The GTA Series is a Game Preservation Nightmare

Did you know that, if you own a PlayStation 5, you can't play Grand Theft Auto 4?

Nor can you play the first GTA and its expansions, or GTA 2, or the spinoffs Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, or the GTA 4 expansions The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. And you can forget about Grand Theft Auto Advance and Chinatown Wars.

Including major expansions, there are 16 GTA games (soon to be 17), and 11 of them are completely inaccessible on the current PlayStation, the platform most closely associated with GTA.

This isn't a strange state of affairs in the world of video games, where works of art are effectively deprecated out of existence by the onward march of technology every seven to 10 years. Things have gotten a lot better since the PS4 generation, with backward compatibility now the norm. But for most of its history, the video game culture has been in constant need of rescuing from technological obsolescence.

But it is a strange state of affairs for one of the most popular and culturally significant game series of all time. For a series of Grand Theft Auto's immense stature, there's usually an effort made to keep older entries playable and available to buy — mostly because the fanbase is big enough that there's money to be made.

Take The Legend of Zelda, for example. Only six of the 21 mainline Zelda games are unavailable on the current Nintendo platform, Switch 2 (five of those because their multi-screen setups would be difficult to replicate). Or how about Final Fantasy? Of the 16 numbered Final Fantasy games, spanning 36 years, only two cannot be played on PS5, and one of those is a 24-year-old MMO. A great many of the spinoffs are available, too.

The situation with GTA is very different. The only games that Rockstar has taken care to keep available on all current-generation hardware are GTA 5, its cash-cow companion piece GTA Online, and the classic trilogy of the early 2000s PS2 era: GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. The situation is a little better on PC and Xbox than on PS5; GTA 4 and its expansions are still available on those platforms (thanks to the efforts of Microsoft's backward-compatibility engineers, in Xbox's case).

Meanwhile, the 2D games that started it all are completely unavailable now. To play them, you'll either need to find original discs to play on an old PlayStation console or source illegal PC copies and adapt them with community mods. The same goes for the handheld games GTA Advance and Vice City Stories. A couple of other handheld spinoffs, Liberty City Stories and Chinatown Wars, are randomly available to play on mobile phones.

Image: Rockstar Games

Most game developers at the very top of the industry — studios that can be considered Rockstar's peers, like Nintendo, Bethesda, or Blizzard — take pride in maintaining their back catalogs as a community service and a source of income. But Rockstar's attitude to its past triumphs seems ambivalent at best.

The fate of the classic "3D universe" trilogy is perhaps even more illustrative than that of the games Rockstar has simply abandoned. GTA 3 and its sequels were monster hits that had profound aftershocks for the medium that are still felt now, a quarter-century later. But Rockstar appeared to spend little time or care on their 2021 reissue in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition. The outsourced remastering work was technically unpolished and artistically inconsistent.

The contrast with how other studios have tended to games of similar vintage — for example, Bethesda's lavish 2025 remake of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion — is stark. And it was telling that Rockstar appeared to be caught by surprise by fans' harsh reaction to The Trilogy. Improvements have been made via patches since, but Rockstar briefly allowed us all to glimpse that it didn't really care for its classic games, and it didn't expect us to, either.

Image: Rockstar Games

At the root of this disconnect might be that Rockstar and its relationship to the game series that has defined it have changed a lot over the years. In the 2000s and into the 2010s, Rockstar had no shame about exploiting the series' popularity with a constant stream of new releases. Of those 6 GTA releases to date, 14 came in the series' first 12 years. In the 17 years since then, we've only had two GTA games, soon to be three. (And that's if you count GTA 5 and Online as meaningfully separate.)

This is such a dramatic and sudden change that it can only partly be explained by the increasing cost and complexity of game development. There are other factors: notably Rockstar's shift from a multi-studio, multi-project developer to a global monolith that works on one gigantic release at a time, its subsequent dedication of resources to Red Dead Redemption 2, and the discovery of a massive new revenue stream in the form of GTA Online.

But tied in with those changes has been a change in attitude to GTA itself. Rockstar once thought of this series as an ever-present gaming brand, like EA Sports or Call of Duty, where maintaining a steady cadence of new releases of varying scope on every kind of gaming platform was the key to sustaining its popularity. Now, it's more like an Elder Scrolls, where scarcity, a sense of event, scale, and undeniable quality are the priorities.

Image: Rockstar Games

In that context, I think Rockstar has become ashamed of what GTA used to be. Rockstar doesn't want to make it easy for you to play the likes of GTA 2 or Vice City Stories because they don't fit its vision for what GTA is now. But this is short-sighted thinking.

Fans love to reclaim forgotten and underrated games, to champion eccentricities and rescue disasters. And they like to interpret history and understand more about what they love. Nintendo may not be proud of a strange detour like Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, but it knows that making the game available to fans just helps them deepen and complete their relationship with the series — a huge long-term gain.

Keeping game history alive is a constant battle. I do think the medium's most successful practitioners, like Rockstar, have a duty to tend to their own gardens. But it's also absolutely in their own interest to do so, even if it seems like it might not be. Release the games, Rockstar. It's a win-win.