"It was a hard decision, but when any modding activity has been declared illegal, we can't see any possibilities to continue this process, unless top management of Take-Two company makes an official statement about modding, which can be used in court."
On June 14th, 2017, the lead developer for the GTA V modding software OpenIV published a post on the GTAForums revealing that Take-Two Interactive sent him a cease-and-desist letter to stop all development and distribution of OpenIV. Within the first week, the petition received over 46,500 supporters. On November 29th, 2014, three women claiming to be survivors of violence launched a petition on urging target to refuse to withdraw copies of Grand Theft Auto V from their shelves, arguing that the game "encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women" (shown below). In October 2013, Guinness World Records announced that Grand Theft Auto V broke seven new world records, which includes the best-selling action-adventure videogame in 24 hours, best-selling videogame in 24 hours, fastest entertainment property to gross $1 billion, fastest videogame to gross $1 billion, highest grossing videogame in 24 hours, highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours and most viewed trailer for an action-adventure videogame. In 2008, GTA: San Andreas set new world records for the Largest Voice Cast in a Video Game, Largest In-Game Soundtrack and Most Successful Entertainment Launch of All Time, though later eclipsed by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009.
As of October 2013, the series has broken more than a dozen of Guinness World records relating to video games and entertainment industry. However, the series found its major breakthrough with the release of Grand Theft Auto III, which went onto become the best selling game of 2001 and paved the road for the commercial success and critical acclaims of sequel releases. The first two 2D universe installations of the series, Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2, were commercially successful and met by positive to mixed reviews, as well as stirring a controversy for its violent and graphic gameplay. set in an unspecified time in a retro-futuristic metropolis called "Anywhere, USA," the game shared most elements from GTA 1, including overhead view and abilities to steal cars or answer phone calls.
Grand Theft Auto 2 (GTA 2) is a sequel to Grand Theft Auto released in 1999 for Windows and PlayStation One and eventually ported to the Sega Dreamcast and Gameboy Color. The game takes place in three cities modeled after real locales, Liberty City (New York City), Vice City (Miami) and San Andreas (California / Nevada), which later became settings for Grand Theft Auto (GTA 1) is a top-down sandbox game that was released in 1997 for DOS and eventually ported to PlayStation, Nintendo GameBoy Color, Windows and Steam. In the end, the game was released in 1997 to critical praise. However, the game never saw release to the Saturn or Nintendo 64, and was nearly scrapped after nearly 30 months in production. The first title in the series was developed by Scotland-based developers DMA Design (now Rockstar North), and published by BMG Interactive, which was originally supposed to be called "Race'n'Chase" and released for MS-DOS, Windows 95, PlayStation, Sega Saturn and the Nintendo 64.