It kind of feels like the Grand Theft Auto games have been around forever! The first one came out in 1997 but I think most people’s first GTA game was GTA III in 2001. After that game came out, games basically changed. It wasn’t until Vice City came out that the games started being known for characters and storytelling. I would argue that GTA IV was the first game in the series that I really cared about characters, but that’s me.

So with all these characters and stories going on in these game, it’s no surprise that theories have come up over the years. Rockstar likes to put a ton of easter eggs in their games since they are all huge open worlds. They also make other games such as Manhunt, Red Dead Redemption, and Bully. So they have made sure and put some stuff about those games in the GTA games as a nice nod to the fans, or are they nods?

There are a ton of fan theories about games connecting to other games or if all the Rockstar games are in the same universe. This list is going to touch on those and several other theories. This is also going to focus on theories that have come true, been confirmed, or at least seen in-game. So no myths that have no proof. Seeing that GTA V will be 5 years old this year, there have been a ton of theories developed from that game alone! Let’s get to it!

20 Print Money

Grand Theft Auto V came out in September of 2013 and it was one of the biggest game releases of the past 10 years! It was awesome to see a new GTA game and explore literally everything! The only problem was that November of 2013, the PS4 was set to come out. So yeah, we had GTA V, but the new system was coming out in 2 months.

It sold 11.21 million copies and made over $800 million worldwide in the first 24 hours.

So there was a rumor that GTA V was going to be ported to the PS4 and Xbox One and at E3 2014 they announced it was happening. The PC version came out in 2015 and is considered the definitive version, with high-end graphics and mods. There was also an entirely new mode in the game but we’ll talk about that later.

19 Going Back To Cali

During the lead up to GTA V people were speculating where the game would take place and if it would be a modern setting or not. Vice City always seems to pop up anytime a new GTA game is mentioned but San Andreas came up as well. GTA: San Andreas came out in 2004 so it had been almost 10 years since we went there. Well turns out the San Andreas theorists were right because in the first trailer for the game, it showed it was based in Los Santos, which is based on Los Angeles.

Not only did the game take place in Los Santos but San Andreas as well. So you could go to the circle that CJ’s house was in, in San Andreas, which was awesome. There were rumors about maybe going back to Las Venturas which is basically Vegas but it wasn't there.

18 Is This Skyrim?

So during the lead up to Rockstar confirming that GTA V was coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC, there were rumors that it would have a new way to play. Some people thought maybe VR but VR was still a ways off from being able to do that. When they revealed that the game was going to be fully playable in first-person mode, it was a bigger deal than some realize.

It was smart to include something like that for people that had played through the entire game already.

It gave them a valid reason to go back through. There’s actually a trophy/achievement for playing the game in first-person mode for 15 hours. It made the game a bit too realistic for some though, because the game is violent and you're seeing that stuff up close in that mode. Gotta get that trophy though right… no… just me?

17 Welcome To Earth

I can’t remember a triple-a game that had such a huge mystery around it for so long like the Mount Chiliad mystery in GTA V. And it was a big deal right from the start of the game launching! People found the monument with the drawings on it and the internet blew up with what it was and what it meant. Was it an endgame thing like an RPG or was it just there to be there? Well, the Doomsday Heist DLC came out in December and you got to go inside Mount Chiliad for the missions and we finally saw what was inside…it was jetpacks!

There’s a symbol of a guy on a jetpack as one of the drawings where people discovered this mystery. Turns out that they were mainly symbols for things you could get in GTA Online DLC. Coincidence? Yeah maybe, but jetpacks!

16 Lonely Island

All of the GTA games are set on islands and most feel there is a reason for that. The series is known for having humor that deals with Americans being a bit full of themselves and being shut out to the outside world. So the rumor was that the games were all on islands as a metaphor for the characters being close-minded and ignorant to what’s going on outside their little bubble of a life.

Even the cities in the games are on islands since they are based on New York.

Now, this could just be a gameplay thing since there needs to be an end to the world but I’m not sure. It could be both because these games take forever to come out and are well thought out. And the evidence is there since they're all, ya know…on islands!

15 Does He Like Beef Jerky?

Bigfoot has been a staple myth in the GTA games for a while. It got really heavy in San Andreas since you have missions in Blaine County and it's set in a heavily wooded area. Bigfoot wasn’t in the main game but there are mods on the PC version that has him running around in the rumored areas. So naturally, people started wondering if Bigfoot was going to be in GTA V since it was set in Los Santos/San Andreas.

