Where the Stories Games Sit in the GTA Timeline

Fans of the series like to argue about continuity, and the two “Stories” games make a good place to start, because their placement is unusually clean. Both are prequels, and both are set within the group of games that begin with Grand Theft Auto III. Laid out by the years each game is set in, the picture is easy to follow.

Vice City Stories is set in 1984. Vice City follows in 1986. San Andreas takes place in 1992. Liberty City Stories is set in 1998, and Grand Theft Auto III itself takes place in 2001. If you read the games by in-world chronology rather than release order, that is your sequence: Vice City in its earlier days, then the later Vice City, then the west coast state of San Andreas, then a younger Liberty City, and finally the game that started the era.

The order of release was almost the reverse of that neat line. Liberty City Stories came out in 2005, and Vice City Stories in 2006, both on the PlayStation Portable first. That means they were made, in part, as looks backward at settings the audience already knew, and they lean on that familiarity. Liberty City Stories gives you Toni Cipriani, a figure from Grand Theft Auto III, at an earlier stage in his career. Vice City Stories gives you Vic Vance, whose brother connects him to the earlier Vice City story.

It is worth saying what this does and does not tell us. The connections are real, but they are mostly connective tissue: familiar names, familiar places, and a sense that the cities are older than the games. Neither prequel is required reading for its neighbor. Each is comfortable as a standalone crime story, and the pleasure of the linkage is a bonus for players who have played the others.

There is also a bigger dividing line worth understanding. Grand Theft Auto IV, released in 2008, is generally treated as the start of a separate continuity, sometimes called the “HD universe” by fans and in coverage. That game presents an alternate version of Liberty City with its own cast and its own tone, and later games in the series follow from it. Terms like “3D universe” and “HD universe” are fan shorthand rather than official branding, so it is best to treat them as convenient labels. But the distinction reflects a real reboot of sorts, and it means the Stories games belong to the older group.

Why does this matter? Partly for the pleasure of the puzzle. A timeline lets you appreciate small callbacks. But it also shows how deliberately the handheld games were designed: they were not just ports or spin-offs, but attempts to expand an existing fictional world in both directions, before the era and after it.

My own take is that the prequels are most rewarding when you resist over-reading them. Do not go looking for a grand unifying plot; go looking for texture. The best moments are small: a character you recognize with a different job, a district in a different state of repair. In a series famous for satire and set pieces, the Stories games are quietly about time, and how a city changes while its people mostly do not.