It seems the safest way to build a Grand Theft Auto recreation without incurring the wrath of the Take-Two Interactive legal team is to just do it inside the mission editor of another, entirely different game. A Far Cry 5 player has used the game's built-in map editor to recreate Grove Street from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the results are nothing short of amazing.
The recreation showcases CJ's iconic cul-de-sac rebuilt from the ground up inside Far Cry 5's Arcade editor. The roads, the houses, the surrounding foliage, and the general layout of the neighborhood are all accounted for. It's not a 1:1 replica down to every last trash can, but it captures the vibe of Grove Street in a way that immediately registers if you've spent any time in Los Santos circa 2004 and one that Grand Theft Auto V failed to replicate in 2013.
For context, Far Cry 5's Arcade mode includes a surprisingly robust map editor that lets players use assets from across multiple Ubisoft titles to build entirely new singleplayer or multiplayer environments. It's the same tool used by the more creative players to recreate everything from Counter-Strike's de_dust2 to Call of Duty's Nuketown over the years, and in recent months, it's become an unexpected hub for Grand Theft Auto recreations specifically.
A quick search online will tell you that GTA fans have previously used Far Cry 5 to scratch a very particular itch. Earlier in 2025, a Reddit user named Fresh-War5908 spent roughly 200 hours recreating Jason's house from the second GTA 6 trailer inside the Arcade editor, running entirely on PS5 without mods.
The side-by-side comparisons were close enough that some people genuinely couldn't tell which screenshots were from Far Cry 5 and which were from the actual Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer. The same creator followed that up with a 300-hour recreation of Ocean Drive from Vice City, complete with enterable buildings, NPCs, cars in the streets, and neon signs that light up at night.
GTA 6 is still months away from its November 19, 2026 launch, and Rockstar Games hasn't released any new information since the second trailer dropped alongside the first delay announcement back in May 2025. The marketing campaign isn't expected to begin until summer 2026, which means fans are sitting in the middle of an information drought that has stretched for the better part of a year.
When there's nothing official to talk about, people get creative. Some of that creativity has taken the form of AI-generated fake leaks and fabricated gameplay footage. Others have taken it to more extreme places, with reports of fans faking employee IDs and flying drones at Rockstar's windows. Thankfully, you also get projects like these Far Cry 5 recreations, and it's also interesting how these mods seem to avoid getting taken down by Take-Two Interactive.
Rockstar's parent company has a well-documented history of going after fan projects with takedown notices. In 2021 alone, the company shut down GTA Underground (a six-year San Andreas mod project), issued DMCAs against multiple modders on sites like ModDB and libertycity.net, and sued the developers behind reverse-engineered ports of GTA III and Vice City. An Unreal Engine 4 fan trailer of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was also taken down despite the creators explicitly stating it wasn't intended as a full remake.
The Far Cry 5 approach avoids all of that. Because these recreations are built entirely within Ubisoft's engine using Ubisoft's assets, they don't use any of Rockstar's code, textures, or game files. There's nothing for Take-Two's legal team to latch onto, at least in theory. The maps aren't modifications of a Rockstar product. They're original creations that happen to look like GTA locations, built inside a completely separate game from a completely separate publisher.
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For what it's worth, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition has come a long way since its disastrous 2021 launch, with Rockstar (and a secondary studio in Rockstar Australia) finally rolling out the kind of updates and fixes that fans had been asking for since day one.
Speaking of original and official products, it's believed that Rockstar is sitting on a re-release of Grand Theft Auto IV but it likely won't happen until after GTA 6 comes out.
