Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a 2002 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the fourth main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 2001's Grand Theft Auto III, and the sixth instalment overall. Set in 1986 within the fictional Vice City, the single-player story follows mobster Tommy Vercetti's rise to power after being released from prison and becoming caught up in an ambushed drug deal. While seeking out those responsible, he gradually builds a criminal empire by seizing power from other criminal organisations in the city.
Rockstar Games, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in New York City. The company was established in December 1998 as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, using the assets Take-Two had previously acquired from BMG Interactive. Founding members of the company were Terry Donovan, Gary Foreman, Dan and Sam Houser, and Jamie King, who worked for Take-Two at the time, and of which the Houser brothers were previously executives at BMG Interactive. Sam Houser heads the studio as president.
Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 action-adventure game developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games. It is the third main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 1999's Grand Theft Auto 2, and the fifth instalment overall. Set within the fictional Liberty City, the story follows Claude, a silent protagonist who, after being betrayed and left for dead by his girlfriend during a robbery, embarks on a quest for revenge that leads him to become entangled in a world of crime, drugs, gang warfare, and corruption. The game is played from a third-person perspective and its world is navigated on foot or by vehicle. Its open world design lets players freely roam Liberty City, consisting of three main areas.
Rockstar North Limited is a British video game development company and a studio of Rockstar Games based in Edinburgh. The company was founded as DMA Design in Dundee in 1987 by David Jones, soon hiring former classmates Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond. During its early years, DMA Design was backed by its publisher Psygnosis, primarily focusing on Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 games. During this time, they created successful shooters such as Menace and Blood Money, but soon turned to platform games after the release of Lemmings in 1991, which was an international success and led to several sequels and spin-offs. After developing Unirally for Nintendo, DMA Design was set to become one of their main second-party developers, but this partnership ended after Nintendo's disapproval of Body Harvest.
Grand Theft Auto 2 is an action-adventure game, developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games in October 1999, for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation, and the Dreamcast and Game Boy Color in 2000. It is the sequel to 1997's Grand Theft Auto, and the second main instalment of the Grand Theft Auto series. Set within a retrofuturistic metropolis known as "Anywhere City", the game focuses on players taking the role of a criminal as they roam an open world, conducting jobs for various crime syndicates and having free rein to do whatever they wish to achieve their goal. The game's intro is unique for a title in the series, as it involved live-action scenes filmed by Rockstar Games.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a 2004 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the fifth main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and the seventh installment overall. It was released in October 2004 for the PlayStation 2, in June 2005 for Microsoft Windows and Xbox, and in November 2010 for Mac OS X. The game is set within an open world environment that players can explore and interact with at their leisure. The story follows Carl "CJ" Johnson, who returns home following his mother's murder and is drawn back into his former gang and a life of crime while clashing with corrupt authorities and powerful criminals. Carl's journey takes him across the fictional U.S. state of San Andreas, which is based on California and Nevada and encompasses three major cities: Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas.
Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is a series of action-adventure games created by David Jones and Mike Dailly. Later titles were developed under the oversight of brothers Dan and Sam Houser, Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut. It is primarily developed by British development house Rockstar North, and published by its American parent company, Rockstar Games. The name of the series is a term for motor vehicle theft in the United States.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is a 2005 action-adventure game developed in a collaboration between Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North, and published by Rockstar Games. The ninth installment in the Grand Theft Auto series, it was initially released as a PlayStation Portable exclusive in October 2005. A port for the PlayStation 2 was later released in June 2006. At the time of release, the recommended retail price of the PS2 port was around half the price of the PSP version, because the PS2 version does not feature the custom soundtrack ripping capability of the PSP version. Ports for iOS, Android and Fire OS devices were also released in December 2015, February 2016, and March 2016, respectively.
"Hot Coffee" is the unofficial name for a minigame in the 2004 action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas by Rockstar Games. While it was not playable in the official game release, the modding community discovered hidden code that, when enabled, allows protagonist Carl "CJ" Johnson to have animated sexual intercourse with his in-game girlfriend.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a 2008 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the sixth main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the eleventh instalment overall. Set in the fictional Liberty City, based on New York City, the single-player story follows Eastern European war veteran Niko Bellic and his attempts to escape his past while under pressure from high-profile criminals. The open world design lets players freely roam Liberty City, consisting of three main islands, and the neighbouring state of Alderney, which is based on New Jersey.
