‘It’s so glossy and sexy!’: 10 movies (and one TV show) that inspired Grand Theft Auto

As GTA 6 looms, we look at the films that have influenced Rockstar’s creatives, from Heat to Bonnie and Clyde, via Boyz n the Hood and Speed

Grand Theft Auto is arguably the most cinematic video game series ever made. Over the past three decades, the games have studied and stolen the themes, conventions and visual dynamism of great gangster and action movies, applying them to open worlds filled with low-life characters and grand set-piece possibilities. Here then are the movies (and TV show) that have shaped the GTA experience, from the 1996 original to this year’s inescapable instalment.

Really? Jan de Bont’s ludicrous bus bomb action flick? Well yes, according to Paul Farley, a game designer who worked on the original GTA, Speed was a huge influence, no doubt due to its fast pace, quip-filled dialogue and wanton vehicular destruction. Farley and his co-designers also took inspiration from 1980s Saturday afternoon TV classics Knight Rider and The A-Team. Basically, anything with a lot of car chases and things exploding.

A Coney Island street gang must make it back to their own territory after a midnight summit in the Bronx, facing multiple attacks from rival crews en route. Directed by Walter Hill, the revered 1979 cult classic remains a stylish depiction of a city in crisis – and a major influence on Rockstar. “This was one of our favourites during the making of GTA 2,” Sam Houser told Official PlayStation Magazine during the making of GTA 3. “It was a great inspiration when creating the various street gangs, and it’s also good for reference on how to construct really seedy, run-down urban areas.” Rockstar loved it so much they made a criminally overlooked adaptation.

Brian De Palma’s explosive, neon-splattered examination of life and bloody death in the Miami drug underworld set the bar for sleaze, style and anarchy that every GTA instalment has aimed at. Seductive and unstoppable, Tony Montana is the ultimate action protagonist, while the film’s footsoldier-to-king narrative – a staple of the Hollywood gangster picture – is fundamental to Rockstar’s series. The film’s synth-laden soundtrack was also hugely influential on the sound of the games. Five of its songs were featured in GTA 3.

The ultra stylish 1980s TV crime series kickstarted the career of its producer Michael Mann, while capturing the glitz, glamour and simmering drug-fuelled violence of the city. It was a major tonal reference for GTA Vice City, and no doubt a lingering inspiration on GTA 6. “Michael Mann’s use of colour and light is wonderful,” Sam Houser told Edge in 2012. “Miami is such a beautiful place anyway, so the light is gorgeous, but his use of night lighting made it so glossy and sexy. He’s also an expert in the use of weapons, and we met all of the weapons experts who worked on Miami Vice. We got into the details in a hardcore way.”

The energy of Martin Scorsese’s movies absolutely fills the GTA series – not just all the violence and chaos, but also the emphasis on the immigrant experience in America and on the connected themes of male identity, brotherhood and betrayal. Goodfellas is so seminal to the series, Rockstar even employed Ray Liotta to voice Tommy Vercetti, the main character in GTA: Vice City. Like Scorsese, Rockstar is also obsessed with the importance of popular music as a structural element of its worlds, cramming the games with hundreds of licensed tracks selected to provide an appropriate aural backdrop to the carnage. Taxi Driver and Mean Streets were also clear influences on the Liberty City-based games.

For GTA: San Andreas, Rockstar transferred the action to 1990s Los Santos, a pastiche of Los Angeles with its mix of skyscrapers, glitzy mansions and sprawling poverty-stricken neighbourhoods. The model for hero Carl “CJ” Johnson was undoubtedly Tre Styles from John Singleton’s 1991 drama Boyz n the Hood, a young kid desperate to escape the local gang culture, but equally seduced by it. The game’s woozy orange patina, its hip-hop soundtrack and its cast list of rappers, gang leaders and corrupt cops drew heavily from this film, and also contemporaries such as Menace II Society and Colors, as well as cult 80s classic To Live and Die in LA.

For GTA 4, Rockstar wanted to explore a different kind of criminal narrative, with a darker, more sombre tone. Its protagonist, ex-soldier Niko Bellic, is an eastern European immigrant who comes to Liberty City to live the American dream, but instead finds an abyss of crime and violence that has already swallowed his cousin, Roman. Dan Houser has said the game has no major movie inspirations, but there are certainly echoes of Russian neo-noir film Brother, about a de-mobbed soldier who becomes entangled in his brother’s violent gangland empire.

De Palma again, with another staple narrative of gangster cinema: the return of the veteran. Al Pacino’s career criminal Carlito Brigante is freed from prison and wants to retire, but is inevitably pulled back into a quagmire of drugs and violence. Rockstar art director Aaron Garbut has cited this film’s nuanced underworld characters as an influence on Vice City, but it is there too in the dark, inescapable fate of GTA 4’s Niko Bellic.

Robert De Niro’s world-weary professional bank robber was surely the template for Michael De Santa, the lead character in GTA 5, a game structured around the sorts of epic heists that made Heat so gripping and visually mesmerising. That film’s crazed antagonist Waingro is also present in the game as co-lead Trevor, a similarly murderous, torturing psychopath. The way Michael Mann shot Los Angeles also feeds into the Los Santos of GTA 5, a slick, soulless megalopolis baking beneath a pitiless sun. People have also seen the hyper-stylised, hyper-violent LA of Drive in the game, though that film’s director Nicolas Winding Refn was himself clearly inspired by the GTA series – a self-reflexive closing of the circle of influence that perfectly encapsulates Rockstar’s culturally carnivorous series.

The 1967 movie that ushered in the new Hollywood of the 70s also provides the modern blueprint of the “romantic-couple-on-the-run” narrative. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are beautifully watchable in their lead roles and director Arthur Penn doesn’t shy away from the sort of graphic, stylised violence that GTA 6 will no doubt revel in. It will be fascinating to see how layered the central relationship in the game is and whether it will stray into the more gritty, sexy, adrenaline-fuelled style of Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway.