The fan project giving the GameCube the Grand Theft Auto it never had just cleared its biggest hurdle. Erasmo Bellumat, the Brazilian developer behind the reVC port, has the full PC version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City running on Nintendo's little purple box, all 1.4 gigabytes of it, with nothing cut.
For now it runs from an SD card, sidestepping the issue with the GameCube's mini-DVDs and its 1.5GB limit, the main reason the port kept getting delayed in the first place. Aside from that small caveat, the textures, FMV cutscenes, radio stations, and audio are all intact, it's the complete game rather than a trimmed-down demo. A disc-booting ISO version, the kind that would run off an actual mini-DVD, is still in the works.
GameCube GTA: Vice City Port Status
Detail | Status |
|---|---|
Full game | Running, all 1.4 GB, with no cut content |
SD card version | Working, sidestepping the mini-DVD size limit |
Textures, FMVs, radio, audio | All intact |
Disc-booting ISO version | Still in progress |
The state of Erasmo Bellumat's reVC port as of his latest update.
Getting the classic GTA running on the platform meant solving problems most modern developers never touch. Bellumat had to squeeze the game into the GameCube's tiny memory budget, and to make the disc version feasible he is doing something wonderfully old-school. He is reordering the files so the ones the game streams most often sit on the faster outer edge of the disc, with rarely-touched data tucked toward the slower center.
As he put it, making this work means learning to "think like a developer from 2002." He seems to be having fun all things considered. He even toyed with the reaction to the delay and eventual release. At one point Bellumat joked that the real trick was just asking an AI to make it run flawlessly on GameCube in a single prompt, before clarifying the post was pure irony. It was a good bit, and the exact opposite of the truth.
This is deep, hands-on reverse-engineering and hardware optimization, the kind that takes someone who genuinely understands both the game and a 25-year-old console.
It is all unofficial, of course. Projects built on reverse-engineered GTA code sit in a legal gray zone, and Take-Two Interactive has pulled the plug on similar efforts before. Bellumat is threading the same needle every one of these ports threads, and putting the source up on GitHub for the community to pick through.
Twenty-five years after the GameCube launched without a single GTA, and with Grand Theft Auto VI about to swallow the industry whole, one hobbyist is quietly finishing the port Rockstar Games never made.