What is Grand Theft Auto?

Grand Theft Auto is Rockstar Games' long-running open-world crime video game series where the player runs missions and causes chaos across fictional cities.

What does Grand Theft Auto mean?

The title is a US legal term for stealing a motor vehicle, which suits a series built around car theft, and it is almost always shortened online to GTA.

How do you use Grand Theft Auto?

Online, GTA is used as shorthand for cartoonish crime and chaos, with gameplay clips shared as reaction videos and recurring jokes like the hooker punchline used to summarize the series' tone.

Is Grand Theft Auto still popular?

Yes, GTA V still anchors the franchise more than a decade after its 2013 release, which broke six Guinness World Records at launch.

How much money did GTA V make on launch?

GTA V generated $815.7 million on its first day and crossed $1 billion in three days, the fastest any entertainment product had ever done so at the time.

What was GTA IV's connection to the Rickroll?

4chan founder m00t said the modern Rickroll began on the /v/ board around May 2007 when someone disguised Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' as the first GTA IV trailer.

Why did GTA V get pulled from Target Australia?

A 2014 Change.org petition by women who had experienced violence, including in the sex industry, argued the game rewarded sexual violence, and Target Australia agreed to withdraw it.

What is OpenIV and why did fans petition to save it?

OpenIV is a modding tool that lets players edit single-player GTA files, and a Change.org petition backed by the LSPDFR mod community asked Rockstar to reverse a 2017 cease-and-desist that threatened a decade of mods.

What was GTA originally going to be called?

The first game was originally titled 'Race'n'Chase' during development at DMA Design before being reworked into the top-down crime game released in 1997.

Grand Theft Auto

Q: Where did Grand Theft Auto come from?

The first game was made by Scottish studio DMA Design, later renamed Rockstar North, and published by BMG Interactive in 1997 after being nearly scrapped in development.

1997video game franchiseclassic

Published August 26, 2026

Grand Theft Auto is Rockstar Games' open-world crime series that began in 1997 and grew into one of gaming's most commercially dominant and controversy-magnet franchises. Its 2013 blockbuster GTA V smashed six Guinness World Records at launch and the franchise fueled everything from the modern Rickroll prank to a decade of modding drama and hooker-punchline jokes across meme culture.

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Overview

Grand Theft Auto, almost always shortened to GTA, is a sandbox crime series where the player runs around an open city stealing cars, shooting people, and taking on missions for gangs or crooked cops3. Rockstar Games has published it since the late 1990s and the franchise is treated online as shorthand for cartoonish crime, gleeful chaos, and 'oops, I ran over another pedestrian' humor6.

The meme footprint of GTA lives in a handful of pockets. Chaotic gameplay clips travel as reaction fuel, the recurring hooker-punchline joke keeps getting recycled on places like Urban Dictionary6, and every new entry sets off a fresh round of modding videos, glitches, and controversy takes. GTA IV famously became the vehicle for one of the internet's most reposted pranks, and GTA V's launch generated so much money that Guinness had to hand out six separate world records1.

The series' visual DNA, that top-down or over-the-shoulder wanted-star chase, has been referenced, parodied, and modded into oblivion since Grand Theft Auto III's 3D leap in 20013. That template is why GTA still gets shared as a comparison point any time a new open-world crime game shows up.

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Origin & Background

Platform

MS-DOS / PlayStation (original release), 4chan and YouTube (meme spread)

Creator

DMA Design

Date

1997

The first Grand Theft Auto was built by Scotland-based DMA Design, later renamed Rockstar North, and published by BMG Interactive in 19973. The project was originally titled 'Race'n'Chase' and was nearly scrapped after roughly 30 months of production, and planned Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 ports never shipped3. The final release was a top-down sandbox for MS-DOS, Windows 95, and PlayStation in which players ran errands for crime bosses across three cities modeled on New York, Miami, and California, which later became Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas in the 3D era3.

Grand Theft Auto 2 followed in 1999 on PC and PlayStation, keeping the overhead view but moving the setting into a retro-futuristic 'Anywhere, USA'3. The series then jumped into full 3D with Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 on PlayStation 2, which became the top-selling game of that year and set the blueprint for open-world action games for the next decade3.

How It Spread

Rockstar spent the 2000s expanding the formula. Vice City in 2002 leaned hard into 1980s Miami aesthetics and soundtrack, and San Andreas in 2004 added stats-based systems like fitness, swimming, and climbing3. Grand Theft Auto IV launched in 2008 with Serbian immigrant Niko Bellic as its protagonist, reportedly cost about $100 million to make, and involved more than 1,000 people over three and a half years of development3.

The meme side of GTA really lit up around that fourth main game. According to 4chan founder m00t, the modern Rickroll started on 4chan's /v/ videogame board circa May 2007, when someone disguised a link to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' as the first sneak-preview trailer for GTA IV3. Anticipation for the trailer was high enough that piles of /v/ users clicked and were bait-and-switched, and the gag spread outward from there3. When GTA IV finally shipped, its early leak reportedly hit torrent sites tens of thousands of times, which the gaming blog GameFront covered with a LOLcat 'y u do dis?' image macro3.

Grand Theft Auto V's launch on September 17, 2013 turned the franchise into a pop-culture heavyweight1. It sold 11.21 million units in 24 hours, generated $815.7 million in first-day revenue, and reached $1 billion in sales after just three days, beating records held by the Call of Duty series and blockbuster movies like The Avengers and Avatar1. Guinness confirmed six new world records for the release, including Fastest entertainment property to gross $1 billion and Highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours1.

How to Use This Meme

Online, GTA gets deployed as a punchline in a few standard ways. Clips of absurd in-game deaths, physics glitches, or five-star police chases are shared as reaction videos and TikToks, often captioned to describe an unrelated real-life situation. The hooker joke, where a player pays a sex worker in the game and then kills her to get the money back, is a running gag Urban Dictionary entries lean on to summarize the series' tone6. Fans also treat 'It's GTA in real life' as a stock caption for any dashcam clip involving reckless driving. Modding communities built on tools like OpenIV supply another entire vein of memes, from Thomas the Tank Engine replacing dragons to Shrek skins for Michael2.