It’s a miracle that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars even exists. Originally launched as a Nintendo handheld exclusive complete with touch-screen carjacking, bloody gunfights, and high stakes drug dealing missions, it’s exactly the kind of game you’d never expect to see first launch on the Nintendo DS. But more than that, it’s secretly one of the greatest and most innovative GTA games ever made.When Chinatown Wars launched in March of 2009, the GTA franchise was in a pretty incredible spot. The revolutionary and massively successful Grand Theft Auto 4 had arrived the year prior, fully establishing itself as the king of criminal open world games in the eyes of both critics and players. Both of its episodic story expansions, The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, were also on track to come out in 2009. But all that was happening on home consoles. While the late 2000s had seen a a duo of games based on 2001’s GTA 3 and 2002’s GTA Vice City come to PlayStation Portable, GTA 4’s successful dive into the HD era seemed to suggest Rockstar was fully committed to the much more powerful consoles and PCs of the time, rather than shrink down the vision and ambition for the then dueling handhelds, Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP. The franchise was striving for gritty realism and cutting edge graphics and it seemed like the portable systems were going to have to sit this round out. Suffice to say that when GTA Chinatown Wars was announced as a top down, cel-shaded game made for a handheld, starring a brand new Triad protagonist who used a touch screen to fire off sniper rifles and steal cars in the same city GTA 4’s Niko Bellic had stomped around in a year earlier, people were pretty surprised. At first glance it not only felt like a step backwards for the series but also it felt downright shocking to see what was initially a Nintendo exclusive GTA game where you could sell drugs and shoot police officers. These days, modern Nintendo handhelds like the Switch 1 and Switch 2 frequently get ports of mature rated games. But during the Nintendo DS era, this was rarely the case. In 2009 it was practically unfathomable for Rockstar to put a brand new, exclusive Grand Theft Auto game on the Nintendo DS, a modestly powerful handheld system that was already five years into its lifespan and mostly associated with things like Mario Kart, Nintendogs, and Brain Training. The DS is home to one of the greatest and most diverse game libraries in the history of handhelds but its tiny low resolution screens, largely casual playerbase, and lack of an analogue stick meant that AAA developers approached the system cautiously when bringing their successful franchises over to it, especially when those franchises were known for being big budget console games aiming for older audiences. Rockstar Games hadn’t brought any of their titles to a Nintendo handheld since 2003, when they launched a cleverly scaled down version of May Payne on the Game Boy Advance and then Grand Theft Auto Advance in 2004, a top down pixel art prequel to GTA 3. That’s why Chinatown Wars felt special. It was clear that the DS had become so massive that even the almighty Rockstar Games couldn’t ignore it. And while fans had some apprehensions about the game’s looks, once they realized that Chinatown Wars bridged the gap between GTA’s top-down origins and its modern fully 3D open world chaos (and, unlike the original games, doesn’t have a locked camera) they knew Rockstar had successfully managed to shrink down their biggest franchise and make it feel at home in the least likely of places without really skipping a beat. Enhanced ports of Chinatown Wars eventually came to PSP and mobile phones and while they never came close to the total sales of the mainline console and PC games, hardcore GTA fans were happy to have this unique new entry that they could bring with them everywhere.Taking out cameras reduces the visibility of your drug smuggling antics, and you'll have fewer cops tailing you after a deal.Chinatown Wars not only has all the things you love and expect from a GTA game, like sharp writing, memorable characters, and tons of weapons, vehicles, and explosive toys to terrorize a big, sprawling metropolis with while flipping through bespoke radio stations, it also introduced a bunch of brand new features to the franchise. Police chases that ratchet up your wanted level have always been a series staple, but Chinatown Wars incorporated a brilliant new mechanic to get revenge: destroying cop cars to lower your wanted level. This is an absolute blast, especially when you’ve got multiple cops tailing you at once and you’re blasting down the road at top speed, bobbing and weaving through traffic. Prior to Chinatown Wars, GTA games required you to drive out of a specific area to lower your wanted level, but this new approach requires a lot more aggression on your part, forcing you to lure cops alongside your car so you can smash them into buildings and other cars, or leading them on, jamming on the breaks and watching them dictate their own destruction while you fire your guns out the widow. It’s an explosive way to watch your wanted level plummet. This adds tension and thrill to every encounter and, outside of also looking cool, it’s genuinely an absolute blast and frequently hilarious. When these aggressive chases overlap with the game’s drug dealing subplot, though, that’s when things get