Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy , The Definitive Edition sank to a user score of 0.4 out of 10 on Metacritic, among the lowest the site has recorded. Some of the players behind that number were demanding refunds. The collection bundled three well-known crime games, rebuilt for modern machines and released in 2021. So what went wrong with a remaster that set out to honor them? What did its developers try to preserve, and what slipped away? And why did the publisher remove the original versions from sale before anyone could compare?

  8590867170

• 2. Three Cities, Three Heroes

  ›

  Claude never says a word. The hero of Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001, is a silent protagonist who is betrayed and left for dead by his girlfriend during a robbery. His quest for revenge pulls him into crime, drugs, gang warfare and corruption in Liberty City, a place loosely based on New York City.

  Vice City, from 2002, jumps back to 1986 and a fictional city modelled on Miami. Its hero is Tommy Vercetti, a mobster freshly released from prison who gets caught up in an ambushed drug deal. From there he slowly builds an empire by seizing power from rival criminal organisations.

  San Andreas arrived in 2004 and is set in 1992. Its stage is an entire fictional state with three main cities: Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas, based on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Carl "CJ" Johnson, a former gangster, comes home after his mother is murdered. He is drawn back into his old gang while clashing with corrupt authorities and powerful criminals.

  All three share one continuity and one basic rhythm. They are played from a third-person view, and the player advances by completing missions, which are linear scenarios with set objectives. Between missions the player can roam the open world and try optional side missions. Some areas only unlock as the story moves forward.

  The studio chosen to rebuild them in 2021 already knew this territory. Grove Street Games, once called War Drum Studios, had made the mobile versions of the trilogy and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of San Andreas.

  17212018

• 3. Rebuilding From Memory

  ›

  The original games ran on a graphics engine called RenderWare. The Definitive Edition moved them to Unreal Engine 4, and the job took two years. Rockstar had held back from the wave of video game remakes, because the team believed such projects demanded care and attention. It came to see a remaster as "a way to maintain the titles for the next decade-plus", without the burden of outdated technology. The developers ranked Grand Theft Auto III as the hardest to update, thanks to its aging assets. San Andreas was much easier, because its original art department had learned to exploit the hardware of its day.

  Producer Rich Rosado estimated that more than 100,000 textures were changed. An artificial intelligence program upscaled them first, and artists then adjusted the results by hand. The team copied the original physics code so the games would feel the same to play. They also tried rebuilding some central buildings from scratch, such as the player characters' houses. Those looked out of step beside their neighbours, so some assets were polished while others were rebuilt entirely.

  The new map navigation came from two sources: pathfinding, and an analysis of the routes that non-player characters already walked. It needed some manual fixes, but the team called such features "easy wins" because the technology already existed. Controls were updated to match Grand Theft Auto V from 2013, and the checkpoint system gained an automatic restart. The Nintendo Switch version added gyro aiming and touchscreen support. All three games now let the player run and shoot at once, a freedom that only San Andreas had offered before.

  Moving to Unreal made the games look "clean", the opposite of what the team wanted. They had to work to make everything look dirtier again. They studied each game for its signature qualities, such as the "bright neons" of Vice City and the orange sky of San Andreas. Colours now shift through the day, and the Sun, Moon, stars and clouds were corrected in placement and movement. Rain fell differently, and puddles gathered and reflected the world around them.

  The old "baked lighting" was, in the team's words, "lighting that would just come from nowhere because we just need to light the scene". The new version takes its light from the sky. That left some places too dark, so artists added artificial lights, such as lampposts in alleys. Trees and foliage everywhere, plus some interior design elements, were swapped for higher-quality assets from Grand Theft Auto V, chosen to blend in naturally.

  Rosado said "the art challenge alone felt insurmountable early on", given three games at once and the immensity of San Andreas. The team avoided realism. The characters' motion capture data was coded to the original caricaturised wire-frame models, so lifelike faces would have looked out of place. The game, they insisted, "must look like you remember it". Adding detail "where there was no detail before" risked clashing with the player's "mental image" of a character. So they consulted developers at Rockstar North, including some of the original artists.

  Some of what they needed no longer existed. The source audio, textures, reference material and character models could not be found, because nobody had archived them. The original team, they said, "never thought they would have to revisit these projects".

  192015912

• 4. Vanishing Originals

  ›

  In August 2021, the news site Kotaku reported that the collection existed and claimed Rockstar Dundee was leading its development. In September, South Korea's Game Rating and Administration Committee gave the trilogy a rating. In early October, an update to the Rockstar Games Launcher carried data referencing the game, including logos, art and achievements.

