Look, let's be honest, gamers cannot stop talking about GTA 6 lately. Just how many chaotic activities will you be able to pull off this time? Exactly how realistic will Vice City feel after all these years? What kind of narrative are you walking into? But let us face it, what really tickles the imagination is the series' signature unlawful shenanigans. Because we are diving headfirst into the chronicles of career criminals, the virtual world is practically dripping with illicit acts. Naturally, everyone wants to know what sort of felonious missions await. Of course, a game is just a game, and you certainly should not confuse it with reality.

Now, critics love to clutch their pearls over the violence in the GTA series, but compared to real life, Grand Theft Auto is practically mild stuff. The mind-boggling, trainwreck criminal schemes cooked up in these games are, more often than not, ripped straight from actual headlines. Once you realise that the digital carnage has roots in historical tragedies, the whole thing morphs into a rather bleak dark comedy. Take the protagonists of the upcoming GTA 6, who are blatantly modelled after the legendary real-life American outlaw couple Bonnie and Clyde. So, I have rounded up the top 5 most notorious GTA crimes that turned out to be completely true stories.

Back in 1947, the infamous 'Black Dahlia' case completely rocked Los Angeles, presenting the gruesome, bisected remains of an aspiring twenty-something actress in an unsolved mystery. Rockstar Games already had a crack at solving this in L.A. Noire, but they decided to reinterpret the whole grim affair in GTA 5 via the Vinewood entertainment mystery side quest known as the Leonora Johnson murder. The fictional plot features a film director named Peter Draper, who tortured and murdered a rookie actress allegedly to harvest pure artistic inspiration. The poor soul was so aggrieved that she literally haunts the hills as an easter egg.

To top it all off, Rockstar Games generously added a layer of sheer agony for completionists. To uncover the dark truth, you have to endure the ultimate paper-chase simulator, scouring every nook and cranny of the sprawling map for 50 scattered letter scraps. Look, tracking down the culprit with Franklin and blasting them with a shotgun after some uncatchable fugitive eluded real-life detectives for over seventy years provides a strangely satisfying catharsis. Still, hunting down all 50 letters will likely murder your mental state first. Anyway, you caught the bastard in the game, so good stuff!

Towards the late 1980s, right around the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brighton Beach in southern Brooklyn transformed into the undisputed stronghold of the Soviet-rooted Bratva mafia. These chaps ran multi-billion-dollar fuel tax evasion scams, loan sharking, arms trafficking, and contract hits. Their staggering penchant for violence, heavy drug dependencies, and deep-seated paranoia plunged the New York underworld into sheer terror, notoriously celebrated for torturing traitors or rivals before dismembering the corpses and dumping them into the Atlantic Ocean.

In GTA 4, Rockstar Games mapped this lovely social club directly onto Mikhail Faustin, the volatile Russian mob boss of Liberty City. Faustin casually pulls out a pistol and executes a subordinate on the spot just because the poor bloke's attitude rubbed the boss the wrong way. Naturally, protagonist Niko Bellic arrived in Liberty City chasing the American Dream only to find himself immediately knee-deep in Faustin's chaotic errands. Imagine rocking up to pay off cousin Roman's gambling debts, only to get sucked into a brutal power struggle among mobsters where you have to dodge bullets on contract hits. Eventually, putting a few dozen holes in Faustin on a rooftop at the behest of his partner-in-crime, Dimitri, brilliantly encapsulates the utterly ruthless, romanticism-free reality of modern criminal syndicates.

In 1979, a broad-daylight shootout at the Dadeland Mall in Miami, Florida, etched a tragic stain onto the city, earning it the grim moniker of the 'Murder Capital of the US.' A hit squad dispatched by the so-called 'Cocaine Godmother' Griselda Blanco rolled up in a heavily armored panel truck and riddled rival cartel members with submachine gun fire. Rockstar directly lifted this exact setup for the opening act of GTA: Vice City. Just as Tommy's crew is about to swap briefcases of cash for merchandise down at the docks, masked gunmen leap out from behind shipping containers, send the Vance brothers' older sibling straight to an early grave, and make off with every last penny.

After rotting away in prison for 15 years and finally stepping out to catch a lungful of fresh Vice City air, protagonist Tommy Vercetti gets tossed straight to the bottom of the underworld, completely flat broke before you can even finish the tutorial. It turns out that drug lord Ricardo Diaz orchestrated the entire ambush, kicking off a brutally vengeful campaign. The scenario paints an unvarnished picture of the bloody drug cartels lurking just beneath the glamorous 1980s neon lights and loud Hawaiian shirts. Honestly, will a slaughter quite like this unfold again in the 2020s iteration of Vice City in GTA 6?

Back in 1997, a bank robbery in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, went down in American law enforcement history as a harrowing 44-minute street battle. Sporting layers of overlapping body armor and carrying modified rifles equipped with drum magazines, two bank robbers sprayed a staggering 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The local police officers, armed with little more than standard 9mm sidearms, had to sprint to nearby gun shops and desperately borrow semi-automatic rifles just to fight back. Though the perpetrators ultimately perished, the firefight left 12 police officers and eight civilians injured, serving as the pivotal catalyst that eventually forced patrol units across America to adopt patrol rifles as standard issue.

Widely hailed as one of the absolute greatest set-pieces in GTA 5, the 'Paleto Score' mission pays extreme homage to the visual composition of that real-world event. Rockstar swapped out the robbers' makeshift gear for military-grade EOD suits and handed the crew miniguns capable of spitting thousands of rounds per minute right as they blast through the bank doors. The ensuing firepower showcase—shredding through a neat line of police cruisers and taking down choppers hovering overhead—exceeds even the scale of the real-life incident. Unlike their real-world counterparts, when the fictional protagonists find their escape route blocked, they simply blast through a tank and leap onto a moving freight train to freedom. Watching this mission dial the heist genre's thrill to absolute maximum levels, even the North Hollywood bank robbers up in heaven would probably nod in approval.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked by the Rodney King verdict, paired hand-in-hand with the Rampart scandal involving an LAPD anti-gang unit far more corrupt than the gangs themselves. These two massive historical flashpoints turned 1990s LA into a living hell and merged into the narrative core of GTA: San Andreas. Officer Frank Tenpenny, the absolute root of all evil in the narrative, takes clear inspiration from the real-life corrupt police officer Rafael Pérez at the center of the Rampart scandal. Tenpenny frames the protagonist CJ for murder, works CJ like a literal slave, and pulls the strings on street-level narcotics distribution to demonstrate just how deeply a corrupt cop can rot.

Later in the game's arc, after committing countless atrocities, Tenpenny walks free from court courtesy of a brazen 'insufficient evidence' ruling, instantly triggering riots across the entirety of Los Angeles. Citizens flood the streets to burn buildings and loot stores, mirroring the stark chaos of the 1992 LA riots. Given that the historic LA riots nearly spilled over into Koreatown, the imagery carries a stark familiarity for Korean audiences as well, and Rockstar seamlessly weaves it into the backbone of the game's plot. Could this exact structural brilliance be the reason why GTA: San Andreas remains hailed as the undisputed masterpiece of the series? By the way, watching Tenpenny meet a thoroughly miserable end while crashing a fire engine still feels deeply satisfying no matter how many times you replay it.