This is one ranking, mine, and I am telling you the criteria before the list so you can work out exactly where you disagree.

Three things decide each placement. What the game did first, meaning what it added that the series had never done. How well it delivered on that at the time. And how it plays in 2026 if you install it today, on hardware you actually own.

GTA 6 is not in the ranking. It comes out on November 19, 2026 and nobody has played it. I close with what it would have to do to take the top spot, which is a different question and a fair one.

The ranking at a glance

Rank Game Year Metacritic
1 GTA V 2013 97
2 GTA: San Andreas 2004 95
3 GTA IV 2008 98
4 GTA: Vice City 2002 95
5 GTA III 2001 97
6 GTA 2 1999 70
7 Grand Theft Auto 1997 Not scored

Those Metacritic numbers are the aggregates on each game’s main page on metacritic.com. Notice that my order does not match them. The highest-rated GTA is third on my list, and I explain why when I get there.

7. Grand Theft Auto (1997)

The one that started it, and the one you should play for twenty minutes rather than twenty hours.

What it did first: everything. DMA Design built a top-down world with three cities in it, Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, and let you drive anything, ignore the missions, and rack up points for chaos. The names in that list should tell you how much of the next thirty years was already sketched out in 1997.

How it holds up: badly, and I am not going to be sentimental about it. The camera is far away, the cars slide, missions restart from checkpoints that punish you, and the fun runs out quickly once the novelty of the freedom wears off.

It is last because a ranking that puts a historically important game above a game you would actually enjoy is not a ranking, it is a museum plaque.

6. GTA 2 (1999)

Better than the first game in almost every way, and still the odd one out in the series.

What it did first: gang reputation. Anywhere City has rival gangs, and helping one costs you standing with another, which changes who will hire you and who will shoot you on sight. That is a genuinely interesting system and the series took years to do anything as sophisticated with faction loyalty again.

The setting is where GTA 2 loses people. It is a retro-futuristic city, not a version of America you recognise, and the series found its voice by doing the opposite. Every GTA after this one is about a real place with the names changed.

Metacritic’s aggregate for it is 70, from 15 reviews, and that is the lowest number in this list by a wide margin. Take it with the era in mind, since critic coverage in 1999 was thin, but it also matches how people talk about GTA 2 now.

5. GTA III (2001)

The most important game on this list, and the fifth-best one to play.

What it did first: the entire template. Third-person 3D open world, radio stations you choose between, a city that carries on without you, a wanted system, missions you pick up from characters instead of a menu. Every open-world crime game since owes it something, and Rockstar built the next twelve years on it directly.

It earned a 97 on Metacritic in 2001 and it deserved it.

How it holds up: rougher than its reputation. Claude is silent, so the story happens around him rather than through him. There are no motorcycles. You cannot swim, and touching deep water kills you instantly. Saving is limited to your hideouts, which turns a failed mission into a long drive.

Play it to see where this came from. Play Vice City to enjoy the same era.

4. GTA: Vice City (2002)

The year the series got a personality.

What it did first: a voice. Tommy Vercetti speaks, and Ray Liotta plays him, which changed what a GTA protagonist could be. It also brought a licensed soundtrack that does real work, motorcycles, helicopters, and businesses you buy and then have to protect.

The 1986 Miami setting is the reason people still talk about it. Vice City is not just a re-skin of Liberty City. It has a colour palette, a decade, a soundtrack and a mood, and it commits to all four hard enough that Rockstar is going back to the name in November.

Where it drops behind: it is small, and its mission design leans on a few brutal difficulty spikes. Demolition Man, the remote-control helicopter mission, is the most notorious of them and it still stops playthroughs today.

It is fourth because San Andreas came two years later and did more of everything.

3. GTA IV (2008)

The best-written GTA and the highest-rated one, at 98 on Metacritic, which makes it tied for one of the highest scores in the medium.

What it did first: weight. GTA IV’s cars have mass, its people fall over like people, and its Liberty City is denser and more detailed than anything the PS2 could hold. Niko Bellic is the best character in the series, an immigrant sold a story about America who spends the game finding out what is actually on offer. The two GTA IV episodes, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, are among the best things Rockstar has made and they run alongside the main story rather than after it.

So why is the highest-scoring GTA only third?

Because a lot of GTA IV’s design has aged into friction. Friends ring you constantly to go bowling and drinking, and the game ties rewards to answering. Dying sends you back to the start of a mission with the drive included. Cover shooting is stiff. The PC version launched in a poor state and its licensed radio music has been thinned out by expiring rights over the years, so the game you install today is missing songs the 2008 game had.

It is a better piece of writing than the two games above it. It is a worse game to sit down with in 2026.

2. GTA: San Andreas (2004)

The most ambitious game Rockstar has ever shipped, measured against what it was running on.

