Grand Theft Auto V

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Three days after Grand Theft Auto V reached stores in September 2013, it had passed one billion dollars in sales. No entertainment product in history had reached that mark faster. The game came from Rockstar North and was published by Rockstar Games. Its story did not follow one criminal, as earlier entries in the series had. It followed three, and it set them loose in a fictional version of Southern California where robbery was the family trade. Why did Rockstar abandon the single-hero formula? How did the studio's teams turn Los Angeles into a playable city without simply copying it? And how did a game that drew so much anger over violence and its treatment of women end up ranked among the best ever made?

  39266994

• 2. Three Protagonists

  ›

  Michael De Santa, Franklin Clinton and Trevor Philips take turns under the player's thumbs. A compass on the screen lets players jump between them whenever they like, though the story locks that option at certain points. During missions the game can also swap characters automatically to finish a specific objective. A character's avatar flashes red when he is in danger and white when he holds a strategic advantage.

  Each man carries eight skills, such as shooting and driving, and one of them is a special ability unique to him. Michael slips into bullet time during combat. Franklin slows down time while driving. Trevor deals twice the usual damage while taking half as much. A meter drains while the ability runs and refills when players act with flair, such as drifting as Franklin or landing headshots as Michael.

  Heists sit at the centre of the story. The hardest ones require AI-controlled accomplices with skills like computer hacking and driving. An accomplice who survives a successful job takes a cut of the cash, and may return for later missions with sharper skills. Some heists allow a choice of approach. In a holdup, players can quietly subdue civilians with an incapacitating agent or storm the venue with guns drawn.

  Reviewers noticed how much the switching changed the feel of play. Edge found that it spared players long journeys to mission start points. Polygon compared rapid switching during a heist to film editing, with the player acting as editor and cutting to the most interesting perspective.

  Outside the missions, each character carries a smartphone that opens an in-game Internet, and that Internet includes a working stock market.

  202533911

• 3. Los Santos

  ›

  The fictional city of Los Santos is modelled on Los Angeles, and it sits inside the state of San Andreas, which is based on Southern California. Together with the countryside of Blaine County, it forms a world much larger than those of earlier entries in the series. Players can explore all of it from the start of the game, although story progress unlocks more things to do.

  Key members of the world production team took research trips across the region and documented what they saw with photographs and video. Google Maps projections of Los Angeles helped them lay out the road networks of Los Santos. To reproduce the city's mix of residents, the developers studied census data and watched documentaries. The team regarded building this world as the most technically demanding part of the entire project.

  Reviewers rewarded the effort. GameTrailers found the imitation of Los Angeles authentic and the world full of voice and personality. Several critics praised the way it satirised contemporary American culture. Official Xbox Magazine felt Los Santos surpassed the grey and gritty Liberty City of Grand Theft Auto IV.

  The size of the map also forced new tools on the player. The game added vehicle types absent from its predecessor, such as fixed-wing aircraft. Crime has consequences in this city. A wanted meter shows how hard the police are hunting a player, and at the maximum five stars, police helicopters and SWAT teams swarm to kill.

  24351298100

• 4. A Buried Betrayal

  ›

  In 2004, a robbery in Ludendorff, North Yankton, went wrong, and a criminal named Michael Townley was presumed dead. His partners were Trevor Philips and Brad Snider. Nine years later, Michael is alive in Los Santos under the name Michael De Santa. He has struck a secret deal with Federal Investigation Bureau agent Dave Norton to stay hidden.

  His quiet life collapses over a car repossession. Franklin Clinton, a gangbanger working for a corrupt car salesman, tries to repossess Michael's son's car, and the two men become friends. After Michael catches his wife with her tennis coach, he wrecks a mansion belonging to the drug lord Martin Madrazo. To pay the debt, Michael returns to crime, with Franklin and the hacker Lester Crest at his side. Their first job is a jewellery store.

