Did you know that, if you own a PlayStation 5, you can't play Grand Theft Auto 4?

Nor can you play the first GTA and its expansions, or GTA 2, or the spinoffs Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, or the GTA 4 expansions The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. And you can forget about Grand Theft Auto Advance and Chinatown Wars.

Including major expansions, there are 16 GTA games (soon to be 17), and 11 of them are completely inaccessible on the current PlayStation, the platform most closely associated with GTA.

This isn't a strange state of affairs in the world of video games, where works of art are effectively deprecated out of existence by the onward march of technology every seven to 10 years. Things have gotten a lot better since the PS4 generation, with backward compatibility now the norm. But for most of its history, the video game culture has been in constant need of rescuing from technological obsolescence.

But it is a strange state of affairs for one of the most popular and culturally significant game series of all time. For a series of Grand Theft Auto's immense stature, there's usually an effort made to keep older entries playable and available to buy — mostly because the fanbase is big enough that there's money to be made.

Take The Legend of Zelda, for example. Only six of the 21 mainline Zelda games are unavailable on the current Nintendo platform, Switch 2 (five of those because their multi-screen setups would be difficult to replicate). Or how about Final Fantasy? Of the 16 numbered Final Fantasy games, spanning 36 years,........

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