A reverse engineering project for Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City has ended. The fans behind the venture received a DMCA notice of what appears to be Rockstar’s parent company, Take Two.
As reported by Eurogamer, the team that rebuilt the source code for both open world games and put it online for any player and fan to use, received a crash this week. The document, which can be viewed on GitHub, claims to be from someone at Take-Two, who says that this work “is not licensed in any way” and that “the best and only solution is the complete removal of the mentioned pages”, along with with a list of files to be removed.
Apparently, GitHub removed these files immediately, although the project leader is not sure if they are from Take-Two, they feel it is “better to assume that it is real”. The re3 and reVC project – GTA 3 with reverse engineering and Vice City with reverse engineering, respectively – meant that modders and developers could alter criminal games in a previously unforeseen way, fixing and altering and generally making them better and friendlier. Loading screens have been removed or reduced, controller compatibility has been improved, widescreen support and more are among the features implemented thanks to these new versions.
The doors were underway for other systems and other improvements, such as lightning tracking. Using re3 and reVC required that you already have both games, and the intention was for educational and modding use. “We do not encourage piracy or commercial use,” said a warning, but of course, this is not much protection if the copyright holder does not approve.
Check out a demo below:
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, a 2005 PSP spinoff, was next in line for treatment, but whether that will happen now is in question. As for GTA 5, he continues to change copies by the ton, and is still making numbers on Twitch.