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Which GTA is the best? GTA V, San Andreas or Vice City

13 October 2026 · Games

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Grand Theft Auto VI is due on 19 November for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, more than twelve years after the last main game in the series. It goes back to Vice City, now part of a state called Leonida, with two leads, Lucia and Jason. Before it rewrites the argument, it is a good moment to ask the old one: which Grand Theft Auto is the greatest? On GOATvs the question is settled the only fair way, one face-off at a time by everyone, and the box above shows where every main GTA stands in the world's Games list today.

The series began small. The first Grand Theft Auto, made by DMA Design in Scotland and released in 1997, looked down on its cities from above and was famous mostly for the outrage it caused. The leap came in 2001 with Grand Theft Auto III on the PlayStation 2: a whole city in three dimensions, Liberty City, where you could ignore the story and simply drive. Almost every open-world game since owes something to that freedom.

A year later Vice City gave the formula a style. Set in a neon version of 1980s Miami, with Ray Liotta as Tommy Vercetti and a radio full of real eighties hits, it felt like walking into Scarface and Miami Vice at once. Then in 2004 San Andreas went bigger than anyone expected: three cities, countryside and desert in between, and Carl Johnson, CJ, coming home to Grove Street. You could work out, eat, learn to fly and fall out with your own gang, and it became the best-selling game on the PlayStation 2. Vice City against San Andreas is the second pair above, and it is the argument a whole generation grew up with.

Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) chose a different road. Niko Bellic, a war veteran from Eastern Europe, arrives in a rebuilt Liberty City chasing the American dream and finds something colder. The cars felt heavy, people stumbled and fell with new physics, and the story was the most serious the series had told. Some players still call it the best written GTA; others missed the fun of San Andreas. It meets its successor in the third pair.

That successor is Grand Theft Auto V. Released in 2013, it gave players three lives to switch between: Michael, a retired bank robber, Franklin, a young man from the streets, and Trevor, who is impossible to describe politely. Its Los Santos is a satire of Los Angeles, its heists are among the best missions in any game, and with GTA Online it never really ended: it came out on three generations of consoles and is often named as the best-selling game of all time after Minecraft. GTA V against San Andreas, the newest classic against the most loved one, is the first pair above.

Rockstar's other games sit close by. Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) took everything the studio learned from GTA to the end of the Wild West with Arthur Morgan, and Bully (2006) moved the same ideas into a school. Both are in the box, because many fans would put one of them above any GTA.

GTA VI will add a new name to the list in November, and real votes will decide where it lands. Until then, pick your side above: GTA V or San Andreas, Vice City or San Andreas, IV or V. Then see where the whole series stands in the Games Top 100, ranked by everyone.

Vote: Grand Theft Auto V vs Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

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