Well once people got into the game and started a string of hunting missions they saw that one of the missions had Bigfoot in it. Now it wasn’t quite what people were expecting after all these years but I have a feeling it was Rockstar doing it on purpose. Bigfoot is just a guy in a suit in GTA V and it’s actually a pretty funny scene.

14 We Are Venom

Around the time Vice City and San Andreas came out people were starting to wonder if all these GTA games had any kind of story/character connections. Since Liberty City kept getting brought up in all the games, people started thinking if it was the same one across GTA III and GTA IV. I mean, that makes sense right? It would be like if multiple Batman movies came out by the same people and it was a different Gotham City every time.

Liberty City has been the hub city for many GTA games.

So in GTA IV, when Claude from GTA III showed up in a mission, that pretty much gave everyone the answer they were wanting. The same happened in GTA V when someone brought up Niko in a mission. So now the question is, when will we see Tommy Vercetti from Vice City show up!? GTA VI?

13 Ack, Ack, Ack!

Aliens have always been an interesting part of the GTA series. There aren’t many games that you actually have any kind of contact with them but there have been clues in all the major games. Like there’s a UFO on a TV set in Vice City and you can see some interesting stuff at Area 69 in San Andreas. So rumors started building if there will ever be any meaning to any of this or if it is just a 'thing' in the games. Well, enter GTA V!

There’s an early mission in GTA V where Michael gets placed on substances and we finally see the aliens in person, even if it was just an illusion. There’s also a side mission that Franklin can do after the main story that involves getting spaceship parts. The big one is Mount Chiliad but we’ll get to that later on the list!

12 Heartache Tonight

Literally a few days after GTA IV came out there were a ton of fan theories about what was possible to do in the game and what was in it. Since it was the first GTA game on a PS3/Xbox 360, it had people’s minds all over the place but that also lead to a few theories leading to things that were in the game. A big one was that you could get inside the Statue of Liberty and there was a beating heart inside. Now, that sounds like a load of garbage, but it turned out they were right!

GTA IV was the first numbered game in the series in 9 years.

It is pretty easy to get inside the statue. All you need is a chopper and you need to fly near it and jump out near a staircase. Once you're on the stairs, just walk up them and go in. It’s an interesting site inside!

11 What’s Old Is New

A few years ago, Sony started a new line of digital games with the PS2 on PS4 games. They are games from the PS2 era but they have gone in and made the textures better and put the games in 16:9 widescreen. They also added trophies so it’s pretty cool to play an older game and get trophies playing through it. So naturally, this lead to fans wanting the GTA games on there and the rumors started if they would be. It’s no surprise that they eventually did.

There’s just something really cool about being able to play GTA III, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas on a PS4! The gameplay is still the same and they have not aged well in that sense but the whole games are there and run really well. And using a Dualshock 4 to play them feels really good!

10 “Me, Me, Me… Me Too”

Man, GTA Online kind of came out of nowhere and became a huge thing! I remember hearing all the stuff you could do in it when it finally launched after GTA V came out. It had some issues and wasn’t really reliable until the game came out on PS4 and Xbox One. The entire map is open just like in the base game and there were some rumors of the civilians being really aggressive. Well, recently some streamers and you tubers caught some being super aggressive!

GTA Online went live October 1, 2013, on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Some of these clips literally show cars deliberately driving into players on the same side of the road. It wouldn't be a big deal but I know a lot of missions involve delivering supplies and they can’t be damaged. It’s interesting if it’s on purpose and knowing Rockstar, it might be.

9 Is That Ghostface From Wu-Tang?

When GTA V came out a lot of weird fan theories started popping up, and since the game is huge it took a bit for people to find out if they were real or not. One of them was that there was a ghost in the game. Seeing that Aliens and Bigfoot appear in the game it’s not too much of a stretch to just throw a ghost in there, but you never come across one in the story so people were unsure. Well, some people recorded it and that was all the proof everyone needed!

She is floating at the peak of Mount Gordo at night. You don’t have to do anything or have anything with you for her to appear, just go there. She looks pretty creepy, actually, so maybe don’t go there at night with headphones on unless you like the spooks!

8 Nelson Laugh

Bully came out in 2006 and kind of came out of nowhere with how popular it got. It was in-between GTA games and was one of the few open-world games that Rockstar made that wasn’t an M-rated game. It had that GTA feel to it while also feeling like something new. Since it was a Rockstar game, though, fans wondered if the game took place in the same universe as the GTA games. Well guess what, it does.

A remastered version called Scholarship Edition came out in 2008.

