Something about the best GTA games dig into your brain. Whether it's the gleeful moments of parody that send up American crime classics, the freedom to go on a rampage across an open world urban sandbox, or little cinematic touches that remind you Rockstar's characters go beyond surface level, it's almost impossible to forget. And here, we're snitching on the best GTA moments, from the series' greatest heists to the pettiest robberies.
It's impressive in part because every Grand Theft Auto is huge. Even if you go back to the very first game on PS1, you'll find a sweeping, expansive ambition that remains incredibly moreish, your path through a city very much your own. And yet, so much sticks with you. As we barrel ever-closer to the launch of GTA 6, we've cracked the window on every game in the series in order to rummage through all those shiny memories, and stashed the best of the best in our trunk for you to look at.
This Top 100 list will be updated each week with a new batch of entries, kicking off with our first twenty below. Let us know your favorites in the comments!
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100. Taking Chop for a walk
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Game: GTA 5
Released: 2013
Easily the strangest protagonist in GTA history – briefly controllable in single-player, and during a GTA Online Halloween event – Chop is a rottweiler notable for his loyalty in a game full of double-crossings. In fact, the only crossing he does is over the roads near the Clinton Residence should you throw his ball too far. His companionship is welcome when the plot starts blowing up, even if he's behaving badly because you didn't bother to train him via the iFruit app.
But go the other way and you can put plenty of time into building the bond between man and best friend, making sure that Franklin shows love and care to his stalwart companion. Ditch all the crime and take a trip down to Vespucci Beach where you can go for walkies and play fetch.
While some of GTA's detractors will call the series a hedonistic sandbox that brings out the worst in players, it's hard to believe that after we've spent a good hour hanging out with our canine pal. For as sinful as your GTA life can be, it can also be quite mindful. Why not put the weapons away, dutifully park your convertible, and hit the sands with Chop while you take in some digital sun?
99. Getting a call from your cousin Roman
Game: GTA 4
Released: 2008
"Niko! It's Roman. Let's go bowling." The phrase became notorious among Grand Theft Auto fans in the years following the fourth game's release – one of the truly enduring early game memes alongside the arrow to the knee and the cake being a lie. While writer Dan Houser later protested that those calls didn't happen nearly as often as players believed, they were new and significant – a calling card for a relationship system. An important step forward not just for this game, but for many others too. And you'd better enjoy bowling. Strike!
98. Watching an actual comedy set in Liberty City
Game: GTA 4
Released: 2008
Ricky Gervais appears at the Split Sides comedy club in Liberty City. Not someone we'd pay to see, but back on PS3 and Xbox 360 the idea of being able to actually drive to a club and take in a proper show was novel. It's an idea Rockstar has revisited a few times, most recently in Red Dead Redemption 2 where you can watch full theater performances that change every week night. What will we be able to watch in GTA 6?
97. Blasting your ice cream van's jingle
Game: GTA: Vice City
Released: 2002
In Rockstar Games' satirical take on Miami for GTA: Vice City, even the most innocent occupation is a paper-thin veneer concealing rampant corruption and criminality. So it proves when Tommy Vercetti buys the Cherry Popper Ice Cream Company (*sigh*), and discovers a burgeoning drug distribution operation. The juxtaposition of sing-song chimes with the sight of grown adults running from the sidewalks for their favourite white-coloured, tooth-wrecking fix remains one of the most grimly comic scenes in the entire series – which really is saying something.
96. Driving past Deliver Me Timbers
Game: GTA 4
Released: 2008
Just a straight-up great name for a company in the business of logging and logistics. You'll spot it on a passing van, and that's about it. A throwaway line, and funnier for it. If you ever needed proof that beyond the grim depiction of a world rife with crime is some very silly comedy, all you need to do is pay attention to the rich detail. No opportunity is missed for a chortle.
95. Discovering the coral reef
Game: GTA 5
Released: 2013
The act of hitting the ocean bed near Los Santos in your submersible might be driven purely by greed – as hazardous as it might be, nuclear waste fetches a high price, and that means more moolah to put towards your next field hangar or golf club. But once you're down there, you discover that some of Los Santos' beauty lies there, below sea level, brightly coloured and alien. It's the lone chunk of on-land coral reef, however, found halfway up a mountain, that has bewitched players – for nine years and counting.
94. Sniping the moon to change its size
Game: GTA 3
Released: 2001
Shoot for the moon, so the saying goes. In GTA 3 if you do, you won't land among the stars as the rest of the saying claims, but it will get bigger. It's a bizarre fact of life in Liberty City that presumably has dramatic knock-on tidal effects for the planet as a whole. But don't worry – snipe enough times and it'll return to its usual size. That this bizarre Easter egg was ever discovered is testament to the sheer amount of time bored teenagers spent in GTA 3, taking potshots at the scenery.
93. Taking the Pisswasser
Game: GTA 5
Released: 2013
Simple gags can be the greatest. 'Wasser' is German for water, and you can work out the rest. Cheap lager made for export, with the slogan 'You're in for a good time'. You're in. Yep. If that's not enough, you can even invest money in the company using Bawsaq (more on that later), and deck out sports cars with the logo like it's a racing sponsor.
92. Turning a GTA Online session into a Frank Ocean listening party thanks to Blonded Los Santos 97.8 FM
Game: GTA Online
Released: 2013
Frank Ocean and friends play spaced-out, soulful music that runs the gamut of contemporary genres, while riffing on the surrealism of GTA's casual ultraviolence between songs. Proof of Rockstar's cool, and evidence that smart curation is still a major part of this online sensation's backbone that makes it a world worth inhabiting and messing around in.
