More than two decades after the Nintendo GameCube came and went without a single Grand Theft Auto game, someone is finally putting one on it, and it's running much better on what's technically Nintendo's last home console.
The Brazilian developer posting as Ebellumat shared about two and a half minutes of footage this month showing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City running natively on real GameCube hardware, cruising around Vice City at night, driving, brawling, radar and wanted stars and all.
For those who have already forgotten, GTA: Vice City was a PlayStation 2 game first, only ater reaching Xbox, and PC. The GameCube, which launched around the same time, never got it, or Grand Theft Auto III before it, or any mainline GTA at all. This is why this port is such a big deal, especially when you consider that Nintendo consoles has never gotten a mainline GTA title outside of the Nintendo Switch getting the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, or modded to run Grand Theft Auto V.
To make it possible, the project uses reVC, an open, reverse-engineered recreation of GTA: Vice City often used by other modders to get the game running on other platforms. For help, EBellumat leaned on the code from the GTA 3 port for the Sega Dreamcast built by Falco Girgis and his team. Girgis, rather than getting territorial about someone borrowing his work, cheered the whole thing on, saying he never doubted the GameCube could handle GTA: Vice City and that it is "handling it better than either DC or PS2 can."
What the GameCube Vice City port Is Targeting
Feature | Target |
|---|---|
Resolution | 640 by 480 |
Frame rate | 60 fps, capped (it was hitting around 90 uncapped in testing) |
Textures | Full PC-quality textures |
Effects | All of them switched on |
Audio | 32 kHz stereo |
Widescreen | Everything from 4:3 up to 21:9, thanks to reVC |
These are what the developer wants to achieve for the GTA: Vice City port on the Nintendo GameCube.
The GameCube not getting GTA in the 2000s was never really a power problem, and this port proves that. Nintendo's console had a genuinely strong general-purpose processor, better suited to the physics, streaming, and animation that GTA leans on than the PlayStation 2's more awkward chip. What actually kept these games off the GameCube was its tiny mini-discs that topped out around 1.5 gigabytes, well short of the full DVDs the PS2 and Xbox used. Its audience also skewed younger and more family-minded, a hard sell for a game built around mowing down pedestrians in a neon crime playground. Finally, Nintendo's whole image at the time pointed in the opposite direction. So the machine got written off as the wrong home for GTA, and years later a hobbyist is quietly showing that the engineering was never the thing in the way.
None of this is official. reVC-style projects live in the same legal gray zone all of these ports do, and Take-Two Interactive has gone after the reverse-engineered GTA code before. EBellumat is threading the same needle everyone here threads. He plans to open the source shortly, under a quirky, very-2026 license that is basically MIT with an attendance list for any AI models that train on it.
It all sits alongside the same stubborn preservation streak that recently got Vice City Stories running natively on PC and handed the Dreamcast a playable Vice City of its own. The familiar pattern never changes. Rockstar Games leaves an old game stranded, the community refuses to let it stay there, and somebody spends their nights proving a twenty-year-old console could have run it all along.
The GameCube waited a very long time for GTA. Turns out it was ready the whole time.