of Release: 2001

Any game that includes the option to solicit the services of a prostitute – particularly in a setting that encourages outlandish criminal behavior – is going to invite some, uh, questionable actions. File this one less under "best" and more under "outrageous," since GTA III let you beat the money you just spent out of the unlucky lady of the night you just patronized. Scandalous? Sure. Even from its earliest 3D incarnations Rockstar was making inherent social commentary with these sorts of inclusions.

Year Of Release: 2001

Michael Madsen, Robert Loggia, Kyle MacLachlan, Joe Pantoliano – Grand Theft Auto III's 2001 cast of voice actors was a who's-who of real Hollywood talent that set the bar not just for the future of series, but for video game production values, period.

Year Of Release: 2002

Much as you felt like you'd ascended the ranks from petty thug to hardened criminal god in GTA III, nothing says power like the flamboyant display of property acquisition. Making a name for yourself as Tommy Vercetti in Vice City didn't just mean running down the competition, but living in a mansion complete with a fat stash of fast cars, free ordnance and daily cash in your pocket.

Year Of Release: 2002

For as great as GTA III was as a satirical violence simulator, the many ways that you could main and kill mostly ignored particularly graphic, up-close-and-personal weapons (more than likely because the game's engine just couldn't handle such sophisticated effects at the time). When Vice City hit the PS2 in 2002, that changed with the introduction of Tommy Vercetti's chainsaw – fitting given that Rockstar's '80s period piece was basically one giant homage to Scarface.It's hardly exciting to watch now, but brandishing that death-chewing saw in a crowd at the time was pretty wild.

Year Of Release: 1997

When Grand Theft Auto first burst onto the scene in 1997, its top-down open-world criminal free-for-all was unlike anything players had ever really seen before. Sure, there had been free-roaming games in the past, but GTA let players to run amok while indulging the worst parts of their psyches in horrfying and hilarious ways in an (at the time) huge virutal city – that was something else entirely. Probably good they changed the name from Race N' Chase, though.