On Monday, every game from Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games was strangely delisted from Steam, and when they returned, so did some of the company’s older titles. Rockstar is responsible for some of the bestselling and widely acclaimed games in the medium’s history, including its most recent title, Red Dead Redemption 2, which released in 2018 to massive sales and positive reviews.
Rockstar’s most anticipated upcoming game is Grand Theft Auto VI, the sequel to Grand Theft Auto V, one of the biggest gaming phenomena in recent memory. Despite releasing two console generations ago in 2013, GTA 5 (and, more importantly, GTA Online) continues to sell incredibly well, and the yet unconfirmed GTA 6 has spawned dozens of rumors over the past few years. While many a
This made it all the more confusing when every Rockstar game was suddenly and without warning removed from Steam, the most popular digital games marketplace for PC users. Kotaku reports that this was likely due to a listing error, which was caught and shared on Twitter by user RobotBrush. Thankfully, Rockstar’s games were restored on Steam very shortly afterwards, but it seems Valve made a second mistake when correcting its initial one.
Though Steam did restore the Rockstar games it previously hosted, the library it replaced it with included multiple older games that weren’t intended to be put back on sale. The first two Grand Theft Auto games and Midnight Club 2 were among those that were delisted quite some time ago, and they miraculously made their way back to the Steam store on Monday. While this mistake wasn’t long-lived, the news traveled quickly and many customers managed to buy these older games before and add them to their Steam libraries before Valve fully corrected the error.
The first two GTA games released all the way back in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and while they never sold the millions of units their successors have, they still spawned and set the irreverent, violent tone of the entire franchise. Meanwhile, Midnight Club is a less well-known Rockstar franchise, but the arcade racing series is no less valued by fans. Accordingly, Midnight Club 2 also no doubt enjoyed a similar sales spike to the one that GTA 1 and 2 did.
While this is a great opportunity to look back at Rockstar’s old gems, but some may argue that this accidental turn of events only raises the bar further for GTA 6. Nothing gets players more excited for a company’s future than a lustrous past, and Steam briefly steered the conversation away from GTA Online to a simpler, more diverse period in the studio’s career. Though it hasn’t even announced or hardly hinted at GTA 6 yet, Rockstar Games would do well to re-examine what it is that drove its fans to rush at the chance to play its older games for a change while developing its latest one.
Sources: Kotaku, RobotBrush/Twitter
