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Grand Theft Auto

action-adventure video game series

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ132730 ↗
Source-derived summary

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is an action-adventure video game series created by David Jones and Mike Dailly. Later titles were developed under the oversight of brothers Dan and Sam Houser, Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut. It is primarily developed by British development house Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design), and published by its American parent company, Rockstar Games. The name of the series is a term for motor vehicle theft in the United States.

Gameplay focuses on an open world where the player can complete missions to progress an overall story, as well as engage in various side activities. Most of the gameplay revolves around driving and shooting, with occasional role-playing and stealth elements. The series also has elements of the earlier beat 'em up games from the 16-bit era. The games in the Grand Theft Auto series are set in fictional locales modelled after real-life cities, at various points in time from the early 1960s to the 2010s. The original game's map encompassed three cities—Liberty City (based on New York City), San Andreas (based on San Francisco), and Vice City (based on Miami)—but later titles tend to focus on a single setting and expand upon the original three locales. Each game in the series centres on different protagonists who attempt to rise through the criminal underworld due to various motives, often accompanying themes of betrayal.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Grand Theft Auto” is action-adventure video game series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Grand, Theft and Auto, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 225-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Grand, Theft and Auto is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “action-adventure video game series” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q132730. VIAF identifies the subject as 185879376. The Library of Congress control number is n42031576. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Grand Theft Auto primary sources, Grand Theft Auto archive and Grand research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Grand Theft Auto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.