  Rockstar confirmed it on the 8th of October 2021, during the month of Grand Theft Auto III's twentieth anniversary. It promised "across-the-board upgrades... while still maintaining the classic look and feel of the originals". Five days later, on the 13th of October, the existing versions of all three games were pulled from digital retailers on consoles and Windows.

  The reaction was sharp. Audiences and journalists worried about video game preservation and the lack of any choice between versions. They also feared that music might vanish because of expired licences, as it had in earlier re-releases. Wesley Yin-Poole of Eurogamer called the decision a "blow to video game preservation" and bad for player choice.

  The music fears proved partly right. Rockstar confirmed that the soundtrack matched the trilogy's most recent re-releases from 2014, which left over 30 songs missing from Vice City and San Andreas combined. Some cheats were cut too, because they "didn't play well" in Unreal Engine. San Andreas also lost its cooperative multiplayer mode.

  On the 19th of November, Rockstar announced that the original versions would return as a bundle on the Rockstar Store. Owners of The Definitive Edition received them free on the 3rd of December. They remained available with every purchase of the game until the 30th of June 2022. Buyers who used the Rockstar Games Launcher could also claim one free Rockstar game between the 20th of December 2021 and the 5th of January 2022.

  2136225153

• 5. Launch Week

  ›

  Preorders opened on the 22nd of October 2021, alongside the first full trailer and screenshots of the graphical upgrades. The release day was the 11th of November, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Nothing about that day went smoothly.

  The launch was planned for 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. An error on the PlayStation Store instead unlocked preorders at midnight local time. Players in Australia and New Zealand got access more than 24 hours early on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and the store listing was taken down in the interim.

  On Windows, the Rockstar Games Launcher went offline for roughly 28 hours for what the company called "maintenance". The game could be neither played nor bought. When the launcher returned, the game stayed unavailable while Rockstar worked to "removed files unintentionally included" in it. Data miners and journalists suggested those files held the removed radio songs, hidden notes from developers, and San Andreas's controversial "Hot Coffee" minigame. After three days, the Windows version came back on the 14th of November.

  Fixes followed. The first update arrived on the 20th of November. On the 30th of November, San Andreas gained an option to show ground fog, following complaints about its absence. A February 2022 update resolved more than 100 bugs.

  Physical editions were first scheduled for the 7th of December. They slipped to the 17th of December for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, and to the 11th of February 2022 for Switch. The Windows version supports Nvidia DLSS, while the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions run at 4K resolution with up to 60 frames per second. Steam added the game on the 19th of January 2023, which brought Steam Deck support, and the Epic Games Store followed on the 15th of February.

  5847445523

• 6. The Critics

  ›

  On OpenCritic, only 12 percent of critics recommended The Definitive Edition, and the site's consensus said it "utterly fails at meeting player expectations". Metacritic reported "mixed or average reviews" for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, but "generally unfavorable reviews" for Switch and Windows. Jordan Middler of Video Games Chronicle thought the collection fell far short of the word definitive. GameSpot's Justin Clark wondered why Rockstar, maker of Red Dead Redemption 2 from 2018, would publish a remaster "that turns its most iconic games into app store shovelware". Jerome Joffard of Jeuxvideo.com disagreed, saying the games kept their original charm and sense of freedom.

  Lighting drew both the warmest praise and some of the sharpest complaints. Sam Machkovech of Ars Technica called it the "best part" of the game. Jordan Olomon of NME said it made the games look the way you imagined them as a kid. Middler felt it captured the vibe perfectly, especially in Vice City, though the sunlight was sometimes too bright. The rain was another matter. Keza MacDonald of The Guardian called the effects "so ugly that they obscure your view", and Clark said they left the games "virtually unplayable". Several critics also found scenes too dark.

  The longer draw distance was a double-edged gift. Christopher J. Teuton of Screen Rant said the games "look better here than they ever have before", excluding mods, but noted that San Andreas now felt simpler and smaller. Middler said it "feels like something you were never supposed to see". Tristan Ogilvie of IGN wrote that it "completely shatters the convincing illusion of scale". Josh Wise of VideoGamer.com argued that the clearer picture removed the dirtier mood, with III missing its "grey-green murk" and San Andreas its "beer-tinted haze".

  Controls fared better. Critics praised mission checkpoints, the weapon wheel, map navigation and improved shooting, and many felt these made the games easier and more enjoyable. Ogilvie still found the checkpoints too unforgiving and the auto-targeting uneven, with San Andreas faring best. Dan Roemer of Destructoid called the combat "incredibly rough and unforgiving at times". Teuton disliked the loss of the cinematic and top-down camera angles from III. Chris Shive of Hardcore Gamer questioned the removal of the Confederate flag from a character's outfit, and Joffard regretted the lost two-player mode.

