One of the first elements that was proposed was to let the game have different radios with different music genres, an idea that at first wasn't really accepted by all the staff and had some skeptics. Through interviews with the early GTA developers and staff members, we know that during the development of the first game they had the general idea of pushing the boundaries of what a game could offer at the time, and that each member could bring up any ideas they could imagine to include in the game. The project was originally named as Race'n'Chase. Both of these games require the original GTA disc to work.

Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 was made as an expansion pack for GTA, and Grand Theft Auto: London 1961 was in turn an expansion pack for London 1969.

It is also one of the 20 preloaded games on the PlayStation Classic console, released in December 2018. Grand Theft Auto, also referred to as Grand Theft Auto 1 in order to differentiate between the original game and the series' individual titles, is the first game in the Grand Theft Auto series, released on PlayStation, PC and later on Game Boy Color.