It’s been a long time since Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA 5) was released. In fact, it’s the longest Rockstar Games has kept fans without a GTA main title.
For comparison, players waited four years between GTA: San Andreas and GTA 4, and five years between GTA 4 and GTA 5.
Because of its massive success and impact on the game industry and gaming culture, the next GTA installment is one of the most anticipated games of 2024/2025 with the trailer for GTA 6 coming in December 2023.
When was GTA 5 released?
GTA 5 was released on Sept. 17, 2013 on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game was remastered for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in 2014. A second remaster of GTA 5 was launched in 2022 for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.
It’s hard to imagine a game of the same magnitude as the GTA franchise not coming out for PC nowadays, but GTA 5 was only ported for PC in 2015.
It has received 11 awards since it was released, including the Golden Joystick Awards’ and Spike VGX’s Game of the Year. The remaster was even nominated for The Streamer Awards in 2022 for the Stream Game of the Year category, but it didn’t win.
What was happening when GTA 5 came out?
Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” was number one on Bibllboard’s Hot 100 chart, followed by “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, and “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons, but we couldn’t run away from Frozen‘s “Let it Go,” since the movie had just come out. Feel old yet?
It was also the Internet’s Harlem Shake era, “What Does the Fox Say” exploded, screaming goats were still a funny meme, Vine was launched at the start of the year, and PewdiePie had made his first appearance in a YouTube Rewind.
We saw Leonardo Dicaprio and Margot Robie do a lot of fake cocaine in The Wolf of Wall Street, the first The Purge movie was released, Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson starred in Her, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe had just entered Phase Two (the first Avengers movie had come out the year before).
Microsoft released Windows 8 in August, Nintendo launched the Nintendo 2DS in October, and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hit the shelves in November.
Barack Obama was elected for his second presidential term, a meteor exploded over a Russian city, Croatia became a member of the European Union, and Edward Snowden fled the U.S. for leaking information about the U.S. government’s mass surveillance program to the press. It was a busy year, all told.
Other games released in 2013
2013 was a great year for the game industry and fans. Here are some of the game titles of 2013, the same year GTA 5 came out:
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
- Battlefield 4
- Bioshock Infinite
- Dead Island: Riptide
- Don’t Starve
- Dota 2
- God of War: Ascension
- Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon
- Mass Effect 3: Citadel
- Metro: Last Light
- Papers, Please
- Payday 2
- Pikmin 3
- Rayman Legends
- Risk of Rain
- SimCity
- Spelunky
- Super Mario 3D World
- The Last of Us
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
- The Stanley Parable
