Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

You can fit San Andreas into Grand Theft Auto V several times over, yet the former still feels bigger. That’s the most surprising takeaway from my time revisiting Rockstar’s ’90s crime epic, which has sold a staggering 21 million copies in its lifetime. Released on PC in 2005, a year after the PlayStation 2 version, it’s a massive step up from the previous game, Vice City, in pretty much every respect.

In the early-to-mid 2000s you couldn’t move for GTA clones: , , , . But while these games were largely, or entirely, set in a single city, Rockstar used its unmatched financial might (and, some might say, hubris) to take things to the next level, presenting an entire state to cause mayhem in. California analogue San Andreas contains acres of country, a desert, and three cities: Los Santos, San Fierro,