What it did first: scale and systems, both at once. Three cities in one state, Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas, with countryside, desert and a mountain between them. Swimming. Climbing. Planes you fly. Gang territory you take and hold. Stats that improve with use, a character you can make fat or muscular, haircuts, clothes, tattoos, property.

All of that on a PlayStation 2, in 2004, in a game that also happens to have the best story arc in the series and CJ, played by Young Maylay, at the centre of it.

It is the best-selling game on the PS2, at 17.33 million units, and it is the game most people mean when they say GTA peaked.

How it holds up: the systems are creaky and some of them are actively annoying now. Learning to fly is a wall. The stat grinding is busywork. But the state itself still feels bigger than maps built two console generations later, and that is the whole point of an open world.

It is second by a small margin. If you weight ambition over polish, it is first, and I would not argue with you for long.

1. GTA V (2013)

Thirteen years old, still selling, and still the best version of what this series does.

What it did first: three protagonists you switch between at will, and a heist structure built around them. That sounds like a gimmick and it is not. Michael, Franklin and Trevor want different things, the switch happens mid-mission, and the game keeps making you the person with the worst view of what is happening. No other GTA has a structure this good.

It also holds up better than anything else here, and not only because of the remasters. The driving is the best in the series. The shooting works. The map has more density per square mile than San Andreas ever had. Los Santos is a genuinely nasty piece of satire that has aged into being more accurate, not less.

The numbers are hard to argue with. It scored 97 on Metacritic, it has shipped on three console generations across twelve years, and Take-Two’s annual report for the year ended March 31, 2026 puts it past 225 million units sold in.

Now the honest cost. GTA 5 never received a single hour of new single-player story content. Twelve years of updates all went into GTA Online, and that is a fact about what shipped rather than a claim about what Rockstar planned, because Rockstar never announced a story expansion to cancel. My own reading is that the ending arrives quickly after a story that was pacing itself for more, and that the online economy which funded the last decade of Rockstar’s output is part of why the next game took twelve years. Both of those are opinions, and I am labelling them as mine.

It is still first. It did the most, it did it best, and it is the one I would put in front of somebody who has never played a GTA.

Where the spin-offs would land

They are not in the ranking because they are not mainline games, and leaving them unmentioned would be dishonest, because one of them is better than two entries above.

Chinatown Wars (2009, Nintendo DS) scores 93 on Metacritic and it earns it. It is a top-down game built out of 3D geometry, with a real drug-dealing economy and stylus-driven set pieces, set in GTA IV’s Liberty City. On merit it belongs around fourth. On format it is a handheld spin-off, so it sits outside the list.

Vice City Stories (2006) and Liberty City Stories (2005) are the PSP pair. Both are better than they had any right to be, and Vice City Stories in particular gives Victor Vance a whole game after Vice City opened by killing him. They land in the middle of this list on quality and below it on ambition.

GTA Advance (2004) is the weakest thing with the GTA name on it. Skip it unless you are a completionist.

For everything in its proper place, with dates, platforms and universes, use GTA games in order.

The top three are close, and here is what would move them

I do not want to pretend this is settled, so here is the switch.

If your criterion is ambition against the hardware, San Andreas goes first. If your criterion is writing and performance, GTA IV goes first. GTA V wins on my third criterion, which is how good the game is to actually play right now, and it wins the first two by less than its reputation suggests.

What would not change is the bottom half. GTA III’s importance does not make it more fun than Vice City, and no amount of history moves the 1997 original up.

What GTA 6 would have to do to take the top spot

Not a bigger map. Size is the easiest thing to promise and the least likely thing to matter, which is why I wrote a whole piece on what Rockstar has actually published about the GTA 6 map size rather than repeating a number somebody guessed.

Three things would do it.

First, beat GTA V’s structure. Two protagonists who are a couple is a harder problem than three who are business partners, because the relationship has to carry weight the whole game rather than showing up in cutscenes. Rockstar’s own synopsis says Jason and Lucia are forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive. If that relationship changes across the story and the game lets you feel it, GTA 6 has something no GTA has had.

Second, give the single-player campaign a reason to exist after launch. GTA 5’s biggest failure was abandoning its own story mode. If GTA 6 supports its campaign for years, it wins on the exact axis its predecessor lost.

Third, make the world react. Every GTA since 2001 has had a city that ignores you between missions. That is the oldest limitation in the series and the one current hardware could actually fix.

I will rank it when I have played it. Until November 19, 2026 anybody telling you where GTA 6 lands on a list like this is guessing.

Where to go from here

For the full catalogue with release dates, platforms and story chronology, read GTA games in order.

For why San Andreas and GTA V are not in the same continuity, even though people talk about them as one series, read the GTA timeline explained. It is also the reason CJ cannot appear in GTA 6 and Franklin can.

And if you want the practical comparison rather than the argument, GTA 6 vs GTA 5 is the one to read before November.