  Trevor, living in squalor in rural Blaine County, hears about that heist and recognises Michael's handiwork. He had believed the FIB killed his old partner. He tracks Michael down, and the reunion is reluctant on Michael's side. Michael's family leaves him, and he becomes a movie producer, which brings him into conflict with the billionaire Devin Weston. Meanwhile, Trevor wages war on outlaw bikers, street gangs, rival meth dealers, the private military company Merryweather and the triad kingpin Wei Cheng.

  The FIB's Dave Norton and his superior Steve Haines then pressure Michael into operations against the International Affairs Agency, including the theft of an experimental nerve agent. When Steve forces Michael and Franklin to erase evidence from FIB servers, Michael quietly wipes the data on his own activities as well. That destroys the leverage Steve held over him.

  The final plan is a raid on the gold bullion reserve of the Union Depository. Before it happens, Trevor learns that Brad was never imprisoned. Brad was killed during the Ludendorff robbery and buried in the grave marked with Michael's name. Trevor concludes the whole heist was a setup meant to kill him instead, and he leaves Michael for dead during a shootout. Franklin rescues Michael, and Trevor later saves him during a Mexican standoff because he believes only he has the right to kill Michael.

  After the depository job succeeds, Franklin faces three options: kill Trevor, kill Michael, or attempt to save both in a suicide mission. If he kills either man, his friendship with the other ends and he returns to his old life. In the third path, the trio and their allies kill Cheng, Stretch, Steve and Devin, and then Michael and Trevor reconcile. The three protagonists stop working together afterwards but remain friends.

  343859

• 5. Rockstar's Long Build

  ›

  Work on Grand Theft Auto V began in 2008, around the time Grand Theft Auto IV was released. It is the seventh main entry in the series and the fifteenth overall. More than 1,000 people worked on it, drawn from Rockstar North and from sister studios around the world. The company overhauled its proprietary engine, called RAGE, to improve how far into the distance the game could draw. By then Rockstar knew the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 so well that it could push their graphics further than ever. Analysts estimated the combined development and marketing budget made it the most expensive game ever made at the time.

  The three-protagonist idea had surfaced much earlier, during development of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Hardware limits made it impossible then. In 2009 the team built two expansion packs for Grand Theft Auto IV that starred new protagonists, and that experience convinced them to try three at once. They treated the new game as a spiritual successor to Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3. They refined the shooting and cover systems, and they reworked the driving to fix the awkward vehicle controls of Grand Theft Auto IV.

  After auditions, Ned Luke, Shawn Fonteno and Steven Ogg won the roles of Michael, Franklin and Trevor. Their performances were mostly captured with motion capture. Dialogue for scenes with characters seated in vehicles was recorded in studios instead.

  The music took years. A team of producers collaborated on the original score, and an in-game radio added licensed songs. The team licensed more than 241 tracks across fifteen music stations, with two further stations for talk radio. Some tracks were written for the game, including original work by the rapper and producer Flying Lotus for the FlyLo FM station he hosts.

  2535363740

• 6. Launch and Online

  ›

  Rockstar Games announced the game on the 25th of October 2011 and released a debut trailer one week later. Journalists noted the huge anticipation, which they credited to the series' cultural significance. The original target of the second quarter of 2013 slipped, and the release moved to the 17th of September to allow more polish. For pre-orders, Rockstar worked with retailers on a special edition. It also launched a viral website for a fictional religious cult called The Epsilon Program, which invited visitors to appear in the game as cult members.

  Grand Theft Auto Online arrived on the 1st of October 2013, two weeks after the main game. Up to 30 players share its world and enter lobbies to complete jobs. Players form crews, and can join up to five. A toolset lets them design custom jobs such as racetracks. The launch was rough. Players reported connection trouble and freezes during load screens. A patch on the 5th of October did not end the problems, and some players saw their character progress vanish. A second patch followed on the 10th of October, along with a gift of GTA$500,000 in the in-game currency to every account connected since launch.

  Rockstar kept adding free updates. The Independence Day Special on the 1st of July 2014 brought patriotic-themed additions. The long-awaited Online Heists update arrived on the 10th of March 2015 and struggled at first under heavy user load.