significantly more high stakes. Since all this cop car smashing and bashing also takes its toll on your vehicle, you’ll need to be more calculated with your reckless driving, especially when you’re smuggling a trunk full of thousands of dollars worth of heroin that will get seized by the authorities or blown to smithereens if your car goes up in flames. It’s the kind of experience that has you grinning from ear to ear and cackling maniacally while juggling several crimes at once, a feeling that is so distinctly GTA and thus, incredibly impressive to see replicated with cartoony graphics on a tiny handheld.Chinatown Wars has you dealing coke, weed, and downers to various gangs around Liberty City, leading to lots of double crossings, shootouts, and some huge payouts. By taking out the cameras that are hidden everywhere across the city, you’ll reduce the visibility of your drug smuggling antics and have fewer cops tailing you after a deal. It’s another great example of Chinatown Wars’ awesome and unique systems overlapping and complimenting each other in brilliant and satisfying ways. Unique gangs across Liberty City also have specific territories, as well as a preferred drug of choice, so dealing different drugs regularly has you driving all over the map and visiting various crews. These largely optional missions are reminiscent of the ancient calculator drug dealing game Drug Wars and while some elements of these missions eventually made their way into GTA 5’s online mode, it’s a shame that these ideas weren’t worked directly into the campaign. Here’s hoping GTA 6 lets you keep an eye on market conditions so you can sell ecstasy pills to the Spanish Lords just like in Chinatown Wars, maybe while hulking Los Santos alligators nip at your heels. Huang Lee's firecracker attitude makes his warpath and lust for vengeance believable.But while many of Chinatown Wars’ victories are in systems and gameplay, it was clearly a game made by the same Rockstar that was penning deeper, more interesting crime stories. Like GTA 4, Chinatown Wars tells an excellent tale of an immigrant plunging deeper and deeper into Liberty City’s seedy underbelly, juggling personal and family relationships with the harsh realities of living life on the run and under the gun. In terms of protagonists, Huang Lee isn’t nearly as earnest as Niko Bellic and spends significantly less time bowling with his cousins or taking women on dates, but his no bullshit, firecracker attitude makes his warpath and lust for vengeance believable, which makes you feel slightly less remorseful about tearing through Liberty City. Like many GTA fans back in 2009, I had finished GTA 4 and was hungry for more, so Chinatown Wars launched at the perfect time. I’ve been a Nintendo fan my whole life and had bought the Nintendo DS the day it launched, so tearing the plastic off of my Chinatown Wars game box and shoving a tiny original GTA game cartridge into my system for the first time was such an awesome moment. I’m also a huge fan of hip hop, so the game's opening story cutscenes being laden with heavy drums and Wu-Tang Clan style Chinese string samples for a beat that legendary artists Ghostface Killa and MF Doom rapped on to promote the game was one of those mindblowing synergies of so many things that I loved coming together. It really was all just a dream come true. It felt right to be back in Liberty City again, even one that looked so different to Niko’s, and it was totally surreal using the same stylus I used to pet Nintendogs to hotwire a stolen vehicle and go on a violent killing spree on the way to a big ticket cocaine deal. That said, as much as I love the touchscreen features across every version of Chinatown Wars, they’re likely what’s holding the game back from being ported to modern consoles. They’d work just fine in handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch consoles but they’d need a bit of an overhaul to function properly on PlayStation and Xbox, which is a shame since I really wish more people could experience this classic entry in one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. Playing Chinatown Wars in 2026 doesn’t just make me nostalgic for being there when the game first released, though. It makes me nostalgic for an era when Rockstar took weird swings like Chinatown Wars. It was an era when Grand Theft Auto got spinoffs, story DLCs, and quirky little handheld ports, and they all tried to show the franchise in a new light. These days it seems like every single idea for a new GTA story or gameplay mechanic gets dropped directly into GTA 5’s online mode where they will instantly print money for Rockstar, a strategy they’ll definitely continue to implement in Grand Theft Auto 6. And while it’s cool that people can play one GTA game for thirteen years straight while still regularly seeing new content, it’s hard not to miss a world before GTA Online where the series had a bit more flexibility. One where unique side stories could exist independently instead of being drip fed into a massive multiplayer mode. Regardless, we’ll always have Chinatown Wars, an immensely satisfying and totally kick ass GTA game that you can take with you anywhere. If you missed it when it first arrived or you’re looking for something to revisit while waiting for the next gigantic entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise to arrive this fall, you should definitely go play it. There’s no other GTA game quite like it.