GTA 6 is out on November 19, and it’s taking us back to Vice City. That’s the fourth trip to Rockstar’s version of Miami since 1997, which is the gaming equivalent of a family that books the same beach hotel every summer and refuses to try anywhere else.

So before you meet Lucia and Jason, it’s worth knowing how we got here. This guide walks through every GTA story in the order it happens inside the games, from 1960s London to modern Leonida. It’s built on IGN’s recent “GTA Recap: The Complete Timeline” video, which does something Rockstar never officially does. It puts every GTA game into one shared timeline.

Spoilers for the entire series ahead. If you still haven’t finished San Andreas, CJ would like a word.

The main GTA stories placed in one timeline, from 1984 to GTA 6 (file: gta-timeline-overview.png)

Rockstar’s Three Universes (and Why We’re Ignoring Them a Little)

Officially, Rockstar splits GTA into three separate continuities.

Universe	Games	What It Looked Like
2D universe	GTA, GTA London 1969 and 1961, GTA 2	Top-down view
3D universe	GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories, Vice City Stories	The first fully 3D games
HD universe	GTA 4 and its two episodes, Chinatown Wars, GTA 5, GTA Online, GTA 6	The modern era

The rule is simple. These universes never meet. Except they keep meeting. Characters, places and events leak across the borders all the time, and GTA 6’s marketing is packed with Vice City references like the Vercetti estate and Phil Cassidy.

IGN’s approach is a neat workaround, and we’re using it here. Treat everything from the 2D and 3D games as true, unless one of the HD games directly contradicts it. That lets the bits that fit stay in, and the bits that don’t quietly leave the room.

1961 to 1969: Grand Theft London

The story starts in the Swinging Sixties, with GTA London 1969 and GTA London 1961. They were expansions for the original top-down GTA, full of British gangsters, cockney slang and left-hand traffic.

They’re still the only GTA games set outside America. Rockstar never tried an English GTA again, which tells you something. But even here, the series’ basic recipe was already in place: steal cars, run missions for criminals, and watch your wanted level climb.

The Great Cities of America

The original GTA introduced the three cities Rockstar would keep coming back to as the technology got better:

• Liberty City, based on New York
• San Andreas, which grew into a whole state based on California and Nevada
• Vice City, based on Miami

Every big GTA story since has happened in one of these three. And the real timeline begins in the one GTA 6 is returning to.

1984: Vice City Stories

Victor Vance is a straight-laced army private with a simple goal. He needs money to buy medicine for his sick brother, Pete. His sergeant, Jerry Martinez, has other ideas and drags Vic into his drug-running side business. When it goes wrong, Vic gets kicked out of the army in disgrace.

Out of options, Vic and his brother Lance build a cocaine operation that pushes the old street gangs out of Vice City. It also puts them in contact with every major criminal in town, including Ricardo Diaz, a cocaine kingpin who loves showing off his money and runs his business from a beachfront mansion. Remember that mansion.

Diaz’s real advantage is leverage over Gonzalez, the right-hand man of his biggest rival, Colonel Cortez. Gonzalez has been skimming cocaine from Cortez for a side hustle. Diaz finds out through his dealings with Vic and uses it to blackmail Gonzalez for information.

Vic’s story follows a pattern almost every GTA lead repeats:

Stage	What Happens to Vic
A noble goal	Pay for his brother’s medicine
Betrayed by someone in charge	His sergeant uses him and gets him thrown out
Pushed into crime	Ends up in the drug trade
Takes over the town	Builds an empire, with plenty of side missions on the way

He also moonlights as Phil Collins’s bodyguard at one point, which is more than most of us will achieve.

All that drug money makes Vice City look like gold to outsiders. And one family in Liberty City is paying close attention: the Forellis.

1986: Vice City

Tommy Vercetti walks out of prison after a 15-year stretch and gets sent south by his boss, Sonny Forelli. The job is a big cocaine deal at the Vice City docks with Victor and Lance Vance, set up by Colonel Cortez.

Diaz knows that the Vances and the Forellis want his territory, so he sabotages the deal. His men open fire, Victor is killed on the spot, and the drugs and money disappear. Tommy and Lance run in different directions, both broke, both alone, and both in trouble.

Tommy promises Sonny he’ll get everything back. To make some quick money, he teams up with his panicky lawyer Ken Rosenberg and starts doing odd jobs for Cortez and, yes, Diaz himself. Nobody knows yet that Diaz was behind the ambush.

Meanwhile, Lance has been digging. He finds out Diaz ordered the hit, using information leaked by Gonzalez. Tommy deals with Gonzalez (chainsaw, naturally), then he and Lance storm Diaz’s mansion and kill him.

That mansion becomes the Vercetti estate, and the name is still around 40 years later in GTA 6.

