5 Best GTA Villains Of All Time, Ranked

The Grand Theft Auto series is all about villains and the elaborate mayhem they cause. That's the whole point of the franchise, of course. More often than not, the player himself is far and away the biggest bad guy in the entire game — if not by design, then at least by the usually highly murderous actions the player opts to take.

However, the game series has plenty of great NPC villains, too. While not every Grand Theft Auto game has managed to deliver such memorably evil figures, many have managed to hit their villain right out of the park. In fact, the barrel has been so overflowing that reducing the franchise's greatest antagonists to just five characters is no easy feat. Still, after much deliberation, we've managed to do it. These five Grand Theft Auto villains are the best of the bunch.

Who among us wasn't blown away by the way "GTA: San Andreas" handled the villain arc of Melvin "Big Smoke" Harris? When Carl "CJ" Johnson returns to the Grove Street Families, his brother Sweet and their old friend Ryder give him plenty of a hard time for walking away from the gangster life. Smoke, on the other hand, is a solid guy who's fully willing to assist CJ and welcomes him back with open arms. A combination of a trusty sidekick and a comic relief, he seems to be a solid ally who has a long history of friendship with CJ and the gang. And then...

Big Smoke and Ryder famously turn out to be traitors to Grove Street, conspiring with just about every other criminal faction out there (and the police, for good measure) for personal benefit. Just like that, the jolly guy with the glasses and the hat transforms into what eventually turns out to be a brutal, "Scarface"-coded drug lord and the toughest boss in the game. 

Upon replaying, you'll notice that small hints of Big Smoke's impending betrayal are scattered throughout the early game, and his behavior is retroactively easy to spot as shifty and self-serving. However, the character's writing and Clifton Powell's voice performance make Big Smoke come across as a reasonably swell guy before the betrayal twist. This helps make him a highly memorable antagonist, and one of the best GTA characters ever. 

Niko Bellic is such a commanding character that many "Grand Theft Auto IV" antagonists arguably struggle to stand out against him. Moti Margolin's Dimitri Rascalov is a notable exception in his own understated, cowardly way, which is a good thing since he happens to be the game's main villain.

Dimitri technically works under Mikhail Faustin in the Faustin Family, and he ends up working quite close to Niko for much of the game. At the end of the day, however, he reveals his hand by orchestrating the increasingly untrustworthy Mikhail's death and betraying Niko. From that point on, Dimitri becomes a bloodthirsty, obsessed man who dedicates plenty of attention and resources to see Niko dead.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has given us backstabbing antagonists before Dimitri, but the early events of "GTA IV" do a great job in painting him as a voice of reason in a game that's full of far more outlandish characters. Because of this, his true nature as a brutal, disloyal, and power-hungry villain who can and will double-cross absolutely anyone comes as a fun shock to the system and greatly changes the game's dynamics.

Claude's ex-girlfriend Catalina has more heavy lifting to do than any other villain on this list, thanks to the fact that "GTA III" is the last game in the series to feature a mute protagonist. Fortunately, she more than holds her own in her somewhat one-sided interactions with Claude, thanks to great writing and entertainingly scenery-chewing voice work by Cynthia Farrell.

Catalina is a murderer, a powerful gangster, and a femme fatale in every possible sense of the phrase. Not only is she Claude's former lover and partner in crime, but she serves as the incredibly personal main antagonist of "GTA III." She also features in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," where it's revealed that before the events of "GTA III," she had a complex romantic history with that game's protagonist, Carl "CJ" Johnson.

Being an openly untrustworthy main antagonist of one game is one thing, but Catalina manages to be even more unhinged in "San Andreas," which takes place before the events of "GTA III" and sees her (mostly) on CJ's side. Occasional hints at a tragic backstory explain some of her actions and views, but at the end of the day, she's a hotheaded villain through and through. Had she and Trevor Phillips ever met, the GTA universe would be in flames within hours.

Is Jonathan Walker's Devin Weston an over-the-top portrayal of a self-aggrandizing billionaire or an accurate picture of a man who's so out of touch with normal life that he doesn't even remember what it was like to touch grass? The jury is out, but one thing is certain: The Big Bad of "Grand Theft Auto V" is a memorable sleazeball.

Devin is a unique character because he doesn't really see himself as a hero or a villain. He simply perceives himself as existing so far above and beyond mere concepts of good and evil that morality means nothing to him. Allies and acquaintances are mere playthings, summoned and dismissed on a whim. Really, the only way to faze him in any way is to embarrass him by getting between him and his goals — in which case he will go after you with the petulance of a child and the resources of a man who can and will send a private army to murder you.

Devin is a thoroughly amoral and openly disgusting opportunist whose dabbling in classic Hollywood self-improvement pastimes only serves to make him even more unlikeable. However, he's actually quite honest in his dishonesty: As he explains to Franklin, he's a Darwinist who's all about the survival of the fittest — and he just happens to see himself as the fittest of them all. While the entire GTA V story doesn't revolve around him, Devin's smug rich guy villainy is the perfect glue to tie it all together.

A police officer is rarely a good guy in a Grand Theft Auto game. When he's voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, it's also easy to tell that the character's going to be trouble. Yet, even this setup does little to prepare the player for the kind of menace Officer Frank Tenpenny turns out to be over the course of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."

To its credit, "San Andreas" doesn't even try to pretend that Tenpenny is a good guy. He leads the LSPD's C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang unit, but he's secretly also a major player in San Andreas's organized crime scene. Very early, he frames CJ for a murder and continues to force our protagonist to do his bidding in increasingly arrogant ways throughout the game. Since Tenpenny is both a crime kingpin and a cop, he combines the worst of both worlds from a GTA protagonist's point of view. It doesn't hurt that he's also a completely reprehensible human being who cares about nothing but himself, and doesn't really care who knows it.

Tenpenny is both a character and an extreme archetype of police corruption. His eventual downfall is one of the most satisfying endings in a GTA game, but it's the way he's built up to be a universally hated but untouchable figure that really seals the deal on his villain greatness. On top of the terrific writing, Jackson's voice work helps the character stand out among his peers, and cements Tenpenny as the greatest GTA antagonist so far.