Every generation of gaming has had its defining moment of freedom. For most of them, that moment belonged to Rockstar Games. Grand Theft Auto 6 is almost here, and the anticipation around it is unlike anything else in the industry right now. That's not hype manufactured by a marketing department. It's the weight of nearly three decades of Rockstar consistently delivering open worlds that made every competitor look like they were working from a smaller blueprint. Here's how that happened, era by era. The top-down years that started it all Back in 1997, when Rockstar North was still operating as DMA Design, the original Grand Theft Auto landed on PS1 as a top-down crime game spread across three locations: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas. All three names that would go on to define the franchise's geography for decades, present from day one. The game was controversial immediately. Members of the UK's House of Lords pushed to have it banned from sale. It never happened, and the controversy arguably helped. What most players miss when they look back at that original title is how much structural groundwork it laid: an open city you could navigate freely, missions that gave you objectives without funnelling you through a corridor, and the freedom to ignore all of it and just cause chaos. GTA 2 arrived in 1999 and added the mechanical building blocks that would carry through the entire series: a health bar, manual saving, side missions, vehicle modding, and collectibles scattered across the city. Unspectacular in isolation, but together they formed the template. The PS2 generation changed everything This is where the franchise stopped being a cult favourite and became a cultural force. GTA 3 in 2001 moved the series into full 3D, and the effect on the open world genre