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Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

second of the two episodic expansion packs for Grand Theft Auto IV

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ94842
Source-derived summary

Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony is the second of two episodic expansion packs for the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV, developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It was first released for the Xbox 360 on 29 October 2009 as a downloadable add-on for owners of Grand Theft Auto IV, and simultaneously on disc alongside Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned in the standalone compilation Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, which does not require the base game. Both the downloadable version and the compilation were released for PlayStation 3 and Windows on 13 April 2010 in North America, and on 16 April in PAL regions. Microsoft added the compilation to the Xbox One backward‑compatibility program in February 2017.

Set concurrently with the events of Grand Theft Auto IV and The Lost and Damned, the game follows Luis Fernando Lopez, a Dominican‑American former drug dealer who now works as bodyguard and business partner to nightclub impresario Anthony "Gay Tony" Prince. The narrative centers on Luis’s efforts to help Tony survive drug abuse, mounting debt, conflicts with Mafia families, and repeated assassination attempts, while also concluding the trilogy's "diamond" subplot. The game received generally favorable reviews from critics, with particular praise for the depiction of its titular LGBT character.

Gameplay

Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony is an action-adventure game set in the open world environment of Liberty City. It features similar gameplay, and the same setting as Grand Theft Auto IV. The player can redo missions to improve their score. The player also has new activities, side jobs, vehicles, and weapons.

Editorial summary

“Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony” enters the record as second of the two episodic expansion packs for Grand Theft Auto IV. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Grand, Theft and Auto can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2008, 2009, 2010, 2017—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2009-10-29. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Grand, Theft and Auto.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Grand, Theft and Auto provides the most credible route into that argument.

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 Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q94842. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2017.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. 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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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony” 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.