You do not need to play another Grand Theft Auto before GTA 6. There’s no giant story to catch up on, no essential backstory and no reason to work through 30 years of the series just so you know what’s happening in Vice City.
But… if waiting for GTA 6 has given you the urge to go back, this is a pretty good excuse.
So rather than giving you a mandatory play order, here’s the easier answer: Pick the GTA that gives you what you actually want.
Which GTA Should You Play Before GTA 6?
Want the closest thing to GTA 6? Play GTA 5.
Want something darker and more grounded? Play GTA 4.
Want classic GTA at its biggest and most ambitious? Play San Andreas.
Want to see Rockstar’s original Vice City before we go back? Play Vice City.
Want to see where modern GTA really began? Play GTA 3.
Already played some of them? Skip straight to whichever one sounds interesting. There’s no required order here.
GTA 5: Play This for the Closest Thing to GTA 6
If you want the most modern taste of GTA before 6, GTA 5 is the obvious place to start.
GTA 5 is still Rockstar’s most recent mainline GTA, making it the best reference point for how the series currently plays.
Set in Los Santos and the surrounding countryside of San Andreas, it gives you the familiar GTA loop in its most modern form. You’re stealing cars, crossing a huge open world, getting into escalating trouble with the police, and bouncing between story missions and whatever catches your attention along the way; all with the most modern presentation and gameplay in the series so far.
It’s also the first GTA built around multiple playable protagonists. Michael, Franklin and Trevor each have their own separate lives and problems, but their stories gradually intertwine as the game goes on. You can switch between them freely outside missions and, at certain points, swap between characters during missions too.
GTA 6 is doing its own thing with Jason and Lucia, so don’t treat 5 as a direct preview. What it does give you is the clearest modern baseline for seeing what Rockstar changes next. And if you’ve already spent hundreds of hours in Los Santos, don’t feel obliged to replay it. One of the older games below may even give you something more interesting to compare.
GTA 4: Play This for a Grittier, More Character-Driven GTA
Play GTA 4 if you want the grittier, more character-driven side of the series.
GTA 4 feels noticeably different as soon as you start moving around Liberty City. The map is smaller than GTA 5’s San Andreas, but the city is dense, the cars have far more weight to them, and crashes send people and vehicles lurching around with a physicality that still stands out today.
Niko Bellic arrives expecting the America his cousin Roman has spent years describing to him, only to find debt, crime, and a much uglier version of the American Dream waiting instead. GTA has always enjoyed taking shots at American culture, but GTA 4 pushes that cynicism much further into the story itself, following one protagonist through a version of Liberty City where almost everyone seems to be chasing something they were promised and never quite found.
It’s easy to see why plenty of fans still consider GTA 4 the series’ high point. Even if you come away preferring 5, it’s worth experiencing just to see how differently Rockstar can approach the same basic GTA formula.
PC players also have a much better way to experience it than the port’s old reputation might suggest. I recently went back to GTA 4 for the first time since around launch, and with modern community fixes installed I was genuinely surprised by how good it looked and how smoothly it ran. A popular community mod called FusionFix takes care of a long list of problems with the original PC release and now has a straightforward installer, so getting it running well doesn’t need to become a project of its own.
The Complete Edition includes The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony too, which makes this a good chance to finally play them if you missed the DLC at launch. Gay Tony is particularly fun after the main story, bringing a much louder and more colourful energy to the same Liberty City.
San Andreas: Play This for Classic GTA at Its Most Ambitious
San Andreas gives you the PS2-era GTA formula at its biggest and most feature-packed.
San Andreas took what GTA 3 and Vice City had established and expanded in almost every direction. CJ’s story stretches across an entire state rather than a single city, taking you from Los Santos to San Fierro and Las Venturas with huge stretches of countryside and desert in between.
Rockstar filled that vast recreation of the western US with far more than missions, too. CJ can gain muscle, put on weight, improve skills, change clothes and hairstyles, buy properties, and lose hours to side activities.
