The release of Grand Theft Auto VI is now a full-blown cultural event. Companies are reportedly seeing an unusual surge in vacation requests around November 19. Even PlayStation, which has never changed its logo to promote one of its own games, gave its app logo a GTA VI makeover when pre-orders went live. The second GTA VI trailer dropped in May 2025 raked in over 475 million views across platforms in a single day. That’s more than the trailer for Avengers: Endgame. That’s how big Rockstar is!
And it makes sense why. Rockstar has spent the last 15 years building a crazy track record of games that became defining titles of their generations. Before we head to Leonida with Jason and Lucia, it’s worth taking a lap around the games that got Rockstar here in the first place. These are the essential Rockstar titles, ranked from great to greatest.
8
‘Bully’ (2006)
Remember when your biggest problems were cafeteria food fights, annoying prefects, and figuring out how to avoid getting caught by the principal? Bully takes you right back to those days. With Bully, Rockstar stripped away the guns and cars and everything that made Grand Theft Auto cool and replaced it with a boarding school kid dealing with school life. Still, it somehow worked and ended up being one of the most immersive games on the PS2.
Bullworth Academy and the town around it were tiny compared to the sprawling cities of GTA, but the world was packed with enough detail and interactivity to make every corner memorable. The school was divided into social groups like the bullies, the nerds, the jocks, and each social group controlled its own territory. Students followed real schedules. The world kept moving whether you were watching or not. Every named student who mattered to the story actually existed somewhere on the map, acting exactly the way they did in their missions. And by the time the credits rolled, it felt like a place you’d spent an entire school year living in.
7
‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ (2008)
Grand Theft Auto IV is defined by the gritty, desaturated color palette of Liberty City, and it perfectly complements the dark story that’s still widely considered the franchise’s best. This entry follows Niko Bellic, an Eastern European war veteran who moves to Liberty City chasing the American Dream, only to get pulled straight back into the kind of violence he was trying to escape. GTA IV introduced the brand-new Euphoria physics engine that made everything feel more grounded. Gunfights became more tactical, and the driving alone was such a leap that it’s genuinely hard to go back to San Andreas or even GTA V afterward. Once you’ve played IV, everything else starts to feel a little arcadey by comparison.
With IV, it feels like the driving objective for Rockstar was to make the most grounded and realistic GTA game possible. Niko couldn’t simply yank an empty car door open and drive away; he had to smash the window and hotwire it first. The AI reacted to what was happening around them in ways that were way ahead of their time in 2008. The game also introduced the in-game smartphone for the very first time, along with morality choices that forced players to make decisions about who lived and who didn’t at key points in the story.
6
‘Max Payne 3’ (2012)
You won’t find Max Payne or Max Payne 2 on this list, and that’s because both games were developed by Remedy, with Rockstar only handling publishing duties. Max Payne 3 is the first entry Rockstar built entirely in-house, and it comes with a completely different tone. Gone are the melodramatic monologues and rainy neo-noir streets of New York, replaced by a bright, colorful, sun-scorched São Paulo. Going from Max Payne 2 to Max Payne 3 feels a lot like going from GTA IV to GTA V, a total shift in mood without losing what made the series work in the first place.
The story picks up nine years after the second game, with a burnt-out, pill-and-alcohol-addicted Max Payne taking a private security job in Brazil and getting dragged into a gang war that spirals into something much bigger. Building on the Matrix-inspired bullet-time mechanics that made the series famous, Max Payne 3 had some of the best-feeling shooting in any video game. The advanced Euphoria physics engine really supercharged the game’s signature Shootdodge mechanic. Max’s mid-air stunts now dynamically interacted with the environment, so he could brace himself against walls, crash into tables, and react to whatever he landed on. And watching ragdolls crumple like a sack of bricks after a clean headshot never stops being satisfying.
5
‘Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’ (2002)
Vice City dropped just a year after GTA III, but the jump in quality was massive. It quickly became the defining game for an entire generation, and somehow managed to remain that game for the generations that followed. It’s also where a lot of what we now think of as standard Grand Theft Auto stuff actually started.
