Rockstar Made a Lot More Than GTA
When you mention Rockstar Games, most people jump to GTA or RDR—as they should—but the company's catalog gets a lot stranger once you dig past the blockbusters. Over the years, this wacky company developed or published some of the most wonderfully weird things on the market, and we’re here to revisit some of the titles you’ll need to blow the dust off of.
1. Thrasher: Skate and Destroy
You don’t have Tony Hawk to thank for skateboarding adventures. Long before the genre was dominated by his name, Rockstar published Thrasher: Skate and Destroy for the original PlayStation in 1999. Instead of chasing enormous arcade combos, Z-Axis built the game around relatively grounded street skating and earning sponsors as you progressed. Rockstar still lists the game in its catalog, but it rarely comes up.
2. Wild Metal
You wouldn't expect one of Rockstar North's earliest games to involve futuristic tanks fighting autonomous machines on distant planets, but that's exactly what Wild Metal had in store. Released for PC and later Dreamcast, it centered on collecting power cores while battling robotic enemies. Rockstar's own archive credits Rockstar North as the developer, and that means this obscure 1999 release is an especially odd piece of history.
3. Monster Truck Madness 64
Yes, Rockstar once published an N64 monster-truck game with vehicles such as Bigfoot and Grave Digger. Monster Truck Madness 64 came in hot in 1999 with races, four-player modes, power-ups, and even WCW/nWo-themed trucks, which is a sentence you probably didn't expect to read in a Rockstar article!
4. Austin Powers: Oh, Behave!
Kids today don’t even know who Austin Powers is, let alone that Rockstar made several games about him! Okay, yes, Oh, Behave! arrived in 2000 as a collection of minigames built around the movie franchise, but that doesn’t make it any less hilarious. It's now the kind of game that can make even longtime Rockstar fans ask whether it actually existed.
5. Austin Powers: Welcome to My Underground Lair!
That’s right—we said a series of games, and we’re not done with this weird chapter yet! Welcome to My Underground Lair! accompanied Powers with a Dr. Evil-focused counterpart. Both games were published under the Rockstar label in 2000, during an era when the company was still willing to attach its name to some extremely unexpected licensed projects.
6. Oni
Most people associate Oni with Bungie, and that's reasonable, but Rockstar did, actually, publish the PlayStation 2 version in multiple regions. The 2001 action game mixed third-person shooting with surprisingly elaborate hand-to-hand combat, and it's one of those releases where the logo on the box is more shocking than anything inside the game.
7. The Italian Job
Oh, sorry—you thought that Austin Powers was the only franchise Rockstar latched onto? Think again! The company also published the release of this title, which was based on the original 1969 movie. Rockstar only handled the North American PlayStation version, which helps explain why its involvement has largely been forgotten.
8. State of Emergency
State of Emergency briefly looked like it might become another major property when it hit consoles in 2002…but it never really did. That’s not to say it came empty-handed; the game dropped players into huge riots where they completed missions while crowds of civilians, enemies, and authorities filled the streets around them. The series continued without Rockstar, though.
Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
9. Smuggler's Run
One of Rockstar San Diego's earliest games wasn't about cowboys or street racers. It had criminals tearing across rough terrain with illegal cargo (if you couldn’t guess from the title). Smuggler's Run launched for PS2 in 2000 and had you dodging border patrol agents, the CIA, and rival smugglers while trying to reach your drop point. You also know what we’re talking about—even if you don’t think so. Rockstar referenced the game years later through throwback content in GTA Online!
10. Smuggler's Run 2: Hostile Territory
The sequel pushed the contraband-delivery concept further with more cars, environments, and increasingly frantic pursuits. That’s not to say it’s remembered, though, which is a shame since GameSpot gave it an 8.3 at the time, so it was far from a disaster. Either way, its disappearance from modern Rockstar conversation is especially noticeable.
11. Smuggler's Run: Warzones
We promise that this is the last one we’ll mention! We can’t ignore this one, though; GameCube owners got their own version in 2002 with Smuggler's Run: Warzones. Rather than being a new sequel, it just expanded with some additional content. However, critics called it an enhanced version of the second game, which is maybe why this one’s the most forgotten entry in an already forgotten franchise.
12. Midnight Club: Street Racing
The Midnight Club name hasn't totally vanished from gaming memory, but the original game still gets buried beneath its flashier sequels. This beloved classic came out alongside the PlayStation 2's North American launch, and had you kick off as a New York cab driver before entering underground races.
13. Midnight Club II
Ask people to name Rockstar's racing games now, and there's a good chance this 2003 sequel won't even cross their minds. We don’t know why! Midnight Club II sent players racing through Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo, allowing both cars and motorcycles to tear through open city streets. Rockstar San Diego developed it for PS2, Xbox, and PC, and Rockstar still maintains an official page for the game—yet people hardly remember it.
14. Grand Theft Auto: London 1969
Hilariously enough, not everything from Rockstar's biggest franchises sticks out. Say hello to Grand Theft Auto: London 1969, a forgotten 1999 chapter for the original top-down GTA. It replaced the series' American cities with a stylized version of 1960s London filled with British criminals and period flavor. It was for PC and PlayStation, but we doubt players still have it saved somewhere.
15. Grand Theft Auto Advance
There’s a good reason this one got buried: it came out on the very same day as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in North America. Digital Eclipse created the Game Boy Advance title as a top-down adventure set in Liberty City one year before the events of GTA III. As you can imagine, it’s still one of the easiest mainline-adjacent GTA releases to overlook.
16. Red Dead Revolver
Before Arthur and John turned Red Dead into one of gaming's biggest names, there was a little someone by the name of Red Harlow. Red Dead Revolver arrived in 2004 as a much more arcade-like third-person Western centered on a bounty hunter seeking revenge. It all sounded cool, but Red Dead Redemption eventually got so much bigger that the original now feels like a forgotten prologue.
17. The Warriors
Rockstar somehow took a 1979 cult movie and turned it into one of the PS2 era's most entertaining beat-'em-ups. Released in 2005, The Warriors expanded the movie's world with events set before the film while letting you brawl, steal, tag walls, and fight alongside other members of the gang.
18. Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis
Few releases demonstrate Rockstar's confidence quite like an unironic table-tennis game. But that’s what we got from Rockstar San Diego: 11 playable competitors, detailed physics, and 19 venues. It came out in 2006, right between far louder Rockstar releases, which explains why casual players barely remember it today.
19. Manhunt 2
We know this sounds insane, especially since the first Manhunt still has plenty of notoriety, but the 2007 sequel has slipped into memory. Manhunt 2 followed Daniel and Leo after an experiment at the Pickman Project went wrong, keeping the original game's stealth and brutal execution mechanics while introducing a new storyline. Somehow, it just never picked up steam.
20. Beaterator
Nothing on this list demonstrates Rockstar's willingness to experiment like Beaterator. What was the 2009 PSP release all about? Well, it wasn't an action game—it was a portable music studio where you could arrange loops, manipulate samples, and create complete tracks. It even showed up later on iOS, but this surprisingly ambitious project still became one of the strangest footnotes in Rockstar's catalog.