The sheer breadth of this game, both at release and still today, is what still makes it worth revisiting. GTA has grown enormously since 2004, but San Andreas remains one of the clearest examples of Rockstar packing an open world with systems simply because giving the player more things to do sounded fun.
It’s also easy to access today. The Definitive Edition is in much better shape than it was at launch and gives you a straightforward modern way to play, although longtime fans still have plenty of reasons to prefer the original.
Vice City: Play This to See Rockstar’s First Version of GTA 6’s City
If GTA 6’s setting is what brought you here, Vice City is the old GTA to make time for.
When Rockstar first took us to Vice City in 2002, it set the game in 1986 and sent Tommy Vercetti into a sun-soaked crime story full of pastel suits, sports cars, palm trees and some extremely good radio stations. The result was a version of Vice City built as much around the excess and style of its era as the streets themselves.
The city is obviously tiny compared with the Vice City and wider Leonida we’re about to explore in GTA 6, but seeing that older interpretation first is exactly what makes the comparison interesting.
Play this one is to see how Rockstar originally imagined Vice City before returning to the same place more than two decades later. And any familiar locations, references or callbacks you recognise along the way will just make that comparison more fun.
If you only try one PS2-era GTA before GTA 6, Vice City has the clearest reason to jump to the front of the queue.
GTA 3: Play This to See Where Modern GTA Started
GTA 3 is hugely important, but it’s also the easiest game on this list to skip.
Liberty City in GTA 3 is where Grand Theft Auto became the series most people now recognise. You can steal cars, take missions across the city, listen to the radio, attract increasingly aggressive police attention or ignore the story and cause trouble on your own. For a game from 2001, a surprising amount of the basic GTA formula is already in place.
What Vice City and San Andreas did next makes GTA 3 feel much simpler today. Claude is a silent protagonist, the storytelling is more basic, and the world has far fewer of the systems and distractions that soon became part of GTA’s identity.
GTA 3 is worth playing if you want to see the point where Rockstar found the basic 3D formula it would spend the next two decades expanding.
What About GTA 1, GTA 2, Vice City Stories and GTA Online?
There’s plenty more GTA history beyond these five, but none of it is essential before GTA 6.
The original Grand Theft Auto and GTA 2 use a top-down, 2D perspective rather than the fully 3D open worlds the series became known for with GTA 3. These games are fascinating as early versions of the same basic idea, but they play differently enough that I wouldn’t send a newcomer there just because GTA 6 is coming. A few minutes of gameplay on YouTube will probably tell you whether that piece of GTA history appeals to you.
After San Andreas, Rockstar also took the series onto PSP with Liberty City Stories in 2005 and Vice City Stories in 2006. Both brought the familiar 3D GTA formula to handhelds before later receiving PS2 versions. Vice City Stories is the more tempting extra for this particular list, taking place in 1984, two years before Tommy Vercetti arrives, and giving you another full story set in Vice City. Neither game has the same straightforward modern re-release as the main PS2 trilogy, though, which makes them harder to recommend as casual pre-GTA 6 stops.
Then, after GTA 4, Chinatown Wars arrived in 2009 with another very different take on Liberty City. It returned the series to a top-down viewpoint for Nintendo DS before coming to PSP and mobile, and it’s well worth knowing about if the stranger corners of GTA history interest you. Again, it’s an optional detour rather than anything we’d recommend before playing 6.
The other obvious omission is GTA Online.
GTA Online is worth jumping into if its huge multiplayer sandbox appeals to you, but you don’t need it before GTA 6.
More than a decade of updates has turned it into an enormous game of its own. If you’re curious about that side of GTA, there’s plenty there to explore. But for a shorter trip through the series before GTA 6, the single-player games above make much more sense.
No, You Don’t NEED to Play Any GTA Before GTA 6
GTA 6 can absolutely be your first GTA.
If waiting for it has made you curious about the older games, start with whichever one sounds interesting and keep going for as long as you’re enjoying yourself.
There’s nothing you need to finish before arriving in Vice City. Just use GTA 6 as an excuse to explore as much of the series as you actually feel like playing.