Grand Theft Auto: every game and controversy explained
GTA is a series of crime-drama video games set in fictionalised cities (mostly) around the US. In each game, the player takes on the role of a criminal (or criminals) navigating the violent underworld of modern America, stealing cars and carrying out missions and heists for a range of shadowy kingpins. The later games in particular are home to vast, freely explorable cities or states and, outside of missions, players are free to do whatever they want, whether that’s exploring the countryside on a bike or taking on side jobs for car thieves, drug smugglers or corrupt politicians.
The original Grand Theft Auto was designed by a Dundee-based studio, DMA Design, which also produced the famed platforming series Lemmings. At the time, the game was an unloved project and publisher BMG Interactive almost canned it several times. Now it is one of the most successful franchises in existance, created by developer Rockstar’s studios across the world, and led from Edinburgh by Rockstar North.
Grand Theft Auto (1997)
In this first instalment, players choose a character from eight possible options, then run around three crudely drawn cities viewed from a top-down perspective – Liberty (based on New York), San Andreas (San Francisco) and Vice City (Miami) – stealing cars, running over pedestrians and completing jobs for a powerful hoodlum. Released on the PlayStation and PC, it quickly attracted media outrage for its amoral violence. BMG Interactive hired publicist Max Clifford, who decided to stoke the controversy, resulting in then Scottish secretary Lord Campbell of Croy condemning the game in the House of Lords. Two expansion packs, GTA London 1969 and London 1961, followed – they are so far the only GTA games that take place outside the US.
Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999)
Set in the futuristic Anywhere City, the sequel looks almost identical to its predecessor, with the same topdown visuals, anonymous lead character and open-world, mission-based gameplay. However, it adds the concept of competing crime syndicates, which the player can work for, gaining respect and unlocking better tasks. It also allows you to take on legal side jobs such as taxi driving and parcel delivery. It is largely forgettable, apart from the fact it came with an eight-minute liveaction movie intro, and was the only GTA game to appear on Sega’s Dreamcast console.
Grand Theft Auto III (2001)
Designed by new studio Rockstar North following the closure of DMA Design, this game marked the beginning of the modern GTA era. The concept of carrying out illegal jobs for criminal gangs remained, but now the lead character had a backstory: he was seeking revenge, having been doublecrossed after a heist. Vitally, it was also the first game in the series to use a fully 3D environment: an overhauled take on the NYC-themed Liberty City. This move away from the top-down view, together with the vibrancy of its game world, the interesting low-life characters and star voice acting performances from Debi Mazar and Kyle Maclachlan, made for a critical and commercial smash hit. Once again controversy followed when it was discovered that players could pick up sex workers for a health boost then kill them to get their money back – though, contrary to the outraged reporting of the time, the game never mandated such behaviour. GTA’s philosophy is that players should be able to do what they want, even if that thing is toe-curlingly amoral.
Later, two handheld titles would serve as prequels to the game: 2004 saw the release of Grand Theft Auto Advance on the Game Boy Advance, which owed much to the first two GTA titles in its visual style. The following year, Rockstar Leeds released Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories on the Sony PSP, which brought 3D visuals to the handheld spin-offs.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice (2002)
Now we get to what some consider the defining game in the series: the tale of gangster-on-the-make Tommy Viccenti, freshly released from prison and looking to rise up the criminal ranks of Vice City, a sleazy metropolis based on Miami. Yes, it’s basically Brian de Palma’s Scarface mixed with Miami Vice, boasting a similar blend of cool music, hot drugs and rampant violence. The 80s setting, with its accompanying soundtrack of contemporary pop, was a brilliant idea, allowing players to blow up speedboats and crash aeroplanes while listening to Flock of Seagulls. This was also when the controversy really hotted up. The Haitian Centers Council criticised the game’s depiction of immigrants, and Rockstar became the subject of two multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought by the families of murder victims in cases in which the game was alleged to have influenced the killers.
A prequel adventure, called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, arrived on the Sony PSP handheld in 2006, featuring a cameo voice acting performance by Phil Collins.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)
Set in Rockstar’s version of California, including its LA-like city Los Santos, this is very much the developer’s take on Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society and the many other similar movies from the late 1990s. Carl “CJ” Johnson is an ex-gang member who returns to the hood for his mother’s funeral and slips back into his old ways. The vast map encompasses three cities and varied landscapes, and a wealth of activities from gambling to cycling. It also has one of the best villains in the series: Officer Frank Tenpenny, voiced by Samuel L Jackson.
GTA: San Andreas will also be remembered for the “Hot Coffee” scandal, in which a sex scene originally edited out of the game was found by hackers, still lurking in the code, and made available online. Congress demanded action and Rockstar founders Sam and Dan Houser found themselves in the middle of their own nerve-wracking side quest: being interrogated by the Federal Trade Commission.
