GTA 3 and Vice City run on in-game TV in San Andreas
A new mod for GTA San Andreas lets players play two older parts of the series directly on a virtual television within the game. The curious project shows how profound interventions in game engines are possible today.
Mod combines three classics
While GTA 6 sets new records with the number of copies sold shortly after the start of the pre-sale phase, modders continue to devote themselves to the predecessors of the hotly anticipated Rockstar video game. The developer Dryxio has now released a mod for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas that makes it possible to start Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto Vice City within the game world. The older titles run on a virtual television in front of which the main character CJ stands.
The modification uses a common Direct3D process to render the image of the ‘guest’ directly onto the texture of the virtual television. Players can seamlessly switch between controlling CJ in the main world and the protagonist of each subgame using the F10 key. The world of San Andreas continues running in the background without a break.
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Deep technical integration
How Videocardz describes, the experiment goes one step further. The developer has demonstrated a nested version where Grand Theft Auto Vice City runs on a screen within Grand Theft Auto III. The latter is played on a television in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas – a triple GTA (in)ception, so to speak. The three games form Rockstar Games’ well-known original 3D trilogy, which defined the open-world genre in the early 2000s.
Grand Theft Auto III was released in 2001 and laid the foundation for free exploration in three dimensions. Grand Theft Auto Vice City followed in 2002 with a colorful Miami setting. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas finally came out for consoles in 2004 and for PC a year later.
Leap in hardware performance
The fact that these extensive virtual worlds can now be calculated nested within each other at the same time illustrates the enormous leap in performance of modern hardware compared to that time. Back then, cities pushed computers and consoles to their limits. Today, modern systems process the required calculations for three worlds at the same time without any stuttering, as the requirements are very low compared to current titles. A small downer, however, is that the installation files for the old titles are required. The mod does not provide any game data. In addition, running multiple game engines at the same time can currently lead to crashes because the old software was not programmed for this.
While fans wait for the sixth part of the series, expected at the end of the year, the project offers a technical gadget for the nostalgic. The modification requires some training, but rewards users with an unusual look at the history of the video game series. It also shows that the community is still finding new ways to reinvent the GTA classics, even more than two decades after the initial release.
