Between 19 there were nearly thirty games made with Criterion's RenderWare game engine technology, though GTA III is far and away the most iconic. Some of these differences can be explained in the tools used to create them. The differences between Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto IV show how much the possibilities of gaming changed in six years.
GTA III was the first three-dimensional Grand Theft Auto game, initially released in 2001 to the sixth-generation PlayStation 2 before its eventual port to the Xbox and PC, while Grand Theft Auto IV introduced GTA's HD Universe simultaneously on the seventh-generation PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2008, as well as introducing a new kind of GTA protagonist. Both were released early in the life cycle of their respective console generations, setting the bar for what sort of functional design was possible for new hardware, and what kind of storytelling could be expected from a mayhem simulator. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto IV are iconic games separated by a console generation and set in starkly different versions of the same fictional city.