Tommy and Lance end up running Vice City. But Lance is jealous and paranoid, and he betrays Tommy to Sonny Forelli. Sonny sees Tommy as disposable now that the southern operation is built, so he comes down to take over. It doesn’t go well for Sonny. Tommy wins, Lance and Sonny are dead, and the Vance crime family is finished.

This is the big moment for the wider timeline. It’s the start of the Forelli family’s downfall, and that downfall is the hidden thread connecting most of the 3D games.

1987: The Lead-Up to Two Big Stories

Across the country, Carl “CJ” Johnson is sick of the poverty, police corruption and endless gang wars in South Central Los Santos. After his younger brother Brian dies, which CJ blames himself for, he moves to Liberty City. There he works as a repo man for Joey Leone, son of mob boss Salvatore Leone.

On the East Coast, a young Michael Townley pulls off his first big robbery near Carcer City, the setting of Rockstar’s PS2 horror game Manhunt. He starts working with Trevor Philips, a pilot he’d teamed up with before. Michael also falls for a stripper named Crystal, who later becomes a very familiar face in GTA 5.

1992: San Andreas

CJ comes back to Los Santos after his mother is killed in a drive-by. He’s barely off the plane when crooked cops Frank Tenpenny and Eddie Pulaski grab him.

Tenpenny is the kind of corrupt cop who makes other corrupt cops look bad. He has already murdered Officer Pendelbury, a rare decent cop who knew too much, and he frames CJ for it. Now he owns CJ and uses him for his own schemes.

CJ’s full story could fill an hour, so here’s what matters for the timeline:

• Pushed out of Los Santos, CJ sets up in San Fierro and helps the Triads throw a rival syndicate out of the city.
• That puts him in the path of Salvatore Leone, who co-owns Caligula’s Palace casino in Las Venturas. One of his partners is Marco Forelli, owner of Marco’s Bistro in Liberty City.
• To win Salvatore’s trust for a casino robbery, CJ goes back to Liberty City and kills Marco Forelli. Salvatore gets the casino to himself. The Forellis take another hit.
• Then CJ robs Caligula’s Palace, and Salvatore heads home with nothing. Getting burned by CJ probably explains why he trusts nobody later in GTA 3.

There’s also a rare crossover between two GTA leads. During CJ’s countryside chapter, he gets involved with Catalina, an unstable street racer. Before long, she leaves him for a quiet guy named Claude, the silent hero of GTA 3. This is also the era of the famous mission where CJ burns a field of drugs, which Franklin refers to years later in GTA Online.

The story ends with the Los Santos riots. They break out after Tenpenny is cleared of Pendelbury’s murder. The riots are Rockstar’s version of the real early-90s Los Angeles riots, and both the 3D and HD timelines treat them as real history. Tenpenny dodges the courts but not CJ, who takes down his enemies and gets his family’s neighborhood back.

1998: Liberty City Stories

Mafia soldier Toni Cipriani comes home to Liberty City after a long exile and joins Salvatore Leone in a war against rival gangs, including the Forellis.

By the end, the Leones rule Liberty City’s Italian mob. But they’ve wrecked so much of the mob’s power in the process that they’re basically kings of a wasteland. Territory the Forellis used to control is now up for grabs, and one of the groups ready to take it is the Colombian cartel, now led by Catalina.

The 1990s: Niko’s War

In what was then Yugoslavia, a young soldier named Niko Bellic is ambushed with his unit of 15 men, most of them from his own village. Almost all of them die. Niko suspects a fellow survivor, Darko Brevic, led them into the trap, and he swears to get revenge one day.

After the war, Niko only has one marketable skill, and it’s not accounting. He turns to crime and spends time in prison.

Around 2000: Lucia Caminos Is Born

According to IGN’s timeline, Lucia Caminos, one of GTA 6’s two leads, is born in a rough part of Liberty City. Her father teaches her to fight from a very young age, while her mother dreams of a better life for her.

2001: GTA 3

While Lucia is still a baby, Claude starts a one-man rampage in Liberty City. Catalina betrayed him during a bank heist and left him for the police, which explains the mood.

Claude gets lucky when the Colombians attack his prison transport to break out someone far more important. He walks away in the chaos. It’s basically the opening of Skyrim, except the important prisoner is a cartel contact instead of a dragon problem.

From there, Claude becomes the most useful hired gun in Liberty City, working for the Triads, media mogul Donald Love and Salvatore Leone. But Salvatore has learned his lesson from CJ. He doesn’t trust ambitious newcomers, so after using Claude for a while, he tries to have him killed. Claude kills him first.

With Salvatore gone, the Leones and the Forellis basically disappear from the story. The Italian mob in Liberty City isn’t finished forever, but those two families are.

Claude then catches up with Catalina. He also never says a single word in the entire game, which remains one of the series’ best running jokes.

