Someone just got three classic Grand Theft Auto games running on the New Nintendo 3DS, and the most impressive one is the game nobody expected but fans have desperately wanted a chance to play for years. A modder going by EpicReds0817 has ported Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories to Nintendo's handheld as a bundle called the reGTA Collection, with a trailer and the source code now public.
Of the three, the Liberty City Stories port is the one that matters the most. The 2005 game, originally a PSP title, never had a full reverse-engineered port finished. The project completes the long-abandoned engine work that stalled years ago. We've seen the other two ported around plenty of times. Liberty City Stories getting the same treatment, running on real hardware with its main story completable start to finish, is new and worth celebrating.
Of course, since this is a homebrew project, the usual caveats apply. It runs only on the New 3DS, New 3DS XL and New 2DS XL, since it requires the extra CPU and RAM exclusive to those models. You also need a modded console on custom firmware and you have to build the games from source and supply your own legal copies for the data, with no ready-made downloads that include assets. The developer, who previously ported Super Mario 64 to the 3DS, called it their biggest handheld project yet.
Mind you, the port is not a lazy recompile. It adds a red-themed touch interface on the bottom screen, Nintendo-style button prompts, a keyboard for entering cheats and converted audio to suit the hardware. It is a proper 3DS version, built around the console rather than dumped onto it.
The reGTA Collection on New 3DS
Game | Status |
|---|---|
Grand Theft Auto III | Included and playable |
Vice City | Included and playable |
Liberty City Stories | The highlight, its unfinished engine finally completed |
Three classic GTA games running on modded New 3DS hardware.
In the last few weeks alone, fans got Grand Theft Auto III running natively on the original Wii, ran the full Vice City on a GameCube and pushed GTA V onto a modded Switch Lite. These are different developers working on different hardware all built on the same reverse-engineering community. The 3DS collection is just the latest, one of the more complete and, most likely, not going to be the last.
None of it is official, as usual. The reGTA engines grew out of the re3 family of projects that Take-Two Interactive has gone after with legal action before. Requiring your own game files is the workaround that keeps these alive.
With Grand Theft Auto VI two months out, the community keeps finding ways to run legacy games on gaming hardware that was never meant for them.