The original Nintendo Wii never got a Grand Theft Auto, much like the Nintendo 64 and the Nintendo GameCube before it. Now, thanks to the work of modders, these consoles are finally getting a GTA entry. The Nintendo Wii, in particular, has a running and working port of Grand Theft Auto III, courtesy of a homebrew developer
A new fan project called re3-wii runs GTA III natively on real Wii hardware, waggle controller and all, with no emulation involved. It uses a similar approach to the native Wii port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
The port comes from a developer going by elmasas, built on re3, the long-running open-source recreation of GTA III's engine reverse-engineered from the PC version. Elmasas adapted an existing Wii U build down to the original Wii, recompiling it for the console's PowerPC chip, GX graphics, and its controllers. It is the actual version of the RAGE engine, rebuilt to run on Wii hardware directly.
What you need to run GTA III on a Wii
Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
A modded Wii | Homebrew-enabled, with the Homebrew Channel |
The re3-wii port | elmasas' boot.dol file, free on GitHub |
Your own PC assets | The models, textures, and audio from a legally owned PC copy |
Somewhere to load it | The apps/re3 folder on an SD card or USB drive |
The re3-wii port is homebrew, so it takes a bit of setup and your own game files.
As with these projects, you'll need to have your own physical copy of the game. The port supplies only the engine and you drop in the assets from a PC copy you own. It runs on real Wii hardware through the Homebrew Channel, and in the Dolphin emulator too, and early testers say it plays "quite well" with a Wiimote and Nunchuk.
What's perhaps the most amazing part here is how fast the project took to complete. elmasas posted the first commit on September 3 and within about two days there were two full releases, controller fixes, reduced CPU load, and USB loading, all built and patched in public as feedback rolled in. It went from "does this even boot" to genuinely playable in under a week.
It lives in the usual gray area, of course. re3 is reverse-engineered GTA III code and Take-Two Interactive has issued takedowns against projects like these before, which is a shame. This is a hobbyist labor of love. It's not something Rockstar Games will ever sell you.
It also joins a run of recent activity around classic GTA. In the last couple of weeks alone, a fan got Vice City running on a GameCube, a streamer wired Twitch chat into San Andreas, and another modder built GTA V-style switching into GTA IV.
With Grand Theft Auto VI weeks away, the community is keeping itself busy breathing new life into the old ones.