91. Watching Michael's movie at the cinema
Game: GTA 5
Released: 2013
The premiere of the film Michael 'produces', or rather enforces, over the course of GTA 5 goes awry on the red carpet, when another of its backers orders a hit on his family. That's Hollywood, baby, possibly even more vicious than a life of crime. But you can head back to the cinema at a later date and watch Meltdown in full. What you'll find are 11 and a half minutes of oddly watchable Wall Street pastiche, impossible car physics, and driving monkeys. And who said gaming isn't a storytelling medium?
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90. Attempting to steer in cinematic cam
Game: GTA 3-5
Released: 2001-2013
There are a couple of entertaining yet unusable camera options in GTA. There's the '90s-style top-down view that's a recipe for flipped vehicles, but best of all is the cinematic camera – a favourite feature of Rockstar North's co-founder and president Sam Houser, who was adamant that Grand Theft Auto should look and feel like the crime movies of his childhood. The view periodically switches between various cool and flattering angles, all pretty much guaranteeing a gnarly crash. The cinematic camera is the very definition of style over sense, which is classic GTA.
89. Knowing why Sex Club 7 is funny because you're a fan of '00s British pop
Game: GTA 3, GTA: Liberty City Stories
Released: 2005
You had to be living in the UK between the years of 1998 and 2003 to know why Liberty City's bunny girl-adorned club was naughty – it's a reference to post-Spice Girls pop group S Club 7. Grand Theft Auto is a pastiche of American pop culture, but plenty of tongue-in-cheek UK references get a look in too. Originally Paulie's Revue Bar, you see the Leones take it over as missions progress and Luigi Goterelli comes in as an owner. Guess he's a 'Bring It All Back' fan.
88. Becoming Ammu-Nation's top customer
Game: GTA 3
Released: 2001
Rockstar North's outsider perspective on the US has served it well, and you can't argue with this simple, damning jab at the country where there are 120 owned guns for every 100 citizens. Frequent visits to the shop over the years have become comfortable and familiar – which is worrying in its own way.
87. Hot Coffee
Game: GTA: San Andreas
Released: 2004
All it took was a fan combing files to find cut content to cause one of gaming's biggest-ever controversies. On the trail of unused animations, 'hot coffee' turned out to be a cartoonish sex minigame, in which CJ has to rhythmically spank his girlfriend to elicit maximum excitement. Chaos ensued as, though the mini-game was inaccessible to the casual player, the incomplete files had been buried on the disc rather than deleted outright. Many fingers were pointed, and Senator Hillary Clinton called for new legislation to ban the sale of violent and sexually explicit games to American children, with a $5,000 fine for retailers in breach of the law.
86. Getting really into talk radio
Game: GTA 3-5
Released: 2001
The nascent Rockstar North dabbled in surrealist comedy radio in GTA 2, but it was only when the series went 3D that it dedicated entire channels to the kind of weird, rambling dialogues you can hear on local phone-in shows in real life. Eventually, the madness seeps in, and you find yourself sitting quietly in a sedan as a mafioso vents about his overbearing mother. "I do a man's job and all," sighs Toni, "but she treats me like a little boy."
85. Any scene with Samuel L Jackson's Officer Tenpenny
Game: GTA: San Andreas
Released: 2004
For those too young for Pulp Fiction, Sam Jackson will always be villainous Officer Tenpenny: a gangster with a badge. He brings his screen presence into the digital role here, crafting a character you love to hate. This is one of the meatiest roles in the series for a celebrity.
84. Walking away from the Chainsaw Masquerade
Game: GTA: Liberty City Stories
Released: 2005
Manhunt was a recent memory when Liberty City Stories came out, and there are a couple of creepy echoes during the latter's runtime. First, a character covertly films you taking out Sindacco goons so that he can use the footage in a snuff film. And second, Rockstar Leeds stages a survival horror showdown in the bowels of a cargo ship. The tension builds in the hollow vessel, until you're ambushed by baddies carrying more power tools than your local hardware store. Brr.
83. Thinking Heavenly Radio is a fantastic joke, then getting weirdly into it
Game: GTA 2
Released: 1999
The home of Hare Krishna conversion, and the only place playing "the sounds of whale love to help Saturn's moon squeeze through Neptune's tight red eye." Strange comedy that really helped to set the tongue-in-cheek comedy tone even before the series fully embraced 3D, classic GTA's radio stations oozed personality even with the generation's limitations.
82. Driving your 'Mini Cooper' wild in Hyde Park
Game: GTA: London
Released: 1999
By setting this early spin-off in a very specific time and place, Rockstar basically promised a playable Italian Job – and it delivered. The Myni, as it's called, may only be 135 pixels from its bonnet to its boot, but offers the best acceleration in the game. That's no small matter when yet another head-on collision takes away all your momentum.
Looking to test drive it? There's ample room at the centrally located Hyde Park, and the pigeons there present little resistance. It might seem quaint now, but the simple rendition of London was a joy to putter around in frenzied style, thanks in part to the design of UK cities, and also the novelty of having a game set in my home country for once. It'd be nice to have the series visit the UK again one day. God knows there isn't a lot more to lampoon now.
81. CJ goes cycling
Game: GTA 5
Released: 2013
Most series veterans quickly realised they were playing in CJ's backyard during the Hood Safari campaign mission of GTA 5, but few noticed him riding by on his BMX with Sweet and Big Smoke. It might not make sense as a canonically sound crossover, but it's a pretty neat nod to how far the series has come since the PS2 days.
We'll be updating this list each week as we approach our number one pick as part of our Countdown to GTA 6 coverage!
