Game · 2004 onward
The best-selling game on the best-selling console ever made — 17.33 million copies on the PlayStation 2 alone, comfortably ahead of everything else on the platform.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, developed by Rockstar North and released in North America on 26 October 2004, is the best-selling PlayStation 2 game of all time, with 17.33 million units sold on that platform. The gap to second place is substantial: Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec sold 14.89 million, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 14.2 million, Gran Turismo 4 11.75 million, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty 11.24 million. What those figures conceal is that two of the top three are Grand Theft Auto games. Rockstar's series was not merely successful on the PlayStation 2; it was a substantial part of why people bought a PlayStation 2 at all, and its exclusivity window on Sony's hardware was one of the most valuable commercial arrangements of the generation. San Andreas is also, technically, an extraordinary thing to have shipped in 2004. It runs an open world spanning three cities and the countryside between them, on hardware with 32MB of RAM, using the RenderWare middleware that made the PS2 tractable — and it added character progression, gang territory, and a degree of simulation that the series had not previously attempted.