Reverse-engineered source code for GTA III and Vice City is offline after DMCA takedown

The reverse-engineered source code of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City has been taken offline following a dmca takedown request. The sender claims to work for the publisher of the games and although the project leader is not sure, he has erred on the side of caution.

That is what the project leader tells Eurogamer. Not only are the original GitHub pages of re3 and reVC no longer accessible, all known forks of the project have also been boarded up. The creators behind the project also had no official permission to put the reverse-engineered code online. The fact that a copy of the original games was mandatory for the use of assets also did not help. The request has been put online.

The new variants of the two games offered several advantages that the original games, dating from 2001 and 2002, did not have. It included support for modern screen ratios, anti-aliasing, faster loading times, a debug menu, and support for modern controllers. The source code also made it relatively easy to transfer the games to, for example, the Nintendo Switch, which happened.

In an interview with Eurogamer, the head of the project, who goes by the nickname monkey and according to his GitHub profile resides in Berlin, says that after this project he will be reverse-engineering Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. Those games came out for a limited number of platforms and the PC was not one of them. Whether that will continue remains to be seen. Aap expressed his intention to get started with those games in a backstory on Eurogamer.