Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Units Sold: 9.4 million
Rank: 1
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive

This open-ended adventure game is a flawed masterpiece. It's a masterpiece because it permits a player to freely explore a sprawling world even as it pushes him or her along a sophisticated story arc. Critics were horrified by the game's violence, but that's just part of the genre. This masterpiece is flawed, however, because hackers uncovered a hidden scene allowing a player to simulate sex with one of the protagonist's girlfriends--and then distributed the patch needed to unlock this to the world. Take-Two managed to expunge the offending code, but it undermined the developer's argument that its edgy games are art, not just a bunch of cheap thrills for overgrown adolescents.