The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) is a proprietary game engine of Rockstar Games, developed by the RAGE Technology Group division of Rockstar San Diego. Since its first game, Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis in 2006, released for the Xbox 360 and Wii, the engine has been used by Rockstar Games' internal studios to develop advanced open world games for consoles and computers.
Euphoria is a game animation middleware created by NaturalMotion based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis, NaturalMotion's proprietary technology for animating 3D characters on-the-fly "based on a full simulation of the 3D character, including body, muscles and motor nervous system". Instead of using predefined animations, the characters' actions and reactions are synthesized in real-time; they are different every time, even when replaying the same scene. While it is common for current video games to use limp "ragdolls" for animations generated on the fly, Euphoria employed a more complex method to animate the entirety of physically bound objects within the game environment. The engine was to be used in an Indiana Jones game that was later cancelled. According to its web site, Euphoria ran on the Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, iOS and Android platforms and was compatible with all commercial physics engines.
Daniel Houser is an English video game writer and producer who holds both British and American citizenship. He is a co-founder of Rockstar Games, where he served as the head writer and vice president of creativity until his resignation in 2020. His brother Sam is the president of Rockstar.
Leslie Peter Benzies is a Scottish video game producer and the former president of Rockstar North, a subsidiary of Rockstar Games. He was the lead developer on the Grand Theft Auto series, taking responsibility from Grand Theft Auto III to Grand Theft Auto V. Benzies left Rockstar in 2016, and was in a lawsuit with its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, over unpaid royalties from April 2016 to February 2019.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar Leeds in conjunction with Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. The game was released for the Nintendo DS in March 2009, PlayStation Portable in October 2009, iOS in January 2010, and Android and Fire OS devices in December 2014. It is the thirteenth game in the Grand Theft Auto series and a follow-up to Grand Theft Auto IV, and is the first instalment to be released for handheld consoles since 2006's Vice City Stories. Set within modern-day Liberty City, the single-player story follows young Triad member Huang Lee and his efforts to recover a sword gifted by his late father after it is stolen from him, while inadvertently becoming caught in a power struggle amongst Liberty City's Triads.
Agent is an unreleased stealth action game under development by Rockstar North that was originally announced for the PlayStation 3. The game was planned to take place in a 1970s Cold War setting. Agent was teased in July 2007 and formally announced in June 2009. The trademark for the game's title was renewed in 2013 and 2017, and abandoned by November 2018.
Grand Theft Auto V is a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the seventh main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV, and the fifteenth instalment overall. Set within the fictional state of San Andreas, based on Southern California, the single-player story follows three protagonists—retired bank robber Michael De Santa, street gangster Franklin Clinton, and drug dealer and gunrunner Trevor Philips—and their attempts to commit heists while under pressure from a corrupt government agency and powerful criminals. Players freely roam San Andreas's open world countryside and fictional city of Los Santos, based on Los Angeles.
A team of approximately 1,000 people developed Grand Theft Auto V over several years. Rockstar Games released the action-adventure game in September 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, in November 2014 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, in April 2015 for Windows, and in March 2022 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The first main Grand Theft Auto series entry since Grand Theft Auto IV, its development was led by Rockstar North's core 360-person team, who collaborated with several other international Rockstar studios. The team considered the game a spiritual successor to many of their previous projects like Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3. After its unexpected announcement in 2011, the game was fervently promoted with press showings, cinematic trailers, viral marketing strategies and special editions. Its release date, though subject to several delays, was widely anticipated.
Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto is a 2012 book by David Kushner that describes the history of Grand Theft Auto and its founders Sam Houser and Dan Houser. It describes some of the controversies that the game went through, such as fights with Jack Thompson, its continual attempts to push up against societal limits, and the attempt to cover up the Hot Coffee mod in the release of GTA: San Andreas.
The Gamechangers is a 2015 British docudrama produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the story of the controversies caused by Grand Theft Auto, a successful video game series, as various attempts were made to halt the production of the games.
