Modder Connects The Entire GTA Trilogy Through Portals in Grove Street

Last time we checked in on this project, a modder had managed to get Grand Theft Auto III running on a television inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, then stacked Grand Theft Auto: Vice City inside that. Dryxio has now gone considerably further, adding portals on Grove Street for players to walk in and out of to find themselves transported and playing as Claude in Liberty City and Tommy Vercetti in Vice City. Each game stays sealed in its own container and never has to know the other exists although, based on the video, it's currently possible for CJ to shoot guns and hit cops in Liberty City.

With that said, it doesn't look like the modder intends to stop improving on the mod anytime soon.

According to the modder, it is possible for CJ to move from one game into another, to the point that he could literally find himself driving a car in Los Santos, pass through a portal and find himself in Vice City or Liberty City and vice versa. If the modder makes that happen, it would be a technical achievement considering that these games were built years apart with different vehicle formats, different handling data, and different physics assumptions.

Getting a vehicle to survive the trip between them means translating between systems that were never designed to speak to each other and the modder says this is all possible.

Here is the detail we find most telling, and hilarious. Somebody asked why there is a portal to GTA: San Andreas inside GTA: San Andreas. The modder's answer was that to save everyone time, the answer is always "why not?" That is a joke, but it also reveals something about how the thing is built.

A portal leading into a second instance of the game you are already playing only works if the framework treats every game as an equal and interchangeable instance rather than hard-coding a relationship between specific titles. The modder confirms that all three games are currently running inside a single process, sharing one Direct3D device.

Interestingly enough, Rockstar Games did always say that the GTA Trilogy titles share a single, continuity, the 3D Universe. What the modder did is to connect all three games after the lore claimed for two decades that these have always been interconnected to the point where you can drive a Liberty City car down a Los Santos street.

Grand Theft Auto fans have wanted unified map of these three cities for roughly as long as the games have existed. This is not that, exactly, but it is the closest anyone has come.

For what it's worth, Rockstar did attempt to bring these three games forward together, in a remastered trilogy collection that landed in famously poor shape and required a long tail of patching to become respectable. Yet, the most interesting thing anyone has done with these three games in years came from outside the company that owns them, and it happened because somebody it'd be fun to do it.

Nobody needs to drive a 2001 car through a hole in Grove Street into a 2002 version of Florida. It is a bad way to play any of these games. It is also the kind of thing that only exists because someone looked at three decades-old titles and decided the reason to do it was that there was no reason not to.

Here's to hoping that Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive don't randomly decide to take the fun out of it. Works like these exist in a grey area that publishers have historically shut down.