  A re-release was announced at E3 2014. It offered a greater draw distance, finer textures, denser traffic and a new first-person view that forced an overhaul of the animation system. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions came out on the 18th of November 2014. The Windows version slipped to the 14th of April 2015, and Rockstar said it needed extra time for polish.

  Plans for single-player downloadable add-ons were scrapped as the team shifted to Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Redemption 2. After the game's source code reportedly leaked online on the 24th of December 2023, dataminers found at least eight cancelled single-player expansions, including one set in Liberty City. The Expanded and Enhanced version reached PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on the 15th of March 2022. Its trailer became one of the most-disliked videos on PlayStation's YouTube channel, and the Windows version received the same enhancements as a free update on the 4th of March 2025.

  5387867983

• 7. Praise and Backlash

  ›

  Metacritic summed up the critical response to the original release as universal acclaim, based on 50 reviews of the PlayStation 3 version and 58 of the Xbox 360 version. IGN called it one of the very best video games ever made. Famitsu gave it a perfect score, making it only the second western-developed game to earn one, after The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

  The story divided reviewers, and Trevor divided them most of all. GameSpot called him a horrible, terrifying, psychotic human being and a terrific character. Eurogamer found him shallow and unconvincing. Awards followed anyway. The game collected Game of the Year honours from Edge, Time and CNET, among others. Trevor won Best Character from Official Xbox Magazine, and Rockstar received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions in 2022 met a cooler reception, with critics praising faster loading and better visuals but finding the core game dated.

  The mission By the Book, in which players use torture equipment during an interrogation, unsettled reviewers. They saw political commentary on torture by the United States government but thought the scene was in poor taste. It drew criticism from politicians and anti-torture charities, and the torture gameplay was cut from the Japanese release.

  Several reviewers found the portrayal of women misogynistic. After GameSpot's Carolyn Petit made that case in her review, readers responded with 20,000 largely negative comments and a petition calling for her firing. Many journalists defended her right to an opinion. In December 2014, the Australian department stores Target and Kmart pulled the game after a petition against depictions of violence towards women gathered over 40,000 signatures. Take-Two Interactive's chief operating officer, Strauss Zelnick, said he stood behind the company's products, the people who create them and the players.

  Critics also objected to the game's transgender characters, whom they described as sex workers drawn as harmful stereotypes. The 2022 re-release removed that material from every part of the game except Director Mode.

  Legal trouble came too. Karen Gravano sued over a character she said was based on her story, and Lindsay Lohan sued over a character she said imitated her image, voice and clothing line. Rockstar sought dismissal of both cases, and both were dismissed in 2016.

  10097999623

• 8. Records and Legacy

  ›

  Within 24 hours of release, Grand Theft Auto V had sold approximately 11.21 million copies for Take-Two Interactive, nearly double what analysts expected. On the 8th of October 2013 it broke seven Guinness World Records, including best-selling video game in 24 hours and fastest entertainment property to gross. In the United Kingdom it sold more than 2.25 million copies in five days, beating the record set by Call of Duty: Black Ops. By November 2014 it was the best-selling game of all time in that country.

  The sales kept compounding. By December 2014 it had shipped 45 million copies, including 10 million of the re-released version. It reached about 100 million copies by July 2018 and over 150 million by July 2021. More copies sold in 2020 than in any year since launch. Barron's reported that the game consistently earned over $500 million annually, with about 22 million monthly active players. By March 2026, almost 230 million copies had shipped, making it the second-best-selling video game of all time.

  Critics framed it as the closing title of the seventh console generation. Polygon called it the closure of that generation and the benchmark for the next. In 2015 Edge ranked it the second-greatest video game of all time, and it was the most-tweeted game of that year despite being released over a year earlier. In 2025 Rolling Stone placed it third, citing its profound effect on the medium.

  Its successor, Grand Theft Auto VI, was confirmed in February 2022, formally revealed in December 2023, and is scheduled for November 2026.

  The older game has found unexpected second lives. Intel Labs used it to demonstrate a way of enhancing graphics with neural networks. Reports in 2026 indicated that Ukrainian drone operators used it to simulate navigation and targeting in urban environments.

  9428653348