GTA 2 came out on October 22, 1999: the game, what happened to it and its cheats

GTA 2 (Grand Theft Auto 2) is the second numbered game in the series and the last numbered entry with a top-down view. Scottish studio DMA Design made it again, but the publisher was now Rockstar Games. The game came out on October 22, 1999, on PlayStation and Windows, on May 1, 2000, on Dreamcast in North America (May 20 in Europe), and in December 2000 on Game Boy Color in a version by Tarantula Studios.

Two years later the 3D GTA III arrived and changed the series completely, so GTA 2 remained a bridge between the first game and the 3D era. Critics praised the soundtrack and the gang system but criticized the graphics, the controls and how little the first game's formula had changed. The Game Boy Color version was poorly received.

Instead of the first game's three American cities there's one fictional city, Anywhere City (also called "Anywhere, USA" in English sources). It's split into three districts, Downtown, Residential and Industrial, and you move between them as you progress. The game doesn't say exactly when it's set: some materials say "three weeks into the future", others 2013, though the game itself mentions the "new millennium".

Levels work the same as in GTA 1: you need to score points (money) to unlock the next district. Points come from destroyed cars, reselling vehicles and, above all, gang jobs. What's new is respect. Do work for one gang and its respect for you grows, but its rivals stop hiring you and open fire as soon as they see you. You have to balance things so you don't run out of work.

For the game, Rockstar shot an eight-minute live-action short film in New York. It became the intro video and was also posted separately on Rockstar's site. The protagonist, criminal Claude Speed, was played by Scott Maslen. The script was written by Dan Houser and the director was Alex De Rakoff. In the story, Claude does work for several Anywhere City gangs until one of them sends a hitman after him.

As in the first game, the music was written specifically for the in-game radio stations. The main menu theme is "Short Change" by British group E-Z Rollers.

More than 1.2 million copies were shipped worldwide, and in total the game sold around 2 million, according to Wikipedia. The UK trade body ELSPA gave the PC version a Silver award (100,000+ sold in the UK) and the PlayStation version a Platinum award (300,000+). For comparison, the first GTA had sold 6 million by March 2001.

Officially, no. Here's the game's store history:

• The free giveaway. On December 23, 2004, Rockstar announced that the PC version of GTA 2 could be downloaded for free from its site through the Rockstar Classics program, after GTA 1 and Wild Metal. The link was emailed after you signed up for the newsletter. The program is now closed, and its page says free downloads are unavailable.
• Steam. In January 2008 GTA 2 appeared on Steam (in the Grand Theft Auto Complete Pack), and in May 2013 it was pulled from Steam and from Rockstar's site. As of October 31, 2026, the game's Steam page is unavailable.
• Consoles. There are no digital re-releases for PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo, only old PS1 and Dreamcast discs and Game Boy Color cartridges.

Third-party sites offering a "GTA 2 download" hand out copies with no guarantees. Rockstar doesn't control them, so it's safer to pick one of the series' games that are on sale today: San Andreas, GTA 5, the mobile Chinatown Wars with a top-down view like GTA 2, or Liberty City Stories.

As in the first game, codes are entered as the player name. On PC, first enter the name GOURANGA, which turns on cheat mode, then delete it and type the code you want. On PlayStation you enter the code straight away on the name screen. Below are the codes described the same way by gta.wiki and GameRevolution. In later-distributed versions of the game, some codes may not work.

According to gta.wiki, invincibility doesn't save you from drowning or from the explosion of a car you're sitting in. Sources describe DANISGOD, BUCKFAST and BIGSCORE differently, so we left them out. Cheats for other games: GTA 1, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA 5.