Grand Theft Auto

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

As we inch closer to the 10-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III this Saturday, we’ve done a lot of reflecting about the era of gaming that it ushered in, and how it changed the way developers look at games. But aside from standardizing open worlds and giving us and a decade of morally ambiguous gaming, GTA as a series has told a lot of fascinating stories. And a big reason those stories were so fascinating was their cast of larger-than-life scumbags, psychos and sociopaths, most of which were not only memorable, but surprisingly complicated underneath their cartoonish exteriors.

With that in mind, we roped together a few of our editors and wouldn’t let them leave until they’d told us, in their own words, which ones were their favorites...

We know that all you GTA heads are neck-deep in the beautifully rendered corpses of mid-level irritating crime-boss douchebags, but let’s take a moment and consider our roots. Liberty wasn’t always this chock-full of cell phone blabbing pedestrians, road raging grandma SUV pilots, and rights-violating officers of the law. In a simpler time, there was only one camera view looking down on all the chaos and the citizens were jaggy

Crime doesn’t pay. But virtual crime? That does pay. And by the bucket-load. Even by the time the series reached Florida, it was breaking records in a major way, with Vice City becoming the fastest-selling PS2 title ever - until San Andreas beat it. And that’s despite four million Americans pre-ordering Vice City, and a million more buying it upon its release (here in the UK, the Miami Vice-vibed title shifted over a quarter of

Anticipating the approach of the latest Grand Theft Auto isn’t the same as yearning for a new Halo or Resident Evil. Most games make you anticipate the experience that the designers dole out to you in a prescribed way, whereas with GTA, you anticipate all the ways in which you will create experiences of your own design. Even if the main draw for some players is the story - and the marketing for GTAIV aims to show this will be the