Before GTA Online there was GTA 4's multiplayer: 16 years of glorious chaos

While fans wait for news about GTA 6 and its online component, it's worth remembering where the series' multiplayer actually began. Long before GTA Online became a sprawling platform with heists, criminal empires and endless side jobs, Rockstar was experimenting with a far humbler online mode in Grand Theft Auto 4.

That mode had none of the elaborate multi-stage heists or the player-driven economy that has kept millions engaged for over a decade. It was simply a collection of silly, chaotic game types built for short sessions. One of them, for instance, was a race featuring 32 trucks — with roughly 25 of them actually taking part. The result was pure pandemonium from the very first seconds.

The official GTA 4 servers were shut down in 2020, but the multiplayer is still playable today through the third-party service GTA Connected. On consoles, the online mode also remains active.

Writing for PC Gamer back in 2009, journalist Kieron Gillen described GTA 4's multiplayer as a source of "glorious chaos" within the open-world sandbox. In his view, the mode wasn't designed to support serious business models — it just delivered the kind of silly fun that was later pushed aside by the commercial machinery of GTA Online.

Now that Take-Two appears reluctant to launch GTA 6's online mode right away, looking back at Rockstar's early experiments feels particularly relevant. It's quite possible that the most profitable online game in history grew out of these simple, chaotic ideas — a reminder that the foundations of a billion-dollar phenomenon were once just about having fun with friends in Liberty City.