Trivia / Grand Theft Auto

• Banned in China: The series was banned in Saudi Arabia, Thailand (except for one title via Steam, via Loophole Abuse) and United Arab Emirates.
• Content Leak: One of the largest and infamous in video game history occurred on September 18, 2022. After years of speculation about the next mainline title after V, a hacker leaked dozens upon dozens of videos and screenshots showcasing an early yet comprehensive and playable build of the next installment in the series, which confirmed the names of the game's two protagonists and the setting being in Vice City, showed off actual gameplay complete with voice acting for the characters, and much, much more. It quickly gained notoriety as one of the biggest leaks ever for a video game, and it reached the point where it was confirmed directly by Rockstar that these leaks were the real deal.
• Development Hell: In 2009, Sony Pictures registered several domain names pertaining to a possible Grand Theft Auto movie. However, no new information was released after that.
• Dueling Games: With the Driver series initially, thanks to some not-so-friendly jabs that III took towards that series. In the IV era, the Saints Row series became its main rival, with ads for Saints Row 2 mocking IV's perceived stonefaced seriousness. Then after Saints Row had its tone shift towards superhero in Saints Row IV, it dueled with the Watch_Dogs series.
• Fan-Work Ban: On February 2021, a group of Grand Theft Auto modders released a reverse-engineered port of Grand Theft Auto III (and Vice City) through Github that would allow the game to be playable natively on modern versions of Windows and other platforms while integrating community-made mods such as SilentPatch and SkyGfx, among other fixes and improvement, but would still require the game's files in order to run. Less than a week later, Take-Two issued a DMCA takedown of the port and its many forks, resulting in those that had a copy prior to the takedown to back them up elsewhere. The DMCA takedown filed against these reverse-engineered ports was sorted out during late June 2021, with the original Github repository for the project was reinstated for a time. At the start of September 2021, Take-Two struck back even harder against the developers of the reversed-engineered port by filing a lawsuit against them for claims of piracy and illegally distributing copyrighted code. This is likely prompted by the fact that Rockstar was working on their own remasters of the PlayStation 2 trilogy released in late 2021, but the state of these remasters were released in also created its own can of worms.
• Gratuitous German: The Securicars are run by the "Gruppe Sechs" which translate to "Group Six" but the "Six" is meant to be homophonous with "Sex".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: With the announcement of the PS2-era trilogy remasters, the original version of III, Vice City, and San Andreas were promptly delisted from digital distribution platforms for consoles, PC, and mobile. Those with the original PC versions on Steam can redownload the games if they were purchased prior to the game's delisting, however, console players will have to track down a secondhand copy elsewhere. Secondhand copies of their original PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC versions can be found for relatively affordable prices. After the controversy of the Definitive Edition's abysmal reception and backlash, the original PC versions of III, Vice City, and San Andreas were reinstated but only for the Rockstar Games Launcher while giving owners of the PC version of the Definitive Edition (up until June 30, 2022) the original games as an apology.
• No Dub for You: A rare Western example. None of the games have non-English voice tracks, and when they are released internationally, they are subtitled instead of dubbed. This is justified, likely due to timing reasons (not to mention, there's already a lot of details that can take more time to develop, even further) and as well as having a very hard time to translate all of the voiceovers into other languages.
• "Take That!" Tit-for-Tat: The series had two games in a row (3 and Vice City) where the player character has to kill someone named Tanner, as in the protagonist of the Driver series. In response, Reflections put a group of men in Driv3r named Timmy Vermicelli (a takeoff on Vice City's Tommy Vercetti) who wears a Hawaiian shirt and arm floaters (due to Tommy's inability to swim) and shoots at the player. Killing all Timmy's unlocks a bonus area. Rockstar fired back in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas by including a scene where a character points out actual flaws in Driv3r.
• Urban Legend of Zelda
  • San Andreas had a ton of these. Perhaps the most prolific were the rumors that Bigfoot (or a Sasquatch, or a Yeti) roamed the forests, and that there were "ghost cars" that drove around in the countryside. The former turned out to have been faked with judicious use of Photoshop, while the latter was a result of abandoned, wrecked cars spawning atop hills and then rolling down them (when cars spawn, they don't have their parking brake on). Other rumors included zombies (mostly the result of a building in San Fierro that housed a company called "Zombotech"), UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Jaws, and a masked slasher who ran around the woods with a chainsaw.
  • IV also had a few. There were rumors that Lola, a prostitute who appeared on some of the promo art, could be found in-game, that a creature called Ratman could be found lurking the subways, and that an abandoned factory is haunted.
• The Wiki Rule: Two of them, in fact — Grand Theft Wiki and GTA Wiki.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A full list of features, missions, characters, etc. that didn't make the final cut of their respective games can be found here.
  • Around the time of production on III and Vice City, Rockstar Games reportedly considered setting a GTA game in Tokyo, going so far as to scout the city for ideas. The idea fell apart for two reasons: the road network was seen as too convoluted to make for a fun open-world driving game, and the culture gap would've meant completely changing so much of the series' style that the game would've been virtually unrecognizable as a GTA game.
  • There was originally going to be a movie adaptation starring Eminem.

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