The series has been called Grand Theft Auto since 1997. Nearly every entry lets you yank someone out of a moving vehicle within the first five minutes of play. And yet, across almost three decades of box art, exactly one cover has ever bothered to show that specific crime happening.
That game is GTA 2.
The one cover that got it right
The GTA 2 cover is almost refreshingly literal. It shows a bird's-eye view of someone rushing into a taxi while pedestrians scatter around the vehicle. It matches the top-down perspective of the actual game, and it depicts the exact crime the series is built around. Simple, direct, honest.
That approach never came back.
What every other cover does instead
From GTA III onward, the formula shifted to collages. Characters, vehicles, and location vibes. GTA: Vice City put Tommy Vercetti front and center with palm trees and a sunset. GTA: San Andreas featured a drive-by shooting, which is at least a crime committed from a car, but not a carjacking. GTA IV showed a cop pulling over a driver, which could theoretically involve a stolen vehicle, but could just as easily be a speeding ticket.
The pattern holds all the way through to the present day.
GTA 6 keeps the tradition alive, for better or worse
Grand Theft Auto 6 continues the streak without missing a beat. The recently revealed cover art packs in a speedboat, a motorcycle, a helicopter, a supercar, and a crocodile, alongside several characters. It communicates scale, excess, and the Florida-coded chaos of Vice City. What it does not show, even once, is anyone stealing a car.
Here's the thing: the cover works on its own terms. It tells you exactly what kind of experience to expect. Big, loud, sprawling, with a cast of characters and a world that rewards exploration. But there is something genuinely funny about a franchise this enormous never putting its defining mechanic on the front of the box, except that one time in 1999.
Why it probably does not matter, and why it kind of does
Box art has always been about selling a feeling, not a mechanic. Rockstar understood early on that the GTA series was bigger than its name suggested. By the time GTA III dropped in 2001, the games had become open-world crime sandboxes where stealing cars was almost incidental to everything else you could do. Putting a carjacking on the cover would have undersold the whole thing.
What most players miss is that this quirk actually tells you something about how the series evolved. The original game and its sequel were laser-focused on the crime loop. The cover of GTA 2 reflects that focus directly. Every entry since has been about something broader, and the box art reflects that shift too.
With GTA 6 shaping up to be the most expensive entertainment product ever made, the cover art was always going to lean into spectacle over specificity. Pre-orders open June 25 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and if you want details on locking in a copy, the GTA 6 pre-order guide has everything you need.
Given how long the gap between GTA V and GTA 6 turned out to be, the next entry is likely a decade away at minimum. That's a long wait for Rockstar to finally put a grand theft auto back on a GTA cover. But at this point, the streak is almost worth preserving. Check out the full GTA 6 guides collection for more coverage as the launch approaches.