Tommy Vercetti became the series’ first fully voiced protagonist. You could finally change your clothes for the first time in the franchise. The map added helicopters and motorcycles to a neon-lit Miami-inspired Vice City that felt worlds away from the grim streets of Liberty City. The Scarface-esque rise-to-power story, the nightclubs, the ability to buy businesses and watch your criminal empire grow, the ridiculous weapons arsenal like the katana and the minigun, all of it traces back to Vice City. Before we head back to Vice City in GTA VI, if you’re only replaying one game from this list, make it this one.
4
‘Red Dead Redemption’ (2010)
Rockstar had always had cinematic ambitions, and GTA was their take on the crime genre, so it only made sense they’d eventually turn to the western. Red Dead Redemption takes place in 1911, following former outlaw John Marston across the American frontier as the Wild West slowly disappears. Federal agents kidnap his wife and son and use them as leverage, and Marston is forced to track down the former members of his gang and kill them one by one.
It’s not as good as its sequel, but Red Dead Redemption had the insanely cool Dead Eye mechanic, super fun minigames, and an incredible story that made it the definitive cowboy game of its era. For all its strengths, though, there’s admittedly a whole lot of horse riding and fairly routine mission design along the way. But all of it pays off in spectacular fashion, culminating in an ending widely considered one of the most impactful finales in video game history.
3
‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ (2004)
As massive as GTA V is, plenty of longtime fans still consider San Andreas to be the greatest GTA game. Instead of a single city, Rockstar built an entire state, complete with deserts, oceans, forests, and mountains stitched together into three separate cities. It was also the first GTA game to feature interactive, fully nude strip clubs, along with a girlfriend system, tons of new shops, and dozens of unique minigames like dancing, lowrider bouncing, pool, and basketball that no earlier entry had come close to offering.
San Andreas also brought a full RPG progression system into the series for the first time. CJ could bulk up at the gym, gain weight from too much fast food, and learn new fighting styles as he leveled up. Those systems have been sorely missing from GTA ever since, which makes it fitting that Rockstar appears to be bringing them back for GTA VI. Both the gym system and the basketball minigames are confirmed to return, which says a lot about how far ahead of its time San Andreas really was.
2
‘Grand Theft Auto V’ (2013)
For the first time in the series, Rockstar let players control three protagonists and switch between them on the fly. Michael, Franklin, and arguably the most unhinged character the franchise has ever produced, Trevor, anchor a Heat-style crime saga packed with the most cinematic missions Rockstar had ever attempted. Los Santos became the studio’s most detailed open world to date. The kind of map where you could hike a mountain, go scuba diving, play golf, do yoga, rob a convenience store at gunpoint, or spend hours modding a single car.
Some of that detail was purely optional and still managed to blow people’s minds, like buying stock in a company right before a mission tanked its price and cashing in on the fallout. Or staring up at the Mount Chiliad mural for the first time and immediately hopping on YouTube to see what the internet had theorized about it. Then there were the Strangers and Freaks side missions that would randomly pop up. There was always something extra for you to do outside of the mainline missions. Well over a decade later, the graphics still hold up better than plenty of modern AAA releases, and GTA Online has kept the game commercially relevant long after anyone expected.
1
‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ (2018)
The Grand Theft Auto franchise might be Rockstar’s most famous, but the studio’s actual magnum opus takes place on the western frontier. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set during the final years of the Wild West, following Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang as their way of life slowly becomes impossible to sustain. The game starts off as a sprawling outlaw adventure but gradually turns into something far deeper and tragic, especially after a major turning point changes Arthur’s outlook on life. It’s widely regarded as the best story Rockstar has ever told.
But the story is only half of what makes Red Dead Redemption 2 so remarkable. Rockstar built an open world so detailed that it often feels like a simulation rather than a video game. Animals have their own behaviors and food chains. Predators hunt without needing the player around. The world itself also changes over time, with construction projects and railway tracks gradually progressing as you revisit them. Townspeople remember your actions and can even hold grudges if you wrong them. That attention to detail extends to the gameplay itself. Shooting an enemy in the hand can make them drop their weapon. Hitting them in the leg affects how they move. Apart from combat, you can spend your time playing poker, blackjack, dominoes, hunting, fishing, stumbling into random encounters, taking on stranger missions. There’s genuinely too much here to list.
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