Summary
According to former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij,Grand Theft Auto 3was originally developed forthe Sega Dreamcastbefore switching to PlayStation 2 after just four months. 23 years later, fans are going back to the original idea and imagining a world in which Rockstar never switched gears, porting the still-influential classic to older hardware.
Vermeij confirmed rumours that the game was in development for the Dreamcast earlier this year in April, revealing that they pivoted to the PS2 for “commercial reasons”, not because the Dreamcast wasn’t powerful enough.
Funnily enough, the PS2’s memory limitations actuallystopped GTA 3 from having working planes.
A talented group comprised of skmp, Falco Girgis, PH3NOM, Frogbull, and jaxyn have managed to get GTA 3 running at a steady 30fps on the Dreamcast in just a month. proving Vermeij right. There are still some problems, like the glitchy HUD, but the team has made enormous progress, ironing out most of the major problems to get the game in a comfortable, playable state.
GTA 3 Really Is A Technical Marvel
It’s hard to overstate just how influential GTA 3 is. It completely reinvented the open-world genre with the still-impressively dense Liberty City that was packed with little slice of life details in a way we just hadn’t seen before with games. Getting such a pioneer of the medium working on even older hardware speaks volumes to its technical prowess, even all these years later.
“You guys did an amazing job on this engine,” Falco said of Rockstar North. “I hope you see our work as a reflection of that and can also take pride in it. I have nothing but respect for what you guys accomplished here”.
That being said, the team haven’t been able to figure out why the HUD is so glitchy — “Nobody f—ing knows yet […] We’ve jjust let is slide… and given the rest of the 2D HUD works that isn’t the fonts… it’s a real mystery!”
In just a few weeks, the team has made the game playable on Dreamcast, fixed the Vertex colours, optimised the audio, improved the fonts, implemented bloom post-processing effects, and more. It’s coming along incredibly well and incredibly fast; if you want to keep up to date with its progress,Esppiral regularly shares YouTube videosshowing off the gameplay to highlight the strides made in development.
