Grand Theft Auto 3

This year marks the 10-year-anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III, and Rockstar’s been celebrating the birthday of its watershed game in grand style. Since GTA III marked its first decade in October, the company’s released a bunch of great (but expensive!) swag to mark the occasion – and, more importantly, Rockstar's sent us a bunch of it so we can pass it on to you. Want in on this? You know you do. Watch the video and click through for details…

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...

There’s not long to go now until Rockstar finally unveil their Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer – unless you’re reading this afterwards, in which case disregard that first bit. Let’s be honest, we’re properly excited. Like groin tingling-ly so and by the amount of activity in our Twitter feed we can tell we’re not alone. 

We’re so pumped for the debut of GTAV that we’ve scoured the interwebs in search of the old, initial trailers for previous iterations. We remember GTAIV’s ‘things will be different here’ trailer with the first glimpse of Niko Bellic from yesteryear but how many of you remember how you felt when Vice City and San Andreas were aired?

Click inside to jog your memory and find out what we think these past trailers mean for GTA V's debut.

Back when I was a fresh-faced 17-year-old, my games website of choice was called game-online. It actually became GamesRadar's sister site, CVG, which is kind of fitting. Sadly I ended up getting it blocked by the mean IT man when I took all lunch hour to download an 11MB trailer of Sonic Adventure on the college network. But I distinctly remember this same website running the first screenshot of Grand Theft Auto III... and the writer clearly hated the very idea of it. It depicted a dark alleyway with three or four men in it, holding guns. “Is this really what people want?” asked the story. If only they'd known...

Tomorrow is Grand Theft Auto III’s 10^th birthday, and to celebrate, we’ve been cranking out a series of articles this week devoted to the series and what we loved about the third game in particular. What inspires so much love? Well, in 2001, GTA III was something nobody had really seen before: a big, freely explorable 3D world in which we could drive around and behave like psychopaths... or not. It was freedom in a way that games had never really offered before, and – with the help of a slickly presented story and a little ultraviolence – it became a huge success and a pop-cultural phenomenon.

Because of its openness, of course, GTA III meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So once again, we’ve polled our editors, this time to ask: what did it mean to you?

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...

Grand Theft Auto III made its mark on pop culture in more ways than one. Not only was it the best-selling video game of 2001, it caused quite a stir within the industry and beyond for its violent and sexual content. Critics loved it, overbearing parents hated it, and Australia even banned it (for a while, and then replaced it with a censored version). GTA III wasn't just the first game in its series to make the leap from 2D to 3D; it was also the first widely successful open-world, sandbox-style videogame to give you the freedom to explore, steal cabs, pick up prostitutes and then kill them and take their stuff – among other things.

Whether or not you were a fan of the game’s content, Grand Theft Auto did change the way people perceived games, and influenced how developers approached game design. With the game now approaching its 10th anniversary this Saturday, we asked some of the brightest minds in the industry to share their experiences with the game, as well as their thoughts on how GTA III has influenced gaming...

Just because a game's a little long in the tooth doesn't mean it's stopped being fun. Come with us as we take a trip through the archives and gather up all the guides, cheats and FAQs from yesteryear for some of gaming’s all-time greats.

If there's one thing fanboys of all stripes can agree on, it's that Grand Theft Auto is amazing. GTA 3 changed gaming forever, and its sequels have consistently lived up to the ever increasing expectations. For your cheating/strategizing pleasure we've got cheats, FAQs, walkthroughs, and guides for San Andreas, GTA IV, Vice City, and all the rest conveniently gathered in one spot for you. Enjoy!

In the immortal Arnie-endorsed words of Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer: “Get to the choppa’!” Or, in this case, get to some games with kickass helicopter battles by letting your eyes travel inside. Be it taking out a Russian attack helicopter with a stealthy hero or destroying a whirlybird by damaging its rotor blades with bottles of hooch during a zombie apocalypse; the following fights with airborne a-holes are the definition of badass… eh, if someone’s recently rewritten the dictionary. 

If you’ve been much of a console gamer over the last 10 years, odds are you probably owned a PlayStation 2 at some point. Initially regarded as a too-expensive curiosity (and later as underpowered next to its Nintendo- and Microsoft-created competition), the PS2 quickly became the gold standard of console gaming, as well as the best-selling console of all time. Nearly all of the last generation’s best games appeared on PS2 first, if not exclusively, and it introduced millions of us to the exciting world of DVDs.

Next week, as many of you may already be aware, marks the 10-year anniversary of the PS2’s North American release on Oct. 26, 2000. So to celebrate a bit before the event, we’re recognizing the 10 greatest games of each year in a weeklong series of list articles, beginning today with the PS2’s release in 2000, and ending with the PS3’s rise to prominence in 2007...