Carl Johnson walks up to a television he has just dropped on Grove Street, he turns it on, and Grand Theft Auto III starts playing on the screen, with Claude driving around Liberty City, while the world of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas carries on around him. Then, because apparently that doesn't sound absurd enough, Claude can drive to a map table inside Liberty City to boot up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and play as Tommy Vercetti.
So, basically, what we're saying is that a modder found a way to have three Grand Theft Auto games all running at once, and it works.
The modder is DryxioGTA, and to say what he's done is impressive is an understatement. This isn't a pre-recorded video playing on a texture, or some kind of screen capture from another window pasted onto the TV. It's a GTA game inside a GTA game inside another GTA game.
Normally, if you wanted to show one game inside another, you would run them as two separate programs and capture the picture from one to display in the other, which is clumsy and slow.
What DryxioGTA has done instead is run GTA 3 as its own independent engine inside GTA: San Andreas. This way, they share the same graphics device, so the older game draws its picture directly onto the TV in CJ's yard in Los Santos.
By hitting a key to switch which game you are controlling, you can play as CJ and Claude, playing an entirely separate game on a screen inside the first one, while the first one keeps ticking along behind you. Both games keep their own save files and their own settings since each engine thinks all is good and running normally, which they are, technically.
This is the modding community keeping old GTA games alive and interesting, running on platforms they have no business doing on, or doing the most absurd things like CJ playing football, years after Rockstar Games stopped meaningfully caring about them.
Think about the state of the back catalogue right now. The original versions of these classic games were pulled from sale and replaced with remastered editions that launched in famously rough shape. Grand Theft Auto IV remains genuinely awkward to play on modern hardware, with its licensed soundtrack quietly eroding as music rights expire. The people doing the most inventive work with Rockstar's older catalogue are, quite often, not Rockstar.
There is a proper irony in that. A single modder can make three GTA games run simultaneously inside one another as a weekend project, while the company that owns them has struggled for years to make its older titles simply run well on current machines.
It doesn't help that Rockstar has had a rocky relationship with modders for years. The company and its parent have historically taken a hard line against mods that touch online play or reuse assets across games, and modders have had projects shut down over exactly this kind of cross-game work.
So enjoy this for what it is, which is a wonderfully pointless technical flex. It is a spectacularly bad way to experience three PS2-era GTA titles. It is also the kind of thing that only happens because someone looked at three decades-old games and thought, what if all of them, at the same time, for no reason.
It's thanks to this type of creativity that the modding community has outlasted several console generations, and why people will keep on doing this long after Grand Theft Auto VI has come and gone.