The game takes place at a school called Bullworth Academy and in GTA IV there was a commercial for the school when you watched TV. Bully sold fine but it was always that one Rockstar game that not everyone played so it was cool to see that in there.

7 Cheating At The Game

So this entry is more of a personal one because I like me some trophies/achievements and I was young when GTA III came out so I played with cheats! I actually played Vice City and San Andreas with them as well! GTA IV was the first game I played legit without them. You could actually use cheats in GTA IV and it only locked out a few trophies. So when GTA V came out I was wondering how it would work there. I was hoping that you could still get them to help out with going for the 100% trophy but no, you get locked out of them if you use cheats. GTA V is actually the easiest GTA game in my opinion since it has a pretty good cover system and the snap aim helps a lot so it wasn't a big deal.

6 Mobscene

GTA V has a ton of graffiti on a ton of walls all over the streets of Los Santos. Most of them don’t mean anything other than the obvious but there are a few that may/may not have a meaning to them. In Vinewood Hills, 1807 is written on a wall in red graffiti with an arrow pointing to a house. So the theory is that the house it points to is supposed to represent the house that the Manson family lived in.

The Manson Family criminal events took place in the late 60s.

The numbers are supposed to represent facts about Charles Manson. The 18 means the number of people he lived with and the 07 represents the number of his victims. Now, Charles Manson isn't walking around in game or anything but the game takes place in a place based on California and that’s where the house was!

5 D-Generation X

Rockstar has said that the GTA games have three different time periods: The original games, the PS2 era games, and the crime-drama games of late. So since they said that people have looked at the three different characters in GTA V and thought…what if these characters represent that and it makes sense seeing how different they are.

Trevor is meant to represent the top-down view original GTA and GTA 2. They are chaotic and really don’t have much of a plot. Franklin represents GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. They are about a good person who is going through a coming of age kind of story and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Michael represents the GTA lifestyle games like GTA IV and GTA V. They are about veterans dealing with the aftermath of what their life of crime has done to them.

4 I’m Your Huckleberry

It’s safe to say the Red Dead Redemption is the biggest Rockstar game outside of the GTA games. The sequel is coming out later this year and, if it doesn't come to PC, it’ll be a system seller this Fall. So since the first game was so popular it made people question if there was any connection to it and the GTA universe. Like maybe John Marston being a relative of one of the characters or something. I don't know about that but there is a piece of evidence that shows it’s in the same universe!

Red Dead Redemption 2 is set to come out October 26th this year.

There’s a book in Franklin’s house called Red Dead written by J. Marston. Is it just an easter egg or does that mean that he wrote a book in between the events of the third act and the finale?

3 No Soup For You

So this one is kind of rough. Some of the best content in GTA IV came from the single player DLC that came out. The Lost and the Damned and The Ballot of Gay Tony were both amazing and it was awesome to play as different characters. So Rockstar said they were working on a big single-player DLC for GTA V and that’s when the rumors started forming about what it would be about. Well, it’s 2018 and we still don’t have it.

GTA Online got to the point that it was so overwhelmingly popular that they just did DLC for that. They recently came out and said that the single player DLC was not going to come and that was a bummer but I get it. I’m assuming that some of the online DLC has the single player content in it. Here’s to Red Dead Redemption 2 getting some single player DLC!

2 Love Gun

GTA: San Andreas was a huge game that had some controversy around it. And yes, this is the section when we talk about the hot drink controversy. There were some rumors about going on a date with one of the women that you could date and she would invite you in for some coffee and yeah… birds and the bees. Well, it turns out that the rumors were true and you could hack your way in there even on consoles.

The game was pulled off shelves for a while and given a Grown-Ups Only rating.

If you have seen footage of it then you know it’s not as bad as it sounds but it can still be pretty crazy for a video game, I guess. There are scenes in movies way more graphic and people didn’t flip about those but, ya know. They did fix the issue and got back the M-rating.

1 I Want It All!

Once GTA V came out on PC people were so happy because they had to wait 2 years to finally play the game! So it was rumored that the game would have some more content and have mod support like a lot of PC games have. Well, when the PC version came out, all of that was true! It had all the new content from the PS4/Xbox One versions like first-person and they included mods.

The PC version came out in April of 2015. Some of the mods for the game are crazy! Like, you can basically play the game like it’s Saints Row IV and you can just fly around the map! You can play the game as a ton of different characters like Marvel characters or Mario. I wish they would do what Bethesda is doing with mods and put them on the console version, but we can’t have everything.