2004: Ludendorff

It’s winter in Ludendorff, North Yankton, and a crew is robbing a Bobcat Security depot. Something about the job feels off. The payout is small for the risk, so the crew’s usual planner, Lester Crest, refuses to take part.

Michael Townley, Trevor Philips and Brad Snider go ahead anyway. The FIB is waiting for them outside the vault. Brad is shot, Michael ends up in hospital, and Trevor escapes into the snow.

Michael cuts a secret deal with the government. He fakes his death and moves his family to a rich part of Los Santos under a new name.

2007: Niko’s Sinking Ship

Back in Europe, Niko now works for human trafficker Ray Bulgarin, running smuggling trips across the Adriatic Sea into Italy. One trip ends in disaster. The ship sinks with all its cargo, and Niko is the only one who survives.

Bulgarin is convinced Niko sank it on purpose. So Niko runs, eventually getting on the cargo ship Platypus, headed for Liberty City.

2008: GTA 4

Niko arrives in Liberty City expecting the life his cousin Roman bragged about in his letters. Mansions, sports cars, the American Dream. What he gets is a tiny apartment and Roman’s gambling debts.

To clear those debts, Niko takes on the Russian mob, which makes the Russian mob extremely unhappy. Boss Mikhail Faustin and his right-hand man Dimitri Rascalov capture Niko and Roman. Dimitri then tricks Niko into killing Faustin, and immediately sells him out to Ray Bulgarin. Dimitri really enjoys a good betrayal.

A huge chunk of GTA 4 revolves around $2 million in diamonds that Bulgarin claims are his. They come into the city with the Platypus’s cook, get sold to Tony Prince, get stolen by The Lost MC, and change hands again and again. That’s how GTA 4 ties into its two episodes, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. The three leads, Niko, Luis Lopez and Johnny Klebitz, keep crossing paths in the same city.

Where do the diamonds end up? After slipping through every criminal’s fingers, they land in a trash bag and are found by a homeless war veteran. He decides to move to Vice City and open a combined gun shop and liquor store. IGN thinks we might see him again in GTA 6. Fingers crossed.

Niko eventually gets his revenge, with a final showdown near the Statue of Happiness. Then he vanishes from the record. Given how let down he was by the American Dream, it’s easy to imagine he left the country.

2009: Chinatown Wars

The next year, Triad heir Huang Lee flies into Liberty City to deliver a ceremonial sword to his uncle Wu “Kenny” Lee, after his father’s murder. Before he even leaves the airport, Huang is kidnapped, shot and dumped in a sinking car.

He survives, takes over a chunk of the city’s street drug trade and goes looking for whoever ordered the hit. The answer is his uncle Kenny, who also killed Huang’s father. It’s not the most surprising twist in GTA history. Huang kills him and takes over the Liberty City Triads.

2013: GTA 5

Michael is now living as Michael De Santa, and he hates his life. His wife Amanda, who used to be Crystal, hates him right back and runs up huge debts. His daughter Tracey is running wild, and his son Jimmy buys a car he can’t afford.

That car brings Franklin Clinton into Michael’s life. Franklin works as a repo man for Simeon Yetarian, a shady car dealer. He’s sent to take Jimmy’s car back, and he does. Michael catches him, but instead of being angry, he respects the kid. Then he “returns” the car to Simeon by driving it through the showroom window. A beautiful friendship begins.

Things spiral when Michael destroys a mansion while chasing Amanda’s tennis coach. The mansion belongs to the girlfriend of cartel boss Martin Madrazo, who wants about $2.5 million for repairs. Michael needs money fast, so he gets Lester back for one last job, a jewelry store heist in Rockford Hills with Franklin on the crew. It works.

But Michael repeats a line from the Ludendorff job during the robbery, and it ends up on the news. Trevor, living in a filthy trailer upstate and fooling around with Johnny Klebitz’s girlfriend, hears it and realizes his best friend is alive. The years haven’t been kind to Trevor, and the news sends him into an aggressive expansion of Trevor Philips Industries. That includes a terrible meth deal with the Triads that turns into an all-out war.

Trevor and Michael reunite. Instead of killing each other, they end up working together to rescue Michael’s daughter from TV talent show Fame or Shame. The host is Lazlow, a radio DJ who has been part of GTA’s world since the Vice City era.

From there, the crew gets squeezed from every side:

Problem	Who Causes It
Forced into illegal “off the books” missions	Corrupt FIB agents Steve Haines and Dave Norton
Hunted by a private military company	Merryweather
A grudge over a movie and a death	Billionaire Devin Weston
An ongoing war	The Triads, still chasing Trevor

Devin’s grudge starts when Michael lands a producer job on a film called Meltdown, which Devin is secretly funding as an insurance scam. A chain of mistakes leads to the death of Devin’s assistant Molly Schultz, and Devin wants revenge.

Then Trevor finds out the truth. Brad wasn’t in prison. He was the body buried in Michael’s grave. The Ludendorff job had been an FIB sting, and Michael’s deal was already in place before it happened. Michael and Trevor nearly kill each other, but the Triads interrupt.

Somehow, the crew keeps going for one last score, robbing the Union Depository for hundreds of millions in gold. Before that, Devin sends Merryweather after Michael’s family at the Meltdown premiere. They survive, because the De Santas are tougher than they look.

At the end, Franklin has to choose:

Ending	What Happens
A	Franklin kills Trevor
B	Franklin kills Michael
C	Franklin refuses, and all three take down everyone who wants them dead

IGN’s timeline follows Ending C, which is the one most fans treat as canon. Michael becomes a successful film producer, Trevor apparently becomes a Vinewood lifestyle coach, and Franklin sets himself up for life.

GTA Online: Franklin Grows Up

GTA Online kept Los Santos busy for years after the campaign. One of its biggest updates, The Contract, brings back an older Franklin running a celebrity “solutions” agency. It also has Franklin working with Dr. Dre, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write in 2013.

2026: GTA 6

And now we’re back in Vice City. This HD version of the city comes with big stretches of the surrounding state, Leonida, Rockstar’s take on Florida.

Lucia Caminos, the Liberty City native, lives here now with her partner in crime and in life, Jason Duval. Expect a Bonnie and Clyde style story across the state, including a big heist in Port Gellhorn, Leonida’s much less glamorous second city.

GTA 6’s marketing is full of nods to Tommy Vercetti’s Vice City. The Vercetti estate is still around. Phil Cassidy shows up, which may make him the first character to appear in person in both the 3D and HD games. He looks exactly the same as he did in 1986 and has somehow grown back an arm, so he’s probably not the exact same guy. But the point stands. Rockstar treats its older games as a kind of loose mythology the new games can borrow from.

We won’t know the full story until the game is out. But if the history above tells you anything, someone is going to get betrayed, someone’s going to buy a mansion, and the Vercetti name isn’t there by accident.

The Biggest Crossovers at a Glance

Character or Thread	Where It Shows Up
The Forelli family’s downfall	Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories, GTA 3
Salvatore Leone	San Andreas, Liberty City Stories, GTA 3
Catalina and Claude	Together in San Andreas, then enemies in GTA 3
Ken Rosenberg	Vice City and San Andreas
Victor and Lance Vance	Vice City Stories, and Vic’s death opens Vice City
The Los Santos riots	San Andreas, treated as history in the HD games
Lazlow	Radio since the Vice City era, then Fame or Shame host in GTA 5
Johnny Klebitz	The Lost and Damned, then GTA 5
The GTA 4 diamonds	Possibly heading to Vice City
The Vercetti estate and Phil Cassidy	Vice City, then GTA 6

The GTA Story in Order

In-Game Year	Game
1961 and 1969	GTA London 1961 and GTA London 1969
1984	Vice City Stories
1986	Vice City
1992	San Andreas
1998	Liberty City Stories
2001	GTA 3
2004	GTA 5 prologue in North Yankton
2008	GTA 4, The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony
2009	Chinatown Wars
2013	GTA 5
2013 onward	GTA Online
2026	GTA 6

Watch the Full Recap

If you’d rather watch the whole thing, IGN’s video “GTA Recap: The Complete Timeline (Watch Before GTA 6!)” covers every era in about 38 minutes, with plenty of clips from the games.

FAQs

Are all GTA games connected?

Officially, no. Rockstar splits them into the 2D, 3D and HD universes. In practice, returning characters, places and events link them, and GTA 6 is leaning into that with its Vice City references.

What order should I play GTA games in for the story?

For the 3D games, play Vice City Stories, Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories and then GTA 3. For the HD games, play GTA 4 and its two episodes, then Chinatown Wars, then GTA 5. If you’re going back to the older games on PC, our guide on how to play old games on Windows 11 will help.

Do I need to play the old games before GTA 6?

No. GTA 6 has new leads and a new story. Knowing the history just makes the easter eggs land better.

Is Tommy Vercetti in GTA 6?

Rockstar hasn’t confirmed it. The Vercetti estate appears in the marketing, but that doesn’t mean Tommy will.

Which GTA 5 ending is canon?

Ending C, where Michael, Franklin and Trevor all survive, is the one most fans and IGN’s timeline treat as canon. GTA Online’s older Franklin fits with that too.

Is Phil Cassidy really in GTA 6?

He appears in GTA 6’s pre-release marketing. Since he looks unchanged from 1986, he’s most likely a new version of the character, not the same man.

Getting ready for launch? Start with our GTA 6 beginner tips, check the GTA 6 price, platforms and PC release details, and if your PS5 storage is nearly full, follow our PS5 SSD upgrade guide before pre-load day.