With GTA 6 finally looming so near you can almost hear the cop sirens, lots of fans are wondering how much of the series they should replay in preparation for the new title. I’ve done the math, and oh boy, I don’t know if you wanna go down that road.
GTA and GTA 2
You can finish the first two games in the series in around 6 hours each, even if you aren’t a total pro. A completionist run of all missions would probably require you around 8 hours. Most fans aren’t thinking of replaying these two games because of how much the series has changed since then, but if you’re the hardest of hardcore fans, now you know.
GTA 3
An average skill player can beat GTA 3’s main campaign in around 6 or 7 hours. Someone who still has those streets tattooed on the back of their mind can do it in under 5, which is surprisingly short for such a grand game. A completionist run, however, could take newcomers over 13 hours.
GTA Vice City
The campaign will once again take players around 6 to 7 hours. Becoming the overlord of Vice City might take a newcomer over 15 hours.
GTA San Andreas
The final title in the PlayStation 2’s GTA trilogy is by far the biggest, with a main campaign that’ll take even experienced players around 12 hours to beat. A Completionist run might take over 20 hours, and a hypothetical but necessary run where you explore all the mysteries and myths within might take forever.
GTA 4
The somber, more cinematic, and deliberately slow-paced of all the GTAs will take an average player at least 12 hours to beat. A completionist run including all content from the game and the two DLCs should take them no less than 40 hours.
GTA 5
The somehow still-latest entry will take players at least 14 hours to beat, and a completionist run will take an average player at least 20 hours. And if you count GTA Online as an integral part of GTA 5, well, then we’d probably have to ditch the hours and start counting in days.
Is revisiting the GTA series worth it?
This revisiting “in preparation” is a recent and possibly not very organic phenomenon that started with movies. Whenever a new Star Wars movie was to come out, many would rewatch the entire series to catch up. That’s doable, even when you forget this series features enough retcons to render any memory rekindling pointless. They then started doing the same with Marvel movies, which is absurd, considering there are over 20 movies, many of them barely even related. I’ve always questioned this trend, as I saw some of my friends clearly struggling through it, but not giving up out of a strange sense of brand loyalty.
Now it’s about GTA, a game series, something that’ll naturally take them even longer to “catch up” on. There’s a lot more to this than just “following the damn train, CJ.” I’m sure many are still going to have a fun time revisiting these games, for a while, at least, but please don’t force yourself to finish them all off just because you set out to, as that risks getting GTA fatigue right before getting to the new game, which would prove pretty sad.
Remember to only play a game for as long as you enjoy it, and that playing GTA 6 as your first game in the series doesn’t make you a LARPer or whatever dumb new gatekeeping term they’ve just made up.