  Character models drew the most ridicule. Cameron Kunzelman of Polygon compared Tommy to a "G.I. Joe doll", and Roemer called him "a bloated Ken doll". Shive liked Claude's new look, but thought Tommy looked "too young" and said some background characters "look like horrible mutant abominations". Olomon called the models "outright ridiculous", and Clark called them "absolutely hideous". Machkovech was kinder, writing that the designs "generally shine" while admitting some "look pretty bad".

  Then came the crashes. MacDonald wrote that the "remasters feel less stable" than the originals, and Teuton found Vice City the shakiest of the three. Sammy Barker of Push Square noted heavy frame rate drops on PlayStation 5. Machkovech criticised the "botched" high dynamic range, the pricing, and at least one hardware crash in every game. The Switch version took particular punishment for awkward shooting, low-quality textures and dips in frame rate. The mobile controls drew mixed responses. When James Archer of Rock Paper Shotgun tried the collection on a Steam Deck in 2023, he called it "still a bit crap".

  7470606564

• 7. Backlash and Apology

  ›

  Many angry user reviews complained that no advance copies had been sent to the press, and others simply disliked the art style. Several reviewers demanded refunds. Journalists listed the usual grievances: the odd look of some updated characters, textual errors on in-game surfaces, problems with the longer draw distance, and glitches in models and physics. Players also made mods to improve the rain and to restore removed content.

  Thomas Williamson, chief executive of Grove Street Games, said he was "enjoying this unparalleled level of scrutiny on our studio". On the 19th of November 2021, Rockstar apologised for the technical problems. It admitted the games "did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality, or the standards our fans have come to expect". The company also reported that members of the development team had been harassed online, and it urged its community to "maintain a respectful and civil discourse".

  In January 2022, Strauss Zelnick, chief executive of Take-Two Interactive, described a "glitch" at launch that had been resolved and said the game performed "just great for the company". Some journalists felt he was playing down serious problems. The following month Zelnick said the game "definitely had some quality issues" and that the company "did fall short", though he noted the issues were being addressed.

  The damage may have reached beyond this one release. According to industry sources, the backlash led Rockstar to shelve remasters of Grand Theft Auto IV, from 2008, and Red Dead Redemption, from 2010. The company shifted its focus toward Grand Theft Auto VI.

  9896978692

• 8. Sales and Second Life

  ›

  In the United Kingdom, The Definitive Edition was the eighth-best-selling game of November 2021, even though it was sold only digitally that month. It slipped to 20th in December. After the physical release it entered the weekly boxed chart at sixth, with 67 percent of copies sold on PlayStation 4 and the rest on Xbox. Its second week brought a 70 percent drop and a fall to 23rd, and the week after it left the top 40. In November on the PlayStation Store, it was the third-best-selling PlayStation 5 game in both Europe and North America.

  Journalists estimated it could have sold up to ten million copies by December 2021. In February 2022, Zelnick said sales exceeded expectations and the company felt "very good about how the title has performed commercially". Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, answered that "everyone knew it underperformed".

  The mobile versions took a long road. Android and iOS releases were first scheduled for the first half of 2022. In May 2022, Take-Two moved the window to its 2023 fiscal year, ending on the 31st of March 2023, and in November it replaced the date with "TBA". Then in November 2023, Netflix announced the games for the 14th of December, through the App Store and Google Play, for subscribers and for individual purchase.

  Video Games Deluxe developed the mobile ports. They fixed further bugs and added a lighting option that matched the original games. Those changes reached consoles and Windows in a November 2024 update, which Fran Ruiz of VG247 felt restored the "stylish" art direction of the originals. The update also removed Grove Street Games from the splash screen credits. Williamson called that a "dick move" and indicated that his studio had developed the update, but that Rockstar withheld it for years.

  Netflix's monthly game downloads rose almost threefold, and the launch became its "most successful launch to date". By January 2024, it had passed 18 million downloads: 2.4 million for III, 4.1 million for Vice City and 11.6 million for San Andreas. By June, the total passed 30 million, with 3.3 million for III, 6.5 million for Vice City and 20.5 million for San Andreas. When III and Vice City left Netflix in December 2024, their totals stood at 4.3 million and 9.65 million.

  San Andreas stayed on the service until December 2025. It reached 48.3 million downloads by June 2025, including 2.5 million in the month before, and 57.4 million by November. That makes it Netflix's most-downloaded game, ahead of Squid Game: Unleashed by more than 27 million.

  5049814554