Before it was even announced, we all knew Grand Theft Auto 6 was going to be the biggest game of all time.And as Rockstar has released two increasingly impressive trailers (alongside a surprisingly fantastic website ripe with screenshots and additional character details), that expectation has solidified into near-certainty.
If GTA 6 does not surpass the record-breaking opening weekends of Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, if it doesn’t dethrone Minecraft as the top-selling game ever made, it will be because something has gone catastrophically wrong.
But how did GTA achieve this vaunted status in the first place? How did Rockstar transform the series from decently popular top-down open-world car games to the defining gaming franchise of the 21st century? Why haven’t the developers of other mega-popular games been able to sustain similar success, and what would it take for another franchise to climb the ranks and supplant GTA at the top?
How Did GTA Get So Popular?
If you had told a gamer in 1999 that the Grand Theft Auto series would go on to become one of the most important and best-selling in the history of video games, that gamer would have done a donut over your body, put your tire-tracked corpse in the trunk of their car, and driven off a pier, Stan-style.
Dramatic, sure, but those first two top-down GTA games didn’t scream ‘next big thing.’ Both were met with mixed reviews and, though the first sold well, GTA 2 moved considerably fewer units. It would have been easier to see GTA as a minor flash in the pan than the start of something massively significant. Especially given the fact that top-down driving was a bit dated in an era when 3D graphics and gameplay had increasingly become the norm.
GTA’s graphics didn’t impress reviewers, either. After creating Lemmings, I don’t think anyone expected DMA Design to go on and redefine the medium forever.
But with GTA 3’s release on the PS2 in 2001, Rockstar not only brought its series up to par with the games of that moment, it took gaming into the future. In hindsight, GTA 3 is widely seen as the game that invented the modern open-world genre. There had been open-ended games prior to 2001, but GTA 3 brought together the mechanics that would become staples of the genre for the 24 years that followed. A main quest that carried the narrative forward. Side quests that allowed the player to dig around the edges of the world. Open-ended exploration, with fun activities and hidden collectibles to reward that exploration. Cars that felt great to drive and guns that were fun to shoot.
GTA 3 is primitive in retrospect, and few players will cite it as their favorite of the PS2 trilogy. But Vice City, San Andreas, and everything that followed built on that foundation. Rockstar is still on top two-and-a-half decades later.
Why Can’t Any Other Developer Pull This Off?
No other developer has managed the same feat. Mario is commercially popular, but his sales ebb and flow with the system he’s on. Mario Kart 8 is huge now thanks to the Switch, but it wasn’t on Wii U. I think the more interesting comparison is another open-world developer that was once on top of the world, and lost it: Bethesda.
With The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Todd Howard and company launched a game that was massively popular with mainstream players. It has since been ported to every possible console, and remains popular two generations later with over 60 million copies sold and, as I write this, more than 22,000 players on Steam in the last 24 hours.
Skyrim was the culmination of everything Bethesda had been working toward for two decades. The Elder Scrolls: Arena launched all the way back in 1994, and since then, Bethesda had been working on increasingly sophisticated RPGs and working to expand the audience willing to take a crack at games once seen as the domain of PC players. Skyrim brought both pursuits to the mountaintop, offering a complicated, expansive open-world that was more approachable for newcomers than ever before. The result was a truly gigantic game that put Bethesda at the top of the RPG developer heap.
But in the years since, Bethesda has struggled to recapture that lightning in a bottle. Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield have seen the company increasingly floundering to give its legion of fans what they want. Rockstar has never had this problem. But why?
Well, the basic answer is that, while Rockstar and Bethesda could both be criticized for ‘making the same game every time’, Bethesda peaked in 2011 and Rockstar has only gotten better. With each Bethesda game, you basically know what to expect and that’s frustrating because the flaws persist while the highs aren’t getting any higher.
But GTA’s structural sameness has allowed Rockstar to get better every time. Broader, yet deeper worlds; more impactful stories driven by increasingly three-dimensional characters; better graphics. Every time Rockstar returns it raises the bar. You may have issues with the games industry’s need to constantly deliver more, more, more — I certainly do — but Rockstar is the rare developer that manages to deliver within those constraints.
Who Could Realistically Take GTA’s Spot At The Top?
CD Projekt Red attempted it with Cyberpunk 2077 and faltered. Larian seemed on the precipice after Baldur’s Gate 3, but stepped away from the series that made it a household name among gamers. Bungie was arguably as significant at the height of Halo, but walked away to create a new, different future for the industry with Destiny. BioWare and Rocksteady could have gotten there, but each have now suffered flops as significant as their victories.
Is it even possible anymore? Rockstar was able to hone its skills by making increasingly big games in quick succession, and by the time it had achieved heavyweight status, it had collected enough revenue through enough streams to take its sweet time and make every release an event.
No one else can do that — as evidenced by Naughty Dog’s constant rereleases between new games and the hefty helping of product placement in Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet’s debut trailer. The true Rockstar level heavyweights — Riot, Mojang, and Epic — aren’t making the kind games that benefit from sequels. Minecraft 2 would be greeted with as much suspicion as hype.
Is there a world where another dev could achieve similar levels of industry-shaking hype? No one — at least not for a long time. No developer has stayed at the top for this long and for another developer to be ‘the next Rockstar’, the current Rockstar would have to go somewhere.
