Do you know that, when you personal a PlayStation 5, you possibly can’t play Grand Theft Auto 4?
Nor are you able to play the primary GTA and its expansions, or GTA 2, or the spinoffs Liberty Metropolis Tales and Vice Metropolis Tales, or the GTA 4 expansions The Misplaced and Damned and The Ballad of Homosexual Tony. And you’ll neglect about Grand Theft Auto Advance and Chinatown Wars.
Together with main expansions, there are 16 GTA games (soon to be 17), and 11 of them are utterly inaccessible on the present PlayStation, the platform most carefully related to GTA.
This is not an odd state of affairs on the planet of video video games, the place artistic endeavors are successfully deprecated out of existence by the onward march of know-how each seven to 10 years. Issues have gotten loads higher for the reason that PS4 technology, with backward compatibility now the norm. However for many of its historical past, the online game tradition has been in fixed want of rescuing from technological obsolescence.
But it surely is an odd state of affairs for one of the in style and culturally important recreation sequence of all time. For a sequence of Grand Theft Auto’s immense stature, there’s often an effort made to maintain older entries playable and in the stores — principally as a result of the fanbase is large enough that there is cash to be made.
Take The Legend of Zelda, for instance. Solely six of the 21 mainline Zelda video games are unavailable on the present Nintendo platform, Change 2 (5 of these as a result of their multi-screen setups can be tough to duplicate). Or how about Last Fantasy? Of the 16 numbered Last Fantasy video games, spanning 36 years, solely two can’t be performed on PS5, and a kind of is a 24-year-old MMO. An excellent most of the spinoffs can be found, too.
The scenario with GTA could be very completely different. The one video games that Rockstar has taken care to maintain obtainable on all current-generation {hardware} are GTA 5, its cash-cow companion piece GTA On-line, and the basic trilogy of the early 2000s PS2 period: GTA 3, Vice Metropolis, and San Andreas. The scenario is just a little higher on PC and Xbox than on PS5; GTA 4 and its expansions are nonetheless obtainable on these platforms (because of the efforts of Microsoft’s backward-compatibility engineers, in Xbox’s case).
In the meantime, the 2D video games that began all of it are utterly unavailable now. To play them, you will both want to seek out unique discs to play on an outdated PlayStation console or supply unlawful PC copies and adapt them with group mods. The identical goes for the hand-held video games GTA Advance and Vice Metropolis Tales. A few different handheld spinoffs, Liberty Metropolis Tales and Chinatown Wars, are randomly obtainable to play on cell phones.
Most recreation builders on the very high of the trade — studios that may be thought of Rockstar’s friends, like Nintendo, Bethesda, or Blizzard — take delight in sustaining their again catalogs as a group service and a supply of revenue. However Rockstar’s perspective to its previous triumphs appears ambivalent at greatest.
The destiny of the basic “3D universe” trilogy is probably much more illustrative than that of the video games Rockstar has merely deserted. GTA 3 and its sequels had been monster hits that had profound aftershocks for the medium which can be nonetheless felt now, a quarter-century later. However Rockstar appeared to spend little time or care on their 2021 reissue in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Version. The outsourced remastering work was technically unpolished and artistically inconsistent.
The distinction with how different studios have tended to video games of comparable classic — for instance, Bethesda’s lavish 2025 remake of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion — is stark. And it was telling that Rockstar gave the impression to be caught abruptly by followers’ harsh response to The Trilogy. Enhancements have been made through patches since, however Rockstar briefly allowed us all to glimpse that it did not actually take care of its basic video games, and it did not count on us to, both.
On the root of this disconnect may be that Rockstar and its relationship to the sport sequence that has outlined it have modified loads through the years. Within the 2000s and into the 2010s, Rockstar had no disgrace about exploiting the sequence’ reputation with a continuing stream of recent releases. Of these 6 GTA releases to this point, 14 got here within the sequence’ first 12 years. Within the 17 years since then, we have solely had two GTA video games, quickly to be three. (And that is when you rely GTA 5 and On-line as meaningfully separate.)
That is such a dramatic and sudden change that it will possibly solely partly be defined by the rising price and complexity of recreation improvement. There are different elements: notably Rockstar’s shift from a multi-studio, multi-project developer to a worldwide monolith that works on one gigantic launch at a time, its subsequent dedication of sources to Purple Useless Redemption 2, and the invention of a large new income stream within the type of GTA On-line.
However tied in with these modifications has been a change in perspective to GTA itself. Rockstar as soon as considered this sequence as an ever-present gaming model, like EA Sports activities or Name of Obligation, the place sustaining a gradual cadence of recent releases of various scope on each sort of gaming platform was the important thing to sustaining its reputation. Now, it is extra like an Elder Scrolls, the place shortage, a way of occasion, scale, and simple high quality are the priorities.
In that context, I feel Rockstar has develop into ashamed of what GTA was once. Rockstar does not need to make it straightforward so that you can play the likes of GTA 2 or Vice Metropolis Tales as a result of they do not match its imaginative and prescient for what GTA is now. However that is short-sighted considering.
Followers like to reclaim forgotten and underrated video games, to champion eccentricities and rescue disasters. And so they wish to interpret historical past and perceive extra about what they love. Nintendo will not be pleased with an odd detour like Zelda 2: The Journey of Hyperlink, but it surely is aware of that making the sport obtainable to followers simply helps them deepen and full their relationship with the sequence — an enormous long-term achieve.
Retaining recreation historical past alive is a continuing battle. I do suppose the medium’s most profitable practitioners, like Rockstar, have an obligation to are likely to their very own gardens. But it surely’s additionally completely in their very own curiosity to take action, even when it looks like it may not be. Launch the video games, Rockstar. It is a win-win.