Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
2009 video game developed by Rockstar Leeds
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar Leeds in conjunction with Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. The game was released for the Nintendo DS in March 2009, PlayStation Portable in October 2009, iOS in January 2010, and Android and Fire OS devices in December 2014. It is the thirteenth game in the Grand Theft Auto series and a follow-up to Grand Theft Auto IV, and is the first entry to be released for handheld consoles since 2006's Vice City Stories. Set within modern-day Liberty City (a fictional satire of New York City), the single-player story follows young Triad member Huang Lee and his efforts to recover a sword gifted by his late father after it is stolen from him, while inadvertently becoming caught in a power struggle amongst Liberty City's Triads.
The game was fundamentally designed for players to have notable interactions with objects on the DS and smartphone systems via their touch-screen controls, while offering unique elements of gameplay not found in other entries within the Grand Theft Auto series. The most notable element, the ability to buy drugs from suppliers and sell them to dealers to make money, proved controversial following the game's release. Despite this, the game received critical acclaim.
Gameplay
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is an action-adventure game set in an open world environment. It has a different presentation from previous games in the series, by partially resembling the first Grand Theft Auto titles. Instead of a ground-level view behind the protagonist or a top-down perspective, Chinatown Wars uses a fully rotatable camera angled down at the action.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars” as 2009 video game developed by Rockstar Leeds. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q94871. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2010, 2014 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars” 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.