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
Rockstar’s dark fable about the immigrant experience follows eastern European former soldier Niko Bellic, who arrives in Liberty City to pursue the American dream – which in his case means organised crime. It was the first GTA to feature the cellphone as a HUD device, allowing Niko to order taxis, call friends and manage his growing riches. The game is famous for its more gritty tone – and for the neediness of Niko’s cousin Roman, who always, always wants to go bowling. The game didn’t cause as many specific controversies as earlier ones had, although Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) tried to get it reclassified as adults-only in the US due to its depiction of car chases with intoxicated drivers.
The game spawned two follow-up chapters in 2009, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, a sign of Rockstar’s growing interest in extending the lifespan of each major GTA release.
Grand Theft Auto V / GTA Online (2013)
Originally released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, GTA V would become a behemoth. Where GTA 4 was a takedown of the American dream, this game took aim at every corrupt and hypocritical aspect of modern America. The game returned us to San Andreas, Rockstar’s fictional California, and the city of Los Santos, this time in the company of three protagonists: reluctantly retired middle-aged gangster Michael, hustler Franklin, and hillbilly psycho Trevor. Cleverly, these three characters compartmentalised three aspects of Grand Theft Auto’s personality – satirical cinematic ambition, characterled crime drama, and violent mayhem – giving Rockstar an outlet for every kind of GTA mission from trying to assassinate toxic social-media moguls to car chases across the desert.
It had the biggest game world we had yet seen anywhere, rendered in detail from the peaks of the mountains down to Michael’s local tennis courts. And that world would become home to tens of millions of players throughout the next decade thanks to GTA Online, the multiplayer mode that Rockstar launched shortly after GTA V’s release. Though its early months were a mess – you could tell the developer had never run an online game before, and the servers struggled to cope with demand in the first weeks, randomly deleting players’ characters and progress – it has since grown into one of the most profitable online games ever made. It took them years to get there, but Rockstar eventually realised the dream of rampaging in San Andreas with friends, planning heists and accumulating supercars.
Grand Theft Auto 6 (2025)
Bringing Grand Theft Auto V to new consoles, and keeping GTA Online continually updated with new mayhem for players to get up to, evidently kept Rockstar busy, and there will likely be an unprecedented 12-year gap between games. Grand Theft Auto 6 was finally shown off for the first time in a brief trailer in December 2023, around the time of Rockstar Games’ 25th anniversary. It will be set back in Vice City and the surrounding, distinctly Floridian state of Leonida, and will feature two partner-in-crime protagonists – one of whom is the series’ first female progatonist, an ex-con called Lucia. Whether that will be enough to address long-running criticisms of Grand Theft Auto’s treatment of women remains to be seen.
The real America has changed so much since GTA V that it’s difficult to see what satirical grenades Rockstar will be able to deploy. In a world in which Donald Trump was president for four years, and that still wasn’t enough to put people off voting for him again, what more absurd fictional scenario could a game concoct?
seeks to implicate in his art. “Church, for me, is a synthetic figure, somebody who is in the process of trying to work within and expand the boundaries of historical narrative and social categories operational within the 19th century. I see him as being a really beautiful cypher.” Hartt aspires to make The Histories a seductive and sensual work that draws a viewer in, ultimately catalyzing conversations around a set of very important ideas.
Another tapestry striking a quite different note is Egyptian artist Ghada Amer’s Because, a beautiful piece done in a palette of maroons. The work uses a textile process that, according to Amer, has ancient roots and dates back to the time of the pharaohs, and which nowadays is associated with producing tents for special events like funerals, weddings and political rallies. Creation of these textiles is in decline because of cheaper modern alternatives, and Amer was asked to work with them in her art as a way of reinvigorating the dying industry. “In the beginning I wasn’t interested at all,” she said. “But then I said, ‘OK, I’ll try it,’ and once I did it was like, ‘oh wow,’ I was really inspired. I was surprised by what I could do with it.”
Amer’s square tapestry is filled with English-language words of varying shapes and sizes drawn from a 1975 Australian feminist declaration that Amer happened to come across. Although written decades ago, the critique in Amer’s text still feels contemporary. “Everything has been said and very little has been done,” Amer said. “Sometimes very ancient quotations
ports and believed Chuck’s story, just because that’s the way he said it happened.
“As the years went on and I got an opportunity to tell stories, I was always interested in re-examining this story and trying to look a little bit deeper as to why we believed this guy’s tale all along.”
Carol was taken back to the hospital, where she delivered a premature son named Christopher. She died on the operating table and the wounded baby died 17 days later.
Hehir says: “There was a tremendous amount of sympathy for the couple and specifically for Chuck, who was fighting for his life in the hospital while his wife had died and his baby was soon to die right after this happened. There was very little, if any, discussion about whether or not he might be complicit.
“We’re not the police. As the public, we read what the papers and TV tells us; there was no internet back then, there were no Reddit threads to offer any kind of conspiracy theories. There were three main news stations in town and two main newspapers in town and all of them were beating the drum that this poor guy had lost his wife and his prematurely born baby was fighting for his life. Meanwhile, there is this murderer running loose and the cops had to get him by any means necessary.”
Some officials began calling for the return of the death penalty in Massachusetts. Boston’s mayor, Raymond Flynn, declared a citywide manhunt for the killer. The police took Stuart’s word in what now looks like a textbook case of systemic racism.
Hehir says: “It’s a lot more insidious than someone just coming out and saying the N-word or police being caught on tape doing horrific things to Black victims. This is something that was part of the set of beliefs of the people who were in charge of investigating this crime. There was a box that they were thinking within and that box was white and male and Irish and Italian. They had a very tough time believing any other version of the events than the one that Chuck had said occurred.”
The police dragnet was merciless. The mayor ordered more than a hundred extra police officers to scour the city’s Black neighbourhoods. There were numerous aggressive raids, in which doors were bashed down without knocking, and humiliating “stop and frisk” searches of the residents of Mission Hill.
Resident Ron Bell says in the film: “It was open season on Black people.”
Alan Swanson, squatting in an apartment building in the Mission Hill housing projects, was arrested when police found a tracksuit soaking in water in the apartment. He was held in a city jail where he could not eat because guards spat in his food and could not sleep because they banged on his cell door through the night.
But the case against Swanson fell apart. A second suspect, William Bennett, who had a long police record, was arrested and held on an unrelated charge while police gathered evidence against him.
But then everything changed. On 3 January 1990, Stuart’s brother Matthew went to police and confessed that Stuart had shot both Carol and himself for insurance money. He had staged it to look like a carjacking and wanted Matthew’s help to dispose of the gun and Carol’s jewellery.
The following morning, Stuart, leaped off the Tobin Bridge, leaving behind a suicide note that claimed he had been “sapped of strength” by an unspecified “new accusation”.
Hehir comments: “The ironic part is that once the news broke, you had people from everyday citizens who were consuming the news all the way up to some of the bosses at a place like the Boston Globe asking: was this guilt or grief? They still couldn’t wrap their heads around the reality of what had actually happened and they were still questioning whether or not Chuck could possibly have done this.
“Now we compare every case that’s similar to this to the Stuart case and it’s almost a cautionary tale. We say, OK, let’s just make sure that we don’t get Chuck Stuart-ed here. At the time, there was no precedent for it so people had a very difficult time accepting that Willie Bennett really had nothing to do with it and that Chuck had conspired this devious plan all along.”
Local media, which had few Black reporters at the time, were stunned by the revelation. The retired Boston Herald reporter Michelle Caruso admits in the documentary: “I consider it the biggest failure of my entire 27-year journalistic career. We failed the city of Boston, particularly the residents of Mission Hill.”
The Black community expressed outrage over why the frequent deaths of Black people in Mission Hill never got similar attention. In archive footage, one says: “So many of our people were killed in Mission Hill. Nothing was said about it but all of a sudden when a white woman – and it’s a shame that any life is lost – but all of a sudden when a white woman loses her life, or somebody white, it seems as if white life is more valuable than Black life.”
Bennett was never charged with the crime but served 12 years for armed robbery of a video store – a charge he denied – and was released in 2002. Hehir goes on: “The story ended in the public’s eyes sometime in January of 1990. The story for the Bennett family still isn’t over to this day.”
The third and final episode of Murder in Boston considers how four generations of Bennett’s family still shoulder the legacy of that wrongful accusation. They have never received an apology from the city or police department.
Bennett’s daughter Sharita, at times tearful, says her defining memory of being six or seven years old is the police raid on their apartment. She recalls: “Growing up, having the last name Bennett, it was just a feeling of being afraid to tell people my full name. That was a big thing for me.”
Now 73, Bennett lives alone in poor health and does not tell people he is from Boston because he knows they will work out his identity. Hehir says: “People still associate his name with that of a murderer and there are still plenty of people in Boston that I talked to who feel that Willie must have known Chuck, that Willie must be involved somehow.
“They cannot wrap their heads around the fact that this crime occurred in a ‘Black’ neighbourhood but there was no Black assailant and there was no Black perpetrator and it was it was purely an evil act by an evil man, Chuck Stuart, with nobody else.”
Only one Boston police official directly involved in the Stuart case agreed to be interviewed for the series. But Hehir hopes that his film will stop the excuses still being made for law enforcement’s conduct in those days.
“In any of these documentaries, we’re trying to show as many perspectives as possible. With painful stories like this, you’re not going to move on, you’re not going to make any progress until all sides understand the other’s pain and the other’s perspective.
“What we tried to do was give the perspective of the Mission Hill community and the Bennett family as much as we could because to me they are – besides Carol and Christopher of course – they are the victims in this case. I wanted to tell the story of that community and of that family so I hope that people have a greater understanding of just what they went through back in 1989.”
There are signs of change. Michelle Wu, elected in 2021, is the first woman and first person of colour to serve as mayor of Boston. Hehir adds: “There’s been tremendous improvement. There is now diversity at the highest levels of government in city hall, within the police department and the city council.
“The minorities who have been subject to that unfair treatment for generations are now more represented in the decision-making process and in the justice process in the city. We have a long way to go; we’re not perfect and we never will be. But the Boston of today bears very little similarity to the Boston of 34 years ago during this case.”
Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning airs on HBO on Mondays